In his very long letter to Jeremy Corbyn about why, after all, he will stay out of the Labour party instead of fighting his expulsion, Alastair Campbell complains that Britain has been the victim of a ‘right-wing coup’. Boris Johnson’s government has no ‘real democratic mandate’, he says, and Mr Corbyn should be fighting it much harder. You hear this argument a lot — we have a new prime minister and so we must have a general election. In my lifetime (born 1956), seven prime ministers — Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Callaghan, Major, Brown, May and Johnson — have come into office without a general election before or immediately ensuing; in that sense, without a democratic mandate. In May 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister and fought the second world war without an election of any kind. When he did finally call an election, after victory in Europe in 1945, he and his party were defeated. There is something uncomfortable about the fact that when a party is in office, the purely party choice of a leader all but automatically makes him or her prime minister. But when you think about it, it is not so silly. In a parliamentary system, the prime minister is the leader who can command a majority in the House of Commons. If that majority is commanded, surely it should not be compulsory to call a general election before the normal term of the parliament. If it cannot be commanded, the problem solves itself. By 31 October, we shall know which of these two situations confronts us.
Photographs of Theresa May attending a cricket match as soon as she left office last week were supposed to tell us what a well-balanced person she is.
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