The Spectator’s Notes | 1 October 2005

If you are not part of the ‘selectorate’, you feel annoyed at the suggestion that Gordon Brown can become prime minister by acclamation and without a general election. It is not so much that another candidate might be better — though I rather like the look of Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary — it is just that a party’s choice of leader is a very different thing from running the country. The country should decide on the latter. Of party leaders since the war chosen while in government only Harold Macmillan could be accounted any sort of success. The others were Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan and John Major. The ones who kept winning elections — Wilson, Thatcher and Blair — were all chosen in opposition. It is Eden that Brown most resembles, in that he has been the impatient yet almost unchallenged heir for years and years.