A New Prime Minister Without An Election? How Top Job in UK Is Decided by Political Cabal

The British constitution says there doesn’t have to be a fresh national election if the Prime Minister resigns, but recent convention suggests there should be anyway.

Sir Keir Starmer, leader of Parliament’s opposition Labour party, has demanded fresh elections in the wake of Prime Minister Boris Johnson announcing he was to be stepping down this week.

To an external observer this may seem a redundant point: of course a government collapsing would precipitate fresh elections to decide who should lead the country next.

But with Britain’s parliamentary system, the next Prime Minister will actually be chosen by just a few thousand paid-up members of the country’s largest political party, from a choice of two candidates decided by a few hundred Members of Parliament.

In some circumstances, the MPs may even bypass the vote among ordinary party memebers.

Boris Johnson has governed the United Kingdom since 2019 by virtue of being the leader of the largest party in Parliament, the Conservatives, or Tories.

In this sense, the Prime Minister doesn’t have a personal mandate, with the aggregate will of the people expressed through their 650 local Members of Parliament. In such a system, it theoretically doesn’t matter who leads Parliament’s largest party: even if they step down the largest party in Parliament hasn’t changed, and could continue to rule until the next scheduled election, which generally run quintenially, although in recent years Johnson and Theresa May, as prime ministers who came to power between elections, both held national elections fairly quickly to try and win personal mandates.

And so selecting the next leader of Britain’s largest party — the parliamentary arithmetic not having been impacted by the political skullduggery of recent days — is what will dominate headlines in the coming weeks. And something else you can be sure to see — both in British liberal media and on Twitter — is how unfair and undemocratic this is, because the vast majority of British people will have no say in who the next leader of the country will be.

This is a difficult point to squarely answer. It may be based on the mistaken assumption that Britain’s political system is like the American or French political system, where the political leader of the nation is directly elected by the people. This is of course wrong. It may also stem from an understanding that while prime ministers are not directly elected, they should be — the view of reformists and revolutionaries who want to see the British political system smashed and remade.

Recent experiments in adjusting the British constitution have ended horribly, by the way, and had to be repealed. Just something to keep in mind.

Looked at another way, the British people have already had their say and will again, in the not too distant future. In this system you choose a person, not a party, and you have to trust the individual Member of Parliament you sent to Westminster to vote on bills on your behalf — assuming they are a Conservative and hence have a say — will select a new party leader aligned with your worldview.

For this is what will happen in the coming weeks. Members of Parliament who feel they have a shot at being the next leader of the Conservative Party — and hence, also the Prime Minister — will announce their candidacies, and presuming they can persuade a handful of their colleagues to support them to ratify the application, they will go into round one of a party leadership contest.

Just as happened in 2019 and 2016, Conservative MPs will vote on who they want as a leader in several rounds, eliminating candidates until just two remain.

In theory, the two final would-be leaders are then submitted to a ballot of all Conservative members, of whom there are around 180,000 in the country. This happened in 2019 when Boris Johnson roundly defeated Jeremy Hunt by two-to one. It didn’t in 2016, though: before the ballot of members could happen, the second-place candidate pulled out of the race, saying she was not confident fellow MPs would back her even if party membership did.

This meant the new leader — Remain supporter Theresa May –simply ’emerged’ from Parliament and into power, having been selected by a vanishingly small group of people.

Possibly another streamlined process like this is more likely now, with the Conservatives yet to formally set out the rules for this leadership contest but said to be keen to ensure the process is lightning fast, so a new leader can be installed quickly and ideally before the summer recess.

This is the sense in which it can be said it really is a tiny cabal of politicos who choose the Prime Minister, on occasion even cutting out Conservative Party members from the process. Unlike the United States, there are no primaries, no opportunities for a fresh outsider to shake things up and appeal directly to the voters.  Indeed, the Conservatives tried open primaries before and found they hated them.

The candidate pool for the coming selection was already settled at the last election, and even that has little to do with voter preference: Conservative candidates standing for Parliament are most often selected centrally by London and imposed at the constituency level. As a right-leaning voter in the United Kingdom, you get what you’re given and in almost all cases the choice is holding your nose and voting for the fake Conservative to keep the hard left out of power.

Perhaps it might be fair to say, then, that the choice of who could possibly be the next leader of the Conservative Party and hence the country comes down to who selected who was even able to stand for the Conservatives in the first place.

Now out of the job, the Conservative Party’s former professional head of candidate selection Gareth Fox — hired by David Cameron in order to make sure parliamentary candidates would be more diverse and less conservative — may just be by legacy the most powerful man in Britain for the next few weeks.