The Prime Minister is appointed by the monarch on the advice of the outgoing Prime Minister, but there is a firm convention that the old one should believe that the new one would command a majority in the House of Commons. Until there were any grounds for assuming that Liz Truss would do so, then Boris Johnson should not resign.
If Jeremy Corbyn had won a General Election, then the Parliamentary Labour Party would have swung into action during Election Night to tell the Queen that, while a Labour Leader might have been able to have commanded an overall majority, this one would not have been. Far from becoming Prime Minister, Corbyn would still have lost the whip. The Prime Minister would have been Keir Starmer.
Likewise, tomorrow afternoon, the Conservative Party's Members of Parliament should convey to Her Majesty the fact that, at the very least, their confidence in Truss as Prime Minister had not yet been established, since she had never led in any round of voting among them, and since she had been the first choice of a mere 50, precisely one in 13 members of the House of Commons as a whole.
Who will be Prime Minister at the end of this Parliament?
ReplyDeleteSunak and Johnson both openly want it, and they are both more popular with the MPs than Truss could ever be unless she ditched everything that she had promised the members. Of course, once she had won, then there would be nothing to stop her from doing exactly that.
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