Manoeuvres to replace a Prime Minister are yet again afoot. In his first blogpost as the Constitution Unit’s new Director, Alan Renwick examines the increasing volatility at the top of British politics. Changes in the occupant of Number 10 between elections are normal. But current methods for filling vacancies are inadequate. And rapid turnover is a symptom of deeper troubles. Addressing those troubles will require fundamental shifts in our political culture.
Back in 2022, when Boris Johnson’s grip on the premiership was weakening, some of his most loyal acolytes suggested that such a move would be unconstitutional. The Prime Minister had a personal mandate from the people, they claimed, and any change at the top would therefore require sanction from voters.
Such claims reflected a view of the constitution that vests strong authority in a single person. They were buoyed by evidence that many voters had indeed been drawn into the Tory fold in the 2019 election by Johnson’s personal appeal. But the UK has a parliamentary system. An essential feature of such a system is that parliament can hold governments – including prime ministers – to account between elections. Without this, we risk elective dictatorship.
No such claims of unconstitutionality are being made in the current period of leadership contestation. After the instability of recent years, they would be hard to sustain. Indeed, 10 of the UK’s 18 post-Second World War Prime Ministers have entered office mid-parliament rather than through general elections. Furthermore, Starmer has never been the electoral asset for Labour that Johnson was for the Conservatives. And Labour, in contrast to the Conservatives, is traditionally a movement party for which collective working is part of the DNA – as evidenced by the central role of its National Executive Committee in decision-making.
Replacing Starmer in the coming months – if it happens – will thus, in itself, be entirely constitutional and quite normal.
Yet, whatever the merits of the case for this particular defenestration, two aspects of the current situation are troubling. The first relates to the process of choosing a successor, the second to what yet another change of Prime Minister would say about how well the system is functioning.
The process of choosing a successor
Any process of choosing a new leader has problems. A drawn-out contest risks leaving normal government in limbo. Labour’s leadership elections in 2015 and 2020 each took around three months, while that of 2016 was completed in two-and-a-half months. Because only serving MPs can run in such an election, the current putative contest has the added peculiarity that candidates have lifted the starting gun but will not fire it until Andy Burnham has been able to contest the Makerfield by-election on 18 June – adding a month to the period of drift.
At the same time, a short contest or a coronation carries risks too: a candidate could be anointed without having had time to develop plans or be adequately scrutinised.
However long the process takes, a further concern relates to who is involved in selecting the new leader. As many commentators – perhaps most forcefully, the political historian Robert Saunders – have argued, election of a Prime Minister by the members of a political party is undemocratic. In a general election, voters are able to make a judgement on the whole team put forward by each political party, including its candidate for the premiership. Between general elections, selection of a new leader by the parliamentary party also has a democratic logic: here, the representatives chosen by the electorate at large make the decision. But there is no rationale for giving authority to choose the Prime Minister to the highly unrepresentative group who have opted to pay the fee to join a political party (or trade union), however noble and public-spirited they may be as people.
This matter will be explored further in a panel at the Unit’s summer conference in June. This is a strong democratic case for returning to a system of electing leaders by a party’s MPs, at least when the party is in office.
Drivers of the revolving door
The second troubling aspect of the current situation concerns the frequency with which Prime Ministers are being removed. There have been six Prime Ministers in the last decade. There were also six Prime Ministers in the preceding four decades. Such accelerated turnover is a symptom of troubled politics, and cannot but hinder effective government.
Many commentators have asked in recent days why this is happening. Four principal explanations have been offered: impatience; flawed recruitment; flawed structures of governance; and a difficult environment.
One version of the impatience argument holds that, in the wake of the turbulent Brexit years, the Westminster village is just hooked on drama. If MPs and newspaper editors got a grip, we could all return to normal. A deeper version of the same interpretation is that our political culture has become increasingly short-termist. Abbreviated attention spans, on this view, are the product not just of a particular political moment, but of longer-term trends in the media system and the rise of instant-gratification consumerism. And declining trust exacerbates this pattern: no one is given the benefit of the doubt; even where voters do have long time horizons, they do not trust that, when politicians seek to impose short-term costs, long-term benefits will result.
