Who should choose the prime minister?

 A young member of the Labour Party was nominated for selection as his local constituency party’s Parliamentary candidate. He confided to a more experienced politician his concern about facing the selection panel. “What if they ask me about foreign policy? I don’t know much about that.” The experienced member replied: “That’s easy. Just say with great passion “Comrades, I believe in a socialist foreign policy”, and they will all applaud you”. There are probably similar stories about other political parties, and they emphasise how loyal party members are to their party and what they regard as its principles. Party members at times fear that their representatives in Parliament may lack the same degree of ardour. This is most likely to happen after a spell in power, when party objectives meet the complexities of government. Strong statements of passionate commitment are therefore particularly welcome from people applying to be the party’s candidates for public office.
   
The work of being a party member is taxing and therefore usually attracts only the most committed or the most ambitious of people. It is taxing because election work involves repetitive tasks such as distributing leaflets and confrontational ones such as canvassing. The latter requires party members to meet the actual British people, and discover that many are strikingly ill-informed and contemptuous of those who work to improve their quality of life through politics. Difficult as the work of party membership may be, it has its rewards. There is the opportunity to exchange ideas with people who share your passion for politics, and the chance to select your candidates for the local council and for Parliament. If your party is in power, you will even be one of the small proportion of the population who have a vote to select the next prime minister.

The post of prime minister in the UK Parliament is designated by the monarch according to which Member of Parliament is able to command a majority in the House of Commons. When one party has a majority (as has been the case with every recent election apart from that in 2010), the post of Prime Minister automatically falls to the leader of that party. But who selects the party leader? In the past, this was decided by the Members of Parliament of the majority party. This makes a great deal of sense. The prime minister has to maintain a majority in the House, and thus should be the person who best commands their support. In addition, his fellow Members of Parliament will be fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different candidates for leader and have the kind of information about them that is not usually available to party members.

However, this task of selecting the party leader in the UK is now determined by party members. In the Labour and Liberal Parties, candidates for leadership must be nominated by at least 10% of Members of Parliament, but after that the decision falls to party members. The Conservative Party has a more complex system, in which the Party’s MPs vote in a knockout ballot and the party members then choose between the top two. Either way, the election is decided by a small number of people. In September 2022, Liz Truss was elected as Conservative Party leader and hence Prime Minister in a ballot in which 142,000 party members voted. The Labour Party enrolled four times as many voters, and Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader in 2020 in a ballot of 491,000 voters.

The problem with letting party members choose the party leader is that they have made some spectacularly bad choices. In the 2019 General Election, the three main party leaders were Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson. Boris Johnson is a good communicator with a gift of knowing what is popular with the public and how to express this as simple choices. As a professional journalist, he is able to speak in headlines. But he has a remarkable record of dishonesty and disloyalty. His Brexit campaign seems to have been driven more by the opportunity it presented to unseat Theresa May as prime minister than any commitment to the cause itself. The consequent negotiations and ‘deal’ with the EU were damaging for the British economy. This was not helped by the subsequent trade negotiations carried out under his government by Liz Truss. These were essentially photo-opportunities designed to confirm the Brexiteer claim that leaving the EU would be simple. Instead of the months and years of careful negotiation normal for trade deals, Liz Truss quickly gave the foreign governments what they asked for, to the detriment of British firms, farmers and consumers. After Johnson was ousted from the premiership in 2022 following a mass resignation of his ministers, Liz Truss was thus well-positioned to appeal to Conservative members.

Jeremy Corbyn has a pleasant informal manner which initially attracted many voters. But his political ideas were acquired in the 1960s and little changed thereafter. In common with many on the left of the Labour Party, he regarded the EU as a ‘capitalist club’ and chose to undermine the Labour Party’s campaign to oppose Brexit at the referendum. Also like many on the left, he had a perverse choice of favoured foreign causes. These included murderous Islamic terrorists, thuggish dictators like Maduro in Venezuela, and even sympathy for the Russian regime when it poisoned a defector living in England. Corbyn attempted to lead the Labour Party against almost all his members of Parliament, and thus had to rely on a narrow band of less effective supporters. Corbyn’s campaign in the 2019 general election led to the worst defeat for the Labour Party since 1935.

Jo Swinson had little impact on the election and misjudged the mood of the electorate. She became the second leader of the Liberal Democrats in a row to lose their seat in a general election.

But the most catastrophic choice by party members was Liz Truss. Prime Minister for only 49 days, she produced a budget which conformed to right-wing libertarian ideology but rapidly led to the loss of at least a quarter of private savings and the imminent bankruptcy of pension funds. Faced by the failure of her ideology, Truss did what most ideologues do: she resorted to paranoia, blaming an ever-longer list of enemies and ‘elites’. These included (to date) the ‘anti-growth coalition’, the ‘deep state’, and the ‘net zero elite’. After this debacle, Conservatives changed the rules for leadership elections such that candidates needed the nomination of at least 100 M.P.s. This resulted in only one nominee (Rishi Sunak) and froze the party members out of the selection.

This might be the start of a trend towards reducing the role of party members in selecting the leader, at least in the Conservative Party. One possibility would be to separate the job of chairman of the party from the job of being its leader in Parliament, which happens in Germany But it is unlikely that members will surrender their power without a fight, and so we must face the prospect of more ineffective leaders, chosen by a small number of activists because they are best at shouting the party’s slogans.