Who asked YOU to vote?
We shall shortly be told who is to be our new Prime Minister. It won’t be one the public voted for, but that is far from the first time: more like, the forty-first mid-term takeover since 1802.
Technically it is the Monarch who invites someone to form a government, one that can command a majority in Parliament; commonly, based on the results of a General Election in which our role is limited to voting for a local MP, largely according to rosette and influenced by who is the current leader of our favoured faction.
Yet as we have seen, the flock of MPs and Party grandees can replace its bellwether at will. We have no direct say in that change, which is a vital one since whoever takes over can steer the country in a new direction.
What influence can we have? It took a major convulsion - the Brexit referendum of 2016 - to turn the tide of events, and even then one PM resigned almost immediately after promising to carry out the decision, and the next did her best, several times, to arrange a Trojan horse of an agreement with the EU. It got to the stage where ordinary members of the public were bluntly asking politicians on ‘Question Time’ whether they understood the order they had been given; the reaction of some on the panel was as though they had been insulted by the furniture.
Now, a new incumbent will be in a position to swing the massive door of history back on its hinges and slam it closed on our cries for independence. Whether this is sudden or gradual, overt or surreptitious, hardly matters: we are most unlikely ever to be offered such a referendum again; for we gave the wrong answer.
Some have said a General Election is like picking the US President. Not so, because we don’t pick the PM; yet so, because real and near-absolute power is vested not in the Monarch, who must remain neutral, but in Number Ten and the Privy Council. It took a Tony Blair to see the potential and begin demolishing the British Constitution as soon as he took office, for example making the Civil Service subject to political direction the day after the GE results were declared.
It is a fantastically powerful position.
How is it filled, under circumstances like the present ones?
In the case of the Conservative Party, first they poll MPs and whittle the list down to two candidates; then it’s a choice for the Party membership, who number something over
‘160,000, or about 0.3% of the total UK electorate… But anyone hoping to sign up to get a say in who will be the next prime minister - or to make mischief with the process - is out of luck. You have to have been a paid-up member for three months to take part in the leadership ballot, by which time a new occupant will be safely ensconced in Number 10.’
The replacement of a Labour Party leader is again an internal Party matter, with more eligible voters but still well under a million.
The Liberal Democrats decide by a postal ballot of Party members - about 100,000 of them. That may seem academic but when Nick Clegg was its leader he was Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition with the Conservatives, 2010-15. Now he has hopped off to the US as President of Meta’s Global Affairs; some of our politicians appear to consider the greatest honours and duties of the UK as merely a stage in their globe-trotting careers. We follow these people like the Oysters in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus And The Carpenter,’ begging for attention and regretting when we get it.
Many of us may forget that we are not a democracy but a constitutional monarchy, with a Constitution that has been fiddled with under the hood by cowboys and is starting to rattle and squeak. Perhaps we are overdue a constitutional convention as in eighteenth century America, to redesign the relationship between the people and their governors.