Britain is set up for instability
We are running a leader-centric political system while pretending it still operates on party-centric rules—and that contradiction creates instability.
Whenever the question comes up of a Prime Minister being forced from office, two schools of thoughts tend to emerge concerning the mandate of a sitting Prime Minister.
Disclaimer: This is not a post about constitutional law or how electoral systems work. It is about the nature of power in modern Britain, how elections are fought and how government operates.
The two schools of thought, broadly speaking, are:
That voters elect an MP at elections and the party with the most MPs forms a government. First past the post is designed to grant winning parties large majorities, meaning that they can pass legislation that was in their election manifesto. The government is typically formed of MPs who were elected at the election, and the Prime Minister is the leader of the winning party.
The end result of this is that no individual holds a mandate, so chopping and changing personnel, including the leader, is fine – it was the party and its manifesto that won the mandate.
In the 21st century, our electoral system puts disproportionate emphasis on the leaders, making election campaigns appear more presidential. Voters intellectually understand that they are voting for a local MP, but more practically, they are really voting for the top team of a party and the PM, who has a particular agenda.
The end result of this is that a PM has a personal mandate to govern – the most obvious recent example being Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory, focused almost entirely on passing his Brexit deal.
Both views can be credibly argued by people who want the PM to stay and people who want the PM to go.
But what the past 10 years of politics have shown us is that the British government operating somewhere between these two positions is suboptimal and creates instability – the most dangerous thing for the government and ultimately the country. Critical projects and policy on the greatest questions of state – national security, rebuilding the economy, pulling children out of poverty – can only really be achieved if the government and its leadership is settled and stable.
In my humble view, the second school of thought is probably closer to the operational reality of leaders who win elections. There is still a dash of option one, but I’ll come to that later.
These days, Downing Street (and to a lesser extent the Treasury) have such ownership of the direction of government that leading the country does look to most of the public like a personal project.
Collective responsibility, in theory, still exists. But when the PM and their inner circle hold so much power, it creates incentives to brief against the leadership and for ambitious cabinet ministers to start making manoeuvres against their boss. Which, I think we can all agree, doesn’t create conditions conducive to stability. It also fosters resentment, as some advisors to Prime Ministers have, in practical terms, more power and influence than cabinet ministers.
Situations like the one we are in now – where clearly some cabinet ministers can see the end game but are still bound by collective responsibility – are extremely toxic.
The pretence that the first school of thought is still dominant doesn’t help this toxicity. If, for example, Starmer were to go, the next Labour leader and PM would resist calls to hold an election because they don’t have to – arguing that you don’t vote directly for a PM.
Reform and the Tories will, of course, cry foul, saying that whatever mandate existed is void without Starmer. While they technically might be wrong, they will practically have a point – as many of Starmer’s supporters have claimed today that he has a personal mandate from the Labour election victory.
I worked as a political reporter during the downfalls of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and was, at the time, guilty of getting swept up in everything that came with it. The problem is, the SW1 personality-driven soap opera, the technical procedures of how you remove leaders, and constitutional law are barely compatible and make very little sense to people who don’t spend their entire lives thinking about it.
This isn’t a criticism of the media, as you need to cover all of this stuff. But between the briefings made by all sides and archaic rules, it’s a bit of a confusing mess that is almost tailor-made to create, you guessed it, instability.
I am not sure what the solution is to all of this, other than to admit that the way our governments run in the 2020s is incoherent and for political leadership to do a bit of soul searching and be more transparent about how they intend to operate in power. Politics is already far too opaque and indecipherable, without the ad hoc structures that our leaders pretend don’t exist.