Tag Archives: Conservative Party rules

A political party, a lettuce, and a tortoise walk into a court: it’s politics in Britain

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Back in 2022–you remember 2022, don’t you?–Britain’s Conservative Party held a big honkin’ majority in the House of Commons and Boris Johnson had just resigned as prime minister, having found multiple creative ways to bring himself and his office into disrepute. 

Great sigh of relief, right? Better days lay ahead, surely.

Ha.

 

How Britain forms a government

But before we go on, we need to understand how Britain chooses a prime minister, because it was time to choose Johnson’s replacement. 

The thing is, British voters don’t choose a prime minister. People vote for someone to represent their area–a member of parliament, or MP if we’re going to save ourselves a few keystrokes. Then whoever leads the party with a majority of MPs becomes the prime minister. 

A head of lettuce. Stay with me and it’ll all make sense.

And if no party has a majority? Oops. The politicians head for the back rooms and try to cobble together a coalition of two or more parties that will make up a majority. Usually the party with the most MPs ends up holding a smaller party by the hand like a babysitter taking a four-year-old across the street. Yes, the babysitter has to promise the kid an ice cream or some screen time, but the babysitter’s still in the lead. 

Where the parallel breaks down is if the four-year-old decides to cross the street with a different babysitter–not the party with the most MPs but a smaller one that still has enough for the two to make up a majority. Until the kid commits to one party or the other, she or he still has some power. After that it depends on how canny the kid and the babysitter are. It can get pretty fractious.

Once a coalition’s formed, the king or queen waves a magic feather and turns the leader of the leading party into a prime minister. 

Since the UK tends to have two major parties and a handful of small ones, someone can usually put together a majority. If not, the largest party can govern unsteadily as a minority government and if you bet on a new election being held before too much time’s gone past you’re not likely to lose your money.

But we were talking about 2022, when the Conservatives held that big honkin’ majority and had just lost their leader. Because when you step down as prime minister, you also step down as leader of your party. You’re both things at once and it’s  anyone’s guess how you know at any given time which one you’re acting as.

Or maybe it works the other way around: you step down as leader first, then find you’re not the prime minister anymore. It’s like one of those dreams where you realize you’re riding the bus and realize you’re stark fucking naked. You don’t stop to wonder what came first. All  you want to do is find some clothes.

In that case–and we’re talking here about the prime minister/party leader case, not the bus/no-clothes case–the governing party chooses a new leader, and that leader is ipso facto and several other Latin phrases that not many people understand the country’s prime minister.

I never studied Latin, unlike Boris Johnson, who was known for tossing phrases of (I’ve read) questionable accuracy into speeches, but I can translate this bit of political reality for you: it means that one political party, not the electorate, chooses the country’s next leader. Who–because the position of party leader/prime minister is a powerful one–may steer the country in an entirely new direction. I mean, when you voted for your MP, you knew who was leading the party. You at least had the illusion that you knew what and who you were voting for. Now it’s out of your hands.

The interesting–not to say bizarre–thing here is that the party elects its leader by following its own rules. So if the majority party’s rules say they choose their leader by allowing each member one vote and each local party club 100 votes, then that’s the way the new prime minister will be elected. If the rules say they do it by shoe size–okay, it’s their party. They get to set the rules.

 

Enter Liz Truss; exit Liz Truss, chased by a lettuce

That’s what happened in 2022. Following party rules, the Conservative MPs narrowed the possible candidates down to two and tossed those two to the members like raw meat to the lions.  And the members voted for Liz Truss, who crashed the economy, became the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, and was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce set up in front of a live camera online. 

I should probably add that the lettuce wore a blond wig. Political writers rely on that sort of detail to liven up their column inches. A fake blue plaque–the kind used in Britain to commemorate historical sites–has since been set up at the supermarket where the lettuce was bought.

But back to the election: what’s known is that 81,326 people voted, all of course Conservative Party members. 

How many registered voters did the country have? 48,208,507.

What percentage of the electorage chose the new prime minister? Sorry, I can’t do numbers, but a very small one.

Full disclosure here: the number for the registered voters is two years off–it’s from 2024–but it’s close enough to give you a sense of the weirdness of it all. And it gets weirder than that, because the Conservative Party itself oversaw the election, not any state body, and we can’t peek behind the curtain to know how it was conducted.

All of that led Tortoise Media–new owner of the Observer newspaper–to tug at the curtain, trying to find out how Truss was actually elected. Initially, they asked the Conservative Party how the election was run, how or whether they ensured it was safe, and whether the voters were all citizens, of legal age, and for that matter even real.

