Nobody votes for a Prime Minister

The press and political commentators should stop saying we do.

“Andy Burnham doesn’t have a mandate to lead the country.”

It’s all I’ve heard today. But he doesn’t need one - not from the electorate anyway.

The mandate that matters to an incoming Prime Minister Burnham is the one from his party’s MPs and from the House of Commons as a whole.

The unwritten UK constitution requires the government to have the confidence of the House of Commons. A majority of MPs must be willing to support the government on key votes, and in any confidence motion. That is the whole test. Everything else is commentary.

If a Prime Minister loses the confidence of his own party’s MPs, he may be forced to resign. That can happen well outside any formal parliamentary protocol. It does not need a confidence motion, or MPs voting down a Budget. It can happen because the support simply drains away. That is what has happened to Keir Starmer today.

So look at the barriers an incoming Labour leader actually has to clear.

The first is the confidence of his party’s MPs. Burnham helped himself here by winning the Makerfield by-election on 18 June, which makes him an MP and quietly removes the only halfway-serious objection going round, that he is not even in the Commons. He is now. With Wes Streeting and others lining up behind him, it looks very likely he will have the numbers in the parliamentary party. First barrier cleared.

The second barrier is the confidence of the Commons. If an opposition MP, Farage or Badenoch for example, were to put a confidence motion to the Speaker, a majority of MPs would have to vote for it to bring a Burnham government down. That majority would have to include a great many of Burnham’s own MPs voting to destroy their own government weeks into its life. That is very, very unlikely to happen.

Here is the part people forget - often knowingly and wilfully, it seems. Nobody in Britain votes for a Prime Minister. Not one voter outside a single constituency ever gets to put a cross next to the name of the person who ends up in Number 10. In 2024 the only people who could actually vote for Keir Starmer were the electors of Holborn and St Pancras. Everyone else voted for their own local MP. The premiership is not an elected office. There is no national ballot for it, there never has been, and there is no law that even requires the Prime Minister to be an MP. The job belongs, quite simply, to whoever can hold the confidence of the House of Commons.

So push the logic to its limit. If a clear majority of MPs were willing to sustain someone in office, that person would be Prime Minister, with full constitutional legitimacy and no general election required, however little say the wider public had in it. We have tested versions of this in living memory. In 2022 the country had three Prime Ministers in a single year without an election, and Rishi Sunak took the job weeks after the Conservative membership had picked someone else. None of that was a constitutional crisis. It was the system working as designed.

Which is why “Burnham has no mandate to lead the country” is not an argument. It’s like trying to find the numerical sum of two colours. He does not need a mandate from the electorate. He needs the confidence of his MPs, then the confidence of the House. Clear both and he is Prime Minister.

Technically, that is all the office has ever been. The Prime Minister is the person who leads the government that holds the confidence of the House of Commons. It isn’t a loophole he’s exploiting. It’s the constitution doing exactly what it has always done.

Politics is actually really straightforward and simple sometimes. This is one of those times. The mainstream press, celebrity journalists, and the commentators they invite onto their ego-feeding podcasts should do a better job of - yes, informing the public - but also being accurate and, perhaps, educational.