The Conservative leadership contest has been dragging on for so long now that familiarity may be breeding indifference. It seems an age since Boris Johnson resigned, and there are still nearly two weeks before the new prime minister takes over. In news terms, the contest is slipping into a downpage summer sideshow. As a result, we may be losing sight of what a groundbreaking event this 2022 succession race actually is.
We should be clear that on 5 September political history will be made. What makes the contest special is that, if the polling and betting are correct, the members of a political party are about to select a prime minister, Liz Truss, for whom neither Tory MPs nor the country itself has voted. Truss will be the third prime minister to be chosen by the Tories in mid-parliament since party members got the final say in leadership contests. But she will be the first to win through party members overturning the MPs’ choice from the earlier rounds.
Until the 21st century, when a prime minister resigned during a parliament, their successor was chosen either informally or by a ballot among the ruling party’s MPs. Among those who reached No 10 in that way in the postwar period were James Callaghan and John Major. This was a logical adaptation of the parliamentary system, under which MPs are chosen at a general election and government is in the hands of the party leader who can command a majority in the House of Commons.
However, the leadership electorate has now been broadened (since 1981 for Labour and 1998 for the Tories) to include a role for party members. There have been four occasions when party members had the power to choose a British prime minister in mid-parliament. In the first, Gordon Brown won the Labour contest unopposed in 2007 because there was no other candidate to succeed Tony Blair. Theresa May won the second, in 2016, by default, because the withdrawal of Andrea Leadsom made a membership ballot unnecessary. Johnson did indeed face a ballot in 2019, becoming the first British prime minister to be chosen by a ruling party’s members; but, crucially, he was also the clear first choice of MPs too in all the earlier parliamentary rounds.
This will not be true of Truss. Unlike May in 2016 or Johnson in 2019, she is not the first choice of Tory MPs. Only 50 of the party’s 357 MPs (14%) voted for her in the first round in July. She trailed both Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt in the next three rounds of the contest before nudging ahead of Mordaunt in round five to qualify for the membership runoff with Sunak. Even in the final round among MPs, Truss had the support of only 113 MPs, or 31.6% of the total. Yet it is she who now seems likely to cross the threshold into No 10 next month.
This does not make Truss an illegitimate prime minister. But it does make her a weak one. It also means she is a prime minister of a new kind, since her mandate to lead comes from the extra-parliamentary party membership and not from parliament itself. This should make supporters of representative democracy wary. It will create problems. Moreover, compared with a general election, when the choice of prime minister is governed by rules to ensure some kind of balance, a party membership election is more open to outside influence, as the Daily Mail clearly grasps. Voters in a membership ballot are also inevitably more partisan.
This may matter rather less in practice than it does in theory. The country is heading into a gale-force economic and cost of living crisis. The Tory party at Westminster will doubtless rally behind its new leader, at least for a few weeks. But the moment, and what it embodies, will resonate. In a very real sense, Truss will be a prime minister imposed from outside parliament. This has not happened in Britain’s parliamentary system since the unreformed era when monarchs still chose their first ministers, about 200 years ago. It will have political, and arguably also constitutional, implications.
To allow the members of any political party to choose the prime minister is dubious in principle and fraught with problems in practice. It inevitably reshapes the institutional balances within a representative government system like Britain’s. But there is no going back.
Prime ministers who win general elections unquestionably have a mandate from the country. Those who come to the job in midterm merely inherit theirs. Recent midterm leaders have fretted about this. Brown, May and Johnson all spent their early months in Downing Street angling for the opportunity to secure their own, distinctive mandate. Brown bottled his opportunity. May squandered hers. Johnson seized his triumphantly.
Which mandate will Truss claim in order to govern? She will inherit the economically expansionist Brexit mandate that Johnson won in 2019 from a wide-ranging coalition of voters across Britain. But she will only be in No 10 because of the mandate from a party membership that, as we should all know by now, is disproportionately old, male, white, southern English and rightwing. Her voters want smaller government, lower taxes and harder Brexit. Truss’s answer to this dilemma will determine the fate of her prime ministership.
But this new kind of prime minister inescapably faces the need to establish her new kind of legitimacy more firmly. It will not be easy. She has to manage a parliamentary party that did not want her as leader (as happened to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn); to choose ministers willing to serve while disagreeing with her approach (the dilemma facing Sunak and others); to cope with an increase of articulate former ministers (including Johnson and Michael Gove) on the backbenches; and to deliver a legislative programme without the major backbench revolts that at times have made the modern Tory party almost unmanageable.
Above all, though, Truss has to win a general election within the next two years. Like most midterm prime ministers, she will instinctively want to stay on until an election is no longer avoidable. Callaghan, Major and Brown all did this. Yet, looking down the barrels of ballooning inflation, spiralling energy prices and a health service on its knees, she may decide that things can only get worse. The one thing we can be certain of about Truss is that she is a bold gambler. It is why she stands on the threshold of Downing Street. For all the risks, an early general election may be the only way open to her to turn her weak mandate into a strong one.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
