A question to hold until the end, because the answer is more specific than people expect and it is not zero. How many votes were cast, anywhere, by anyone, in the process that made Andy Burnham prime minister of the United Kingdom on Monday?
Set it aside for a moment. The thing worth examining first is not the man or the politics but the instrument, because Britain has now used it seven times in ten years and it is beginning to look less like an emergency measure than like the ordinary way the country changes its head of government.
The mechanism, stated plainly
In a Westminster system the prime minister is not elected as prime minister. The office goes to whoever can command a majority in the House of Commons, and in practice that is the leader of the largest party. Change the party leader between general elections and you change the prime minister, without anything else happening.
The party’s own rules therefore become constitutional machinery. Whatever process Labour uses to pick a leader is, in that moment, the process by which the country picks a government.
Labour’s rules require a candidate to be nominated by a set proportion of the party’s MPs before going to a ballot of the membership. The threshold exists to stop frivolous candidacies. It has a second property, which is the one that operated this month: if only one candidate clears it, there is nothing to ballot, and the rules provide for that candidate to be declared elected.
What happened, in order
Keir Starmer announced on 22 June that he intended to resign as leader and as prime minister, having lost the confidence of his parliamentary party.
Four days before that, on 18 June, Burnham had won a by-election in Makerfield, in Greater Manchester. The sitting member had stood down to create the vacancy. He was mayor of Greater Manchester and not a member of the Commons, and a party leader must sit in the Commons, so the seat was the precondition for everything that followed.
When nominations for the leadership closed he had 379 of them, which is more than ninety four percent of all Labour MPs, and he was the only eligible candidate. There was consequently no membership ballot. He was declared leader on 17 July and became prime minister on 20 July.
Every step of that was in order. No rule was suspended and nothing was done in a corner. The sequence is the rules running exactly as written.
What kind of object this is
It is tempting to call this a democratic deficit and move on, and the label is too blunt to be useful. The mechanism does something real, and it is worth naming what.
Its virtue is speed and the absence of a vacuum. A country whose government has lost the confidence of its own MPs is in a genuinely bad position, and the ability to resolve that in four weeks without a general election is not nothing. Nations that require a national vote to replace a failed executive can spend months with an administration that everyone knows is finished.
Its cost is that the resolution is produced by the smallest possible electorate. Four hundred or so MPs decided this, and because they coordinated well enough to produce a single candidate, even they did not have to vote. The process worked so smoothly that it consumed itself: a threshold designed to filter candidates, applied to a field of one, produces a leader without an election.
That is not a flaw introduced this month. It is a feature of the design that only becomes visible when a party is unified enough to trigger it.
The second example
Britain is not unusual in this and the comparison is clarifying rather than exculpatory.
Australia replaced prime ministers between elections repeatedly through the 2010s by party room ballot, a process involving only sitting members and often concluded within a day. The country eventually found the churn intolerable and the major parties changed their rules to make it harder, which is the interesting part: the constraint came from the parties, not from the constitution, because the constitution had nothing to say about it.
Japan’s governing party has selected prime ministers through internal contests for most of the postwar period, with a franchise that includes party members but is still a fraction of the electorate. Nobody there regards this as a crisis of legitimacy, partly because it has been continuous for so long that it is simply how the office is understood to work.
What distinguishes the British case is not the mechanism but the frequency. Seven prime ministers in ten years is a rate at which the electorate’s relationship to the office changes character. A voter who cast a ballot in the last general election chose a party and, reasonably, a person. The person has now been replaced twice by processes that voter had no part in, and the mandate the government is operating under was issued for a different leader and a different program.
There is one more difference, and it runs against Britain. In both Australia and Japan the party that changes its leader is changing the holder of an office the public understands to be party property, because the churn has been frequent enough for long enough that the expectation has adjusted. British general election campaigns are still fought substantially around the two people who might be prime minister, with their faces on the material. A system cannot campaign on the person and then treat the person as interchangeable without the gap being noticed.
The answer
So: how many votes were cast in the process that produced this prime minister?
In the leadership contest, none, because there was no contest to hold. The 379 nominations were signatures, not ballots, and no vote of the parliamentary party or the membership took place.
The only votes cast anywhere in the sequence were in Makerfield on 18 June, in a by-election for one seat in the House of Commons, by the people who live there. Several tens of thousands are eligible in a constituency of that kind and rather fewer turn out for a by-election in June. Those ballots made him a member of parliament, which is a different job, and they were cast before Starmer had announced anything.
That is the honest account. One constituency in Greater Manchester, voting for its own member, four days before the vacancy existed, is the entire body of people who marked a paper anywhere in the making of a British prime minister this summer.
Britain has shown no sign of wanting to change any of this, and whether it should is a question for the people who live under it. But the mechanism has stopped being an exception. It is now one of the ordinary ways the country replaces a government, and a country ought to be able to describe its ordinary instruments accurately.
