Take Your Pick

We may be in the last week of August, but it is still the silly season, so here comes the old question of who should elect Conservative and Labour Party Leaders.

It was Conservative MPs who chose John Major, William Hague, Michael Howard, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak, while the party members presented a grateful nation with Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Take your pick.

It was considered that Howard, May and Sunak were self-evidently the only candidates, meaning that May and Sunak were appointed directly to the Premiership without a vote's having been cast even among MPs, with any doubters dismissed as obvious lunatics.

Labour pulled the same trick with Gordon Brown, although at that time he would also have won a members' ballot. But in 2020, the Parliamentary Labour Party had been all ready to secede, and to litigate for the party's assets, if the plebs in the rank and file had not given it who it wanted, as they duly did.

The 100-year blackout of the Left had been reimposed, so the only noises off that anyone would admit to being able to hear were from sniffy old Blairites. Those can hardly complain today, though. Beyond their wildest dreams is the means-testing of Brown's winter fuel payment, a key measure in cementing the enormous popularity that he enjoyed for many years, long after most voters had recognised that the Blairites' own hero was a war criminal surrounded by crooks.

Well, now we have another Prime Minister who is a war criminal surrounded by crooks, and when he is not starving children, then he is freezing pensioners. The MPs and the party members both chose him, although at the present rate the MPs will soon be the only remaining members of the Labour Party. So again, and even before considering that Labour's rules had been changed under Keir Starmer to make a contested Leadership Election effectively impossible, when it came to who should choose the Leader, then take your pick.