Of the 15 British Prime Ministers since the end of the Second World War, only two — Attlee and Heath — both initially entered and finally exited Downing Street at a general election. The coronation of Sunak or Truss will make that just two out of 16.
So there is nothing especially unusual about the current leadership election — except, of course, that the Conservative Party is choosing a new leader less than three years after the last one won a general election with close to a landslide. The only other real difference between the current contest and most of the others since 1945 is the involvement of the Conservative Party’s grassroots. The 2019 contest from which Boris Johnson emerged victorious was the first time that any party’s membership had directly chosen a Prime Minister.
This will be the second, and not everyone approves, with calls to restrict the vote to MPs in the future coming from both within and without the party. For some, this is about principle (MPs are accountable to the public, activists aren’t); for others it’s pragmatic (it’ll be quicker, or produce what they see as the right outcome).
Things are not helped by the demographics of the Conservative grassroots — average age around 57, mostly middle-class, disproportionately white and southern — which last time triggered complaints about how the Prime Minister was being chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Right-wing cabal. (Given the demographics of the Labour Party, when, or if, they are next in power long enough to change leaders while in Downing Street, then their Prime Minister will be chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Left-wing cabal, but people seem less exercised by this for some reason.)
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this debate is that it has taken so long to become an issue. Labour widened the franchise for its leadership elections to include party members in the early Eighties; the Conservatives did the same in the late Nineties. Yet both changes took place at the beginning of long periods of opposition; that, and two unopposed contests in 2007 (Labour) and 2016 (Conservative), meant that it’s taken almost 40 years for this issue to come to a head.
It was Willie Whitelaw — who stood as party leader, unsuccessfully, in 1975 — who once said that whatever system you have, someone was bound to think it was the wrong one; listening to complaints this week you have to feel he had a point. One of the few academic studies of British leadership contests — albeit one that is now almost 30-years-old — concluded that the rules chosen didn’t actually make much difference to the outcome. For all that parties obsessed about procedures, it was likely that the same people would have been elected in most cases (although the possible exceptions to this claim — including both Thatcher and Corbyn — strike me as important enough to treat that conclusion with some caution).
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