The writer is the director of the Government Research Institute, a consulting organization
Bricks flew in the Conservative Party leadership contest. Penny Mordaunt, emerging from a sketchy ministerial career to become the main challenger Rishi Sunak as party leader and thus successor Boris Johnson as prime minister, has garnered many supporters but No one escapes the calm.
Looking at this lousy theater, played out through televised debates, I wonder if this method of selecting party leaders is a real loser. I suspect it will backfire – first for the Conservatives, but then for the entire country.
Above all, I wonder if the procedure to give party members a final say will survive the public skepticism that such a few choose the prime minister.
Any party leadership race offers an opportunity to explain again (often bewildering to the foreign media) that Britain has a parliamentary system. Voters choose their local MPs and the leader of the party with enough MPs to form a government – or coalition – is prime minister. The party can change its leader without a general election – very different from a presidential system where the president is elected directly by voters, as in the US.
Sometimes this also needs to be explained to the politicians themselves. Johnson appeared to imply that the UK had a presidential system before he stepped down as Conservative leader on 7 July, in a desire to directly appeal to the 14 million voters who had backed the Conservatives with a majority. numbers in 2019.
In an age where people vote for everything or rank online, from Love Island winner for Uber drivers, you can feel the growing public ignorance that lacks the voice of the country’s next leader. The televised debates seem to invite people to watch, but the system does not allow this impulse. As a result, there is a great deal of pressure – although not always a great deal of insight – to bear on the different ways in which the main parties choose their leaders.
As for the Conservatives, MPs eliminated candidates for the final two – the process is currently underway. Then party members vote. These are very different audiences, leaving the candidates huddled in their promises, hoping that somehow the rest of the country doesn’t hear what they’re saying.
The question that can be heard is around the second stage. There are less than 200,000 Conservative members and compared to the general population, they are older, whiter and live in the south. The cry rang out: why should such a small group of unrepresentatives have to choose the next prime minister? There will certainly be pressure on the prime minister chosen this way to quickly establish legitimacy through calling a general election, as Johnson did in 2019.
It is only relatively recent that Conservative members have had such a loud voice. Before 1965, its leaders simply “emerged” after discussion among MPs. After 1965, they were elected by MPs. The reforms in 1998 by William Hague, then the leader, in response to his defeat in the 1997 election gave the final decision to party members.
Labor has experimented for decades with different ways of choosing its leader, giving votes to MPs, unions, members and others. Its 2015 rule change giving votes to affiliated and registered supporters as well as full members triggered a wave that helped put Jeremy Corbyn in the lead.
But since party rules don’t give Labor MPs the power to remove their leader by a vote of no confidence like their Conservative counterparts can (Corbyn simply refused) going into 2016 after such a vote), they were unable to achieve the dismissal of a sitting prime minister. in the same way that happened with Johnson.
The motivations of both parties to give members voice is clear – it seems more democratic. But there will never be enough of them to give a sense of real legitimacy. Because they are activists of their own choosing or at least committed enough to politics to choose to pay a party member, they will never resemble the general electorate.
Provided the UK keeps a parliamentary system based on parties, it may be better to let MPs have a say. At least they were elected by the whole country. It will provide a more defensible process than the one currently underway. Meanwhile, we’ll have to watch for another six weeks, knowing that the candidates are playing on a national stage to a small gallery.
