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.