The party answered that they didn’t appoint the prime minister, the sovereign did, using his or her (her in this case) magic feather. Furthermore, the party was a private club and no one’s business.

 

The courts

So Tortoise Media went to court, arguing that the party was serving a public function and in that election acting as a public authority, so it should be subject to judicial review and the public’s right to know under European law.

Hang on. European law? Didn’t Britain leave the European Union?

Yup, but it didn’t leave the Council of Europe, which is a different beast with a similar name, so it still recognizes and is subject to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Who knew, right?

To help make their point, Tortoise bought Conservative Party memberships for a tortoise–an actual one–under the name Margaret Thatcher, and for two other dead people. 

Three years and two courts later, Tortoise (the media company, not the actual one) lost. The court ruled that the party wasn’t serving a public function. Boris Johnson had advised the queen to appoint the new prime minister not as party leader but as the outgoing prime minister, so the way the party ran the election wasn’t a matter for public scrutiny.

Did you follow that? Did you picture Boris Johnson naked on a bus? If so, you have my deepest sympathy.

Parliament could, in theory, vote itself or some public body the power to oversee mid-term transfers of power, but my best guess is that the current government is too busy overseeing its own unpopularity to bother. If the prime minister resigns midway through his term, which I wouldn’t rule out since everyone close to him is busy denying the possibility, the election will be overseen by a different party–Labour, this time–and pigs may not fly but tortoises could well vote.

An incomplete guide to Boris Johnson’s downfall, or How to have fun with British politics

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Let’s do a quick review of recent British political mayhem for the benefit both of folks who don’t live in Britain and of the ones who do but want a few extra moments to gloat: 

Boris Johnson has stepped down as prime minister and head of the Conservative Party. But Boris Johnson is also  still the prime minister and head of the Conservative Party.

Confused? I can’t think why. Stick around. It’ll all make something vaguely approaching sense before we’re done. 

Or else it won’t. I make no promises.

 

Irrelevant photo: Purple toadflax

What went wrong for Johnson?

You might as well ask what didn’t, but as so often happens he wasn’t brought down by the real scandals–the corruption, the lies, a Brexit cobbled together from high-end wine corks and journalistic fairy dust, not to mention heartless policies, destruction of the infrastructure, drunken parties during lockdown, lost elections, and the resignations of two ethics advisors–but by a sex scandal. And not even one he participated in. 

What happened was that he appointed someone named Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip, ignoring accusations that he was not a pincher but a groper.

Deputy chief whip? No, that’s not the sex scandal. It’s one of those weird British things that we can blame on history and that I won’t bother to explain.. 

When the accusations became public, Johnson said he hadn’t known about them.

Then it became public that he had been told. Formally. 

Then more allegations surfaced.

For the record, the people Pincher groped were male. I’m not sure if that had an impact in how the scandal’s played out. It would an interesting study. Or in the absence of evidence, an interesting essay. You could assert all kinds of things you couldn’t actually demonstrate.

Anyway, once all that happened, resignation letters from cabinet ministers and assorted less impressive governmental appointees began to flutter to the pavement outside 10 Downing Street like autumn leaves–first two, then more, than dozens, including, eventually, resignations from people who’d been appointed to replace people who’d resigned earlier.

At this point, any normal politician would have put their hands in the air and surrendered peacefully, but this is Boris Johnson we’re talking about, and it wasn’t until the resignation letters formed a layer dep enough to resemble Larry the Cat’s litter box that he finally, grudgingly, made a resignation speech that blamed herd mentality for running him out. 

Why did this particular scandal bring him down when other equally lurid ones haven’t? It’s a mystery. If enough autumn leaves fall onto a balance scale, eventually they’ll outweigh the political convenience on the other side. That’s the best I can do. 

But (see above; you’re supposed to be paying attention here), he’s not actually gone yet.

You know about Rasputin? He was a mystic, a faith healer, a self-proclaimed holy man, and a key hanger-on in the court of Russia’s last tsar–assuming, of course, that we don’t count Putin. He was assassinated by other court hangers-on who were desperate to get rid of him, and the story goes that he was poisoned, stabbed, beaten, shot three times, and finally wrapped in a rug and tossed into the River Neva. When he was fished out he was decisively dead, but he had water in his lungs, indicating that he was still alive when they threw him in.

The rug was ruined.

To be fair, it may not have happened exactly that way, but that’s okay, we’re not doing Russian history here, we’re just giving it a passing glance because I suspect it’s going to take something along the same lines to get Johnson out of Number 10, even now that he’s resigned.

