Tory members should not pick our PM
So, this coming week, for the second time in as many months, it looks likely that our next prime minister will be selected by Tory party members from two candidates chosen by MPs. The last time, it fell to the “grass roots” who were presented with a chancellor of the Exchequer who has a proven record in a time of crisis, and picked the white candidate who has flip-flopped on several major political issues in her career instead. This time, the same former chancellor is standing, and it appears that Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt are battling it out to be the white candidate to repeat the exercise. Last night, there was a Twitter thread posted by Christopher Hope, an associate editor at the Daily Telegraph, with a series of quotes from the party chairman, Jake Berry. This may be linked to a full article in the paper, but it’s not linked in the thread.
Berry misses the point here: the country is supposed to be a democracy, not just the Tory party, and the word means the people having power, not just party members. It’s all well and good for party members to pick a party leader when the leader is out of office, or when the party leader is a separate position from its candidate for prime minister, as it is in the United States where nobody ever refers to President Biden as the Democrats’ party leader, but when the leader will automatically be prime minister, it’s not appropriate for a self-selecting minority of the population to have the final say. Members of Parliament are elected — some of them on the basis of a considerably less than 50% majority of their local population, it’s true, but elected all the same.
As for the point of being a member of the party, the answer is that it enables someone to have a vote in choosing candidates for election and for standing to be local councillors. It should not give anyone a licence to pick a prime minister for everyone, and to impose them on the elected parliamentary party. We live in a Parliamentary system, not a presidential one; a party gets to form a government when it can command a majority in the House of Commons. That’s the way it has been for decades (since the Parliament Act of the 1920s, which reduced the powers of the House of Lords), and everyone who joins a political party or involves themselves in politics in any other way knows it.
It says a lot that Berry emphasises the fact that two prime ministers have been removed despite winning the membership; the first won a general election. Yet, elected members of parliament — the people whose election put Boris Johnson in power — decided they had no confidence in him because of countless incidents of inappropriate behaviour, the last involving covering up for someone who was accused of sexual assault. This is, again, part of the parliamentary system you should know about when you join a party. He has always had huge question marks over his character; he is noted for lying (a journalist mentioned today that he was the only person his paper would call a liar without consulting lawyers), his sexual behaviour, his racism, his (and his friends’) contempt for restrictions his government imposed to protect everyone’s health during the Covid pandemic, his preference for appearances on TV when he has a job to do; despite claiming credit for “getting Brexit done”, his ‘deal’ has led to companies going bust and jobs being lost because they cannot export their goods to Europe at all or at least with the necessary ease. Anyone who has tried to buy goods online from Europe will have found websites that state they no longer ship to the UK.
Not having the right to pick the PM is not a question of being stupid; it’s a question of not being an elected member of Parliament. He has the right to write to his MP and may even have personal access to him or her at party meetings and so on. But becoming and remaining PM depends on the confidence of MPs, not party members, because he is the country’s, meaning everyone’s, prime minister.
The role of a councillor is to oversee the provision of local services such as education, housing, waste collection and recycling, road and public transport and so on. Councillors do campaign for their party with parliamentary candidates, but this is not their principal function and to claim they deliver elections for the party almost sounds like a boast that they can fix elections and get away with it, given that district and borough councils administer elections and voter registration. In any case, it’s not just councillors who have a vote in this election (if it was, it would not be quite as bad), it’s all party members. That’s the problem; most of them have no democratic mandate whatsoever.
Given the strong likelihood of a Labour government following the next election (some polls showing a Labour majority that would normally be only seen in a dictatorship, which is not necessarily a good thing, especially given the lack of tolerance for dissent in the Labour party currently), we would hope that the law would be changed so that no future prime minister could be chosen by one party’s members. What parties do when selecting candidates for election is their business; when they are in power, and the result affects all of us, the decision must fall to those with a democratic mandate.
