A Son of the Rock

No British voter elects a Prime Minister. Neither do we elect a government.

All we vote for – all we ever vote for – in UK General Elections is a representative, a single member of Parliament.

I have voted in nine General Elections and have yet to find a question on the ballot paper asking me who(m) do I wish to be Prime Minister – or indeed whom I wish to be in government.

The only person who can be said to “vote” for the Prime Minister is the monarch – at present the Queen – who invites an MP to form a government (albeit usually on advice from the outgoing PM.) This is true whether that invited MP can “command” a majority in the House of Commons or not. It is Parliament (a word, by the way, derived from French and meaning, almost literally, talking shop) which decides whether a government exists or not; as only the House of Commons can vote a government down.

In this regard I find the complaints that Gordon Brown was an unelected PM to be strange, even ignorant – if not deliberately mischievous. He was as elected – or unelected – as Tony Blair, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Alec Douglas Home, Harold MacMillan etc. etc. before him.

Every Member of Parliament has been elected, except, in days past, for the Speaker, whom convention required to be unopposed – and he or she could not become PM. UKIP and others are, I believe standing against John Bercow on May 6^th. Michael Martin had some opposition too last time as I recall.

In the 2005 General Election Gordon Brown’s name certainly appeared on my ballot paper. To call him unelected was a distortion of the truth, at best. It subsumes into the term only those closed electorates which may choose a political party’s leader. Not being a member of any of them I was not consulted when those parties made their respective choices so in that respect, but in that respect alone, they were/are all unelected. As has been every Prime Minister in my – and anybody else’s – lifetime.

Still, if Mr Irresponsible or even that inoffensive Mr Clegg become PM after next Thursday I may take some delight in dubbing them unelected.