The flawed recruitment story holds that we are not securing the best people to fill the Prime Minister’s role. Some of those who are chosen therefore underperform, leading to pressure for their early replacement. Again, there are two versions of this argument. One concerns specifically the process for selecting Prime Ministers that has already been mentioned. By empowering unrepresentative party members, this process elevates leaders – think Liz Truss or, in opposition, Jeremy Corbyn – who appeal to a narrow and ideologically purist segment of opinion but lack a programme that is likely to work for all. Some voices – not least the Constitution Unit’s former Director Meg Russell – have also questioned whether it is desirable to restrict the pool of eligible applicants just to the MPs of the governing party.
The other version of the recruitment story is concerned with entry to and progression within the political class as a whole. This account worries that political discourse has become so toxic, and debate around many issues so mired in sloganeering, that reasonable people who would govern competently are repelled from taking part. As anyone who knows Westminster well is aware, there are still many wonderful, committed, public-spirited people in politics today. But the danger is they are pushed aside by those more willing to play a venal game.
The third explanation for political turbulence focuses on flaws in our structures of governance. This account – emphasised by the Institute for Government’s Hannah White and the former civil servant Sam Freedman – contends that institutions at the heart of government are not up to the tasks that contemporary society demands of them. The Institute for Government argues that the centre of British government is too weak – unable to provide effective coordination across departments and policy areas. It has long made the case for a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, alongside other reforms, to make up this deficit. Sam Freedman argues for similar changes, as well as more strategic use of the Prime Minister’s time, and a more constructive approach in government to the role of parliament. This last point chimes with a long-running theme in Meg Russell’s research: that a strong parliament is a friend, not an enemy, of good government.
The final explanation highlights the difficult circumstances in which Prime Ministers now seek to lead. This is sometimes framed in terms of whether the UK has become ‘ungovernable’. It overlaps with the claims about impatience: an electorate that seeks instant gratification is impossible to please. But it also focuses on the concrete conditions that leave Prime Ministers having to make invidious decisions every day: the slowdown in growth since 2008; the legacy of austerity; the deficit built up over the Covid years; the shocks imposed by Putin’s adventures in Ukraine and Trump’s in Iran. In addition, whereas the political battle used to be fought on a simple ideological terrain defined by more left- and more right-wing approaches to the economy, now economic concerns jostle with sharp cultural divides, making it far harder to hold a stable coalition together.
Are there solutions?
It seems likely that all of these posited explanations capture some of what is going on. Restoring greater stability is therefore likely to require action on multiple fronts.
The kinds of institutional adjustments propounded by Hannah White, Sam Freedman, and others would seem to be essential. A more benign international and economic context would also help.
But we need in addition to think about our wider political culture. How can we acknowledge the pain and anger that many people feel, while also restoring generosity and kindness to our public discourse? How can we lengthen political time horizons without appearing to belittle the problems that people are experiencing in their lives here and now? How can we ensure that politicians remain accountable through processes of competition for power without allowing the competitive logic to squeeze out any hope for reasonable discussion of complex issues? Questions such as these need answers if solutions are to be found.
Such answers are likely to include working to ensure that people feel genuinely listened to. A charismatic leader may help with that. Parliament’s role in enabling diverse perspectives to be both voiced and truly heard is also central. Education is vital for supporting people in knowing both how to express their own views effectively and how themselves to listen well to others. Much greater use of deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies, if done well, could help gradually to shift the culture too.
Most politicians are acutely conscious of the toxicity of our contemporary political discourse: after all, they live it every day. But there is a surprising lack of focus on finding solutions. Yet improving the current state of politics – which turbulence at the top exposes – is vital to the health of our democracy and the quality of governance.
Professor Alan Renwick is Director of the Constitution Unit.
Featured image: ‘Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends EPC Summit in Armenia‘ by Lauren Hurley/No 10 Downing Street (CC BY 4.0).