It’s the membership stage of the latest edition of Who Wants to Lead the Conservative Party?, and one of the unlovelier rituals of the season is the rash of commentary claiming that the involvement of party activists in choosing a Prime Minister is a dire threat to good government and/or the constitution.
Now, far be it from me to criticise someone for adopting a position of stern constitutionalist principle. If you’re the sort who simply does not approve of MPs delegating their decision-making responsibilities, that’s a perfectly coherent position – although it seems more often applied to members’ ballots and referendums than say, quangos or devolution.
But some of the arguments levelled against activists this time out have been nonsensical, and few more so than Daniel Finkelstein’s argument in Tuesday’s Times that “a return to MPs choosing their party leader would have prevented the twin fiascos of Corbyn and Johnson”.
Please. Does anyone truly believe that “Johnson was chosen because the members wanted him, and the MPs positioned themselves to enable it”? MPs picked the outgoing Prime Minister for one reason: they thought he was possibly the only man capable of breaking the toxic deadlock of the last parliament and delivering our exit from the EU. (They were probably right.)
Besides, as Philip Cowley points out in an excellent piece for UnHerd:
“The Conservative rules ensure that only two candidates go through to the members’ vote. If one of those is so unsuitable that choosing them would be a disaster, then it’s not the fault of the grassroots.”
Right, that’s that said. One of ConservativeHome’s first campaigns was to save ‘one man, one vote’ from Michael Howard, and we have not resiled from that principle.
But there are limits to it, and the current campaign by David Campbell-Bannerman and Peter Cruddas to force Boris Johnson onto the leadership ballot – reported in yesterday’s Daily Mail – totally exceed them. It happily has no chance of success, specious threats of injunctions notwithstanding; but if it did, it would be imperative that it fail.
As mentioned above, the leadership stage is not the ultimate source of an incoming Prime Minister’s constitutional authority. That is derived exclusively from their ability to command a majority in the House of Commons.
Conservative MPs may choose to delegate the final choice to the membership, but the ultimate decision remains in the hands of parliamentarians, and they have a responsibility to ensure (as Labour did not) that only candidates capable of commanding their confidence are put through to the final stage.
Johnson no longer commands that confidence. The Government does, because MPs backed it against its own vote of no confidence in itself earlier this week. But the Prime Minister himself can barely scrape together enough loyalists to staff a caretaker Cabinet. It was thus quite correct, as Adam Tomkins argued yesterday, that he resign.
In light of this, it would be entirely contrary to the constitution if the institutional Conservative Party could somehow impose on its MPs a leader who they had rejected and who did not command their confidence. It would transform the latter from independent members of a sovereign institution into mere delegates, and validate the currently-hysterical suggestion that the member ballot undermines parliamentary democracy.
Our party rightly savaged the Labour Left when it attempted to do pull a similar stunt on the Opposition during the Eighties, a decade we are not normally prone to forgetting. There is no excuse for indulging in it now – especially not for a man who might end up facing a recall by-election this autumn.