Well, now we have Rishi Sunak as PM (or Rashid Sinook, as Biden called him).
My impression is that he’s a keen and capable executive - give him the program and he’ll implement it effectively, even if it involves blowing up our currency. But I don’t see him as a Chairman of the Board type, one who might (for example) have the balls to tell Biden we’re not going to help him destroy Ukraine. I wonder if we’ll find out who runs him before the Tories get slaughtered in the next General Election.
Thanks to Peter Oborne, we know who ran the previous incumbent - it was the Mayfair millionaires, manipulating the Mayfly PM. Rishi’s got to be better than her, the lady with a whim of iron and brain of stone who boldly forbade the Russian Foreign Minister from moving troops about his own territory.
We didn’t vote for either of them.
People might splutter at having PMs foisted on us without our say-so, but we never elect them anyway. Technically it is the Monarch who appoints a Prime Minister, one who thinks he or she can command a majority in Parliament and get business done.
In 2010, with no party having an overall majority, the Liberal Democrats toyed with the idea of joining forces with Labour plus some minority parties; if that had gone ahead Gordon Brown might have returned to Number Ten as a sort-of-elected PM for the first time. Instead, LibDem leader Nick Clegg threw in his lot with the Conservatives in exchange for a commitment to hold a referendum on our system of voting, and so we got David Cameron for PM and Clegg as Deputy PM. (More on that referendum shortly.)
By the way, I wonder what would happen if the Monarch said, ‘I’m not having him kiss my hands, by George!’ Perhaps we’d be given a new Monarch.
Anyhow, although we don’t pick the PM, he/she has to be an MP, which means winning in his/her own constituency.
Not necessarily by that much, though. Even in the landslide General Election victory of 1997 that ousted the Tory government, the ‘charismatic’ Tony Blair won 71.2% of ballots cast in Sedgefield, which looks impressive; but 28.7% of the electors didn’t vote at all. Looking at all who were registered to vote, only 52% actively chose Blair.
When Labour went to the polls again in 2001, Blair won 65% of votes cast in Sedgefield, but his 26,110 ballots represented only 40% of the total constituency electorate.
There’s a similar story for political parties. Only twice since 1918 has any party garnered more than 50% of votes cast nationally in General Elections - the Conservatives both times, in 1931 and 1935 (see p.10 here.)
And only once (in 1950) has voter participation exceeded 80%:
In short, every government in the last hundred years has ruled without overt majority approval.
Why don’t people vote?
Maybe because they think it makes little difference. To some extent, that’s right.
The system is based on geography. Within the boundaries of each constituency you might find that the voters tend to be rich or poor, rural or urban, with varied racial, cultural, religious and political traditions. If most of your fellows happen to fit your own profile, they may return an MP without your help; if not, your vote may do nothing to prevent it; such is a ‘safe seat.’
Your influence as a voter is at its greatest in ‘swing’ or ‘marginal’ seats, say where 5% or less of votes cast can change the result. In the 2019 General Election, only 10% of Parliamentary seats were like that.
Because we have numbers of political parties, it’s possible for someone to become an MP with a minority of votes cast; they just have to have more than the next most popular candidate. It’s known as ‘first past the post’ (FPTP).
In 2011 I looked at General Election results for 2005 and found that in only 220 out of 650 seats did the winner get more than 50% of the ballots; in 2010, only 217 seats were won on an absolute majority. If the ‘winning post’ meant half or more of votes cast, about two-thirds of the winning ‘horses’ never finished the course!
It’d be even worse if you factored-in the non-voters.
In 2011 we had a referendum on a different kind of voting system, the ‘Alternative Vote’, whereby you could express a second preference (or more) in case your first got nowhere. In this way you might feel you had some extra influence over who won.
The LibDems were keen on the idea, thinking it might get them more votes as they seemed to be more middle-of-the road, compromise candidates. I’m not sure that’s necessarily right, but in any case both Labour and Conservative parties were opposed, possibly for those same reasons. Clegg got his referendum, but not his desired result.
For now, we’re stuck with an idiosyncratic system that semi-disenfranchises so many of us in safe-ish seats, but one that generally ends up with one party having a workable majority in Parliament. That latter is seen as a good thing; again, seeing what they do when the wind is behind them, I’m not so sure!