And just for the record, I’m not advocating that particular set of actions, just contemplating overblown similarities. 

Johnson, they say, likes the perks of office. I can’t imagine he’ll give them up willingly. Already he’s had to move a postponed wedding reception from the grand mansion where prime ministers get to play to I don’t know where but wherever it is it’s less impressive.

Hasn’t the poor man suffered enough already?

 

What has Johnson learned from all those resignations?

The names of people he wants to take revenge on, although whether he’ll have the power to do them any damage is still up for grabs. Other than that, nothing that I can see. He new appointments aren’t much better than his old ones. One of the new crop (because he’s still the prime minister and is expected to have some semblance of a functioning government around him) has been accused by someone Pincher groped of asking if he’s gay, because if he is then surely what happened isn’t straightforward sexual harassment. 

In other words, she wanted to know if he asking for it.

Another appointee demonstrated the political judgment and sensitivity that she’ll bring to her new position by giving the finger to demonstrators outside Number 10. That may breach the ministerial code, which expects “high standards of behavior” and “propriety.” But that’s okay because  who’s going to enforce it? 

A third appointee doesn’t believe people are really having trouble affording food–presumably they’re using food banks because, hey, it’s free food–and compared taking the knee to giving a Nazi salute.

The big appointment, though, is to the chancellor’s job, since the last one resigned and is a front runner in the race to replace Johnson. The chancellor’s the guy who counts the money and makes financial policy. Or tries to, anyway. The new one is Nadhim Zahawi, and reports leaked out that civil servants sent out warnings about his finances. That’s not the same as saying he’s guilty of anything, only that disturbing allegations are buzzing around his head like flies around cowpies.

Wise politicians might want to be careful where they set their foot, although a wise politician is not what we’re dealing with.

An unnamed Conservative grandee accused Johnson of making unsuitable appointments so that he could leave a mess behind for his successor, but it’s also possible that no one suitable will take his phone calls. Or that he doesn’t know a bad appointment from a convenient one.

 

What didn’t happen

Under the current law, the prime minister can call an election at any time, and at one point Johnson hinted that he might just do that. Since his party has a huge whackin’ majority and polls indicate that right now it’s scraping caked-on crud off the linoleum, his party will be against this. As one article says, it would be “constitutionally very unusual.” And the queen could, if her advisers advised, refuse the request on the grounds that the existing parliament is viable.

From what I’ve read, that would be done via back channels, not in public. A message would go to Number 10 saying, basically, “Do not embarrass the queen by requesting this.” Only they’d capitalize queen.

 

So why’s he still the prime minister?

The best I can do by way of an answer is to say, Because that’s the way it works. Prime ministers aren’t elected directly. They’re (usually) the leader of the majority party, if there is one, or of the biggest, baddest party in the case of a coalition government. So if they step down, guess who gets to choose a new one.

You got it: the biggest, baddest party in the House of Commons. Which does it by following its own party rules instead of rules drawn up by anything as finicky as the government. So the process can take time, depending on the rules. 

Of course, since the rules are the party’s, the party can also change them at will–at least if its rules allow it to. If it wants to choose the next prime minister by seeing who can throw a rock farthest, I can’t see what would stop it.

Prime ministers can always resign effective immediately, in which case their party texts a temp agency and says, “Send us someone of prime ministerial quality, please. Must make public appearances and know how to wear a suit convincingly.” And then that person will run a caretaker government.  

But that’s not what’s happened. When Johnson finally bowed to something approaching reality and agreed to resign, he proposed hanging on until October, when the Conservatives hold their convention. 

To which the party said, “Not a chance,” but it didn’t roll him in that rug, so the date when he’s fully replaced depends on how quickly it can organize its replacement procedures: First the people who wanted to replace Johnson had to get support from at least 20 of their fellow Conservative MPs (that knocked a few out of the race), then those same MPs have (or had–I’m writing this a bit in advance of the fact, so I’m not sure if it’s happened yet) to vote until they’ve narrowed the list to two.  Then the party’s members vote. 

They’re rushing it as fast as they can and he should be gone by September 5. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. They might roll him in the wallpaper * and head for the river.

 

  • Yeah, that was another scandal. It’s breathtakingly ugly, it was very expensive (but then so was the rest of the furniture), and Johnson got caught arranging for a Conservative donor to pay for it. The next prime minister will either be haunted by it or bringing in a team of people with acetylene torches to get rid of it.