The past four months in British politics have brought the process of how Prime Ministers of the UK are selected sharply back under the spotlight. Many have demeaned party leadership elections as undemocratic and dysfunctional. This debate comes in light of the widely denounced premiership of Liz Truss whose fifty days in office saw huge economic and political crises pile up to a point where she was left with no choice but to resign, making her time as Prime Minister the shortest in British history.
The question, then, becomes how we can ratify our Constitution in a way to ensure the UK does not witness another episode such as this anytime soon.
Firstly, it is key to point out that constitutionally, we as Britons do not and never have elected our Prime Ministers directly. The term Prime Minister is derived from the Latin phrase: “primus inter pares,” which directly translates to, “first amongst equals”. The Prime Minister’s mandate to direct party policy comes from the party whilst the mandate to govern comes from the electorate voting for their party in general elections. Therefore, as the Prime Minister’s essential function is to be a ‘first minister’, the most important thing they must have is the confidence of Parliament.
It is not unusual for the UK to be governed by ‘unelected’ Prime Ministers. Since 1900, the post of Prime Minister has changed 30 times and on 19 of those occasions the Prime Minister has taken office without having won a General Election.
Why then, did it go so disastrously wrong for Liz Truss? The answer to this question becomes obvious when you compare how other ‘unelected’ PM’s of modern times came to power with the circumstances in which Liz Truss became Prime Minister.
Once a PM resigns, it is up to the parliamentary party to nominate a candidate through multiple rounds of voting before two candidates who cross a required threshold are put before the party membership. In other ‘unelected’ cases, John Major acquired 50% of nominations from fellow MPs, Theresa May acquired 50%, and Gordon Brown acquired a staggering 88%. None required the party membership’s approval as all contenders withdrew from the race due to the clear support all three had. Whilst all three had their critics, as all Prime Ministers do, the key point is that the level of support they received from MPs allowed them to command the respect of the house and govern with far more stability than Truss. When you compare the support they had to the measly 14% of nominations Truss was able to gather in her first round of nominations, it is easy to see why her government collapsed as quickly as it did.
Therefore, what I propose to ensure we never see the chaos such weak governance causes again is to ratify the process of party nominations to ensure any potential Prime Minister has the support of at least 40% of fellow MPs in the first round of nominations, additionally I would propose the removal of the ability for the Party membership to vote in leadership elections.
To reiterate, the Prime Minister has to be able to command the respect and the loyalty of Parliament and this was something Truss was simply unable to do. The support she gained as the leadership campaign evolved seemed to come from Johnson loyalists who wanted to ‘Stop Sunak’. Most of those who backed Truss did not do so because of a genuine belief she would be the best Prime Minister but rather as a way of stopping Sunak’s rise to Number 10. Whilst 40% is a high threshold, the knowledge of it would ensure MPs unite behind a candidate the party has genuine faith in to be a successful Prime Minister.
The second point is perhaps more controversial, but there are three key reasons as to why members should not select party leaders: it is neither democratic, representative, nor corruption-proof. This becomes apparent when looking at the Conservative Party membership, who have ‘elected’ all of our last three Prime Ministers.
The first point should be relatively self-explanatory. At the moment, the Conservative Party membership makes up approximately 0.42% of the UK’s population and they have chosen the country’s last two Prime Ministers. Besides the obvious ludicrousness that it is somehow ‘democratic’ to involve this 0.42% and absolve the remaining 99.58%, it is also completely unrepresentative of the demographic of the country. According to Queen Mary University of London, approximately 71% of the Conservative membership are male, 87% are white, and they are disproportionately older than the general population. To add to this, you do not even have to be a resident of the UK to vote in Conservative party elections, which clearly adds to the point of it not representing a UK demographic.
There is also a lack of transparency in membership elections. No public record of who the voters are, how many can vote, or even the balloting company which administers these elections is required. This is not to say anything underhanded has happened in leadership elections but the undisclosed nature of them creates an alarming loophole within our Constitution.
If it is clear that the current system is not fit for purpose and if a purely democratic solution is what is to be desired, then the only way of dealing with Prime Ministerial resignations is to have both a leadership election and a general election shortly after to ensure the Prime Minister has a personal mandate from both party and public. My rebuke to that would be it would paralyse the government for too long and too frequently. As seen this past summer, leadership elections can take as long as six weeks at their longest whilst general elections see Parliament dissolved for six weeks as well. This would mean that the last six years alone would have seen four general elections with the UK potentially not having a Prime Minister for 12 weeks at a time in this period.
I would suggest that this level of political paralysis is unaffordable and the only solution to this problem is to put more faith in the parliamentary democracy we currently operate in and allow MPs to select Prime Ministers. Whilst the democratic argument is still problematic, at least these MPs are representatives of their constituency and accountable to them, unlike Conservative Party activists whom we know little about. The current system seems to be trying to serve two purposes and thus is unable to satisfy either.
Image credits: Arnaud Jaegers via Unsplash