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What is Prime Minister Gordon Brown playing at?

By Clark Nida

So Gordon Brown has resigned as leader of the Labour Party, but stays on as Prime Minister? People who wonder about this don't know how their own government works.

The Queen rules Great Britain. Constitutionally she does so through a Prime Minister she personally has chosen. Wisdom dictates that she choose the MP who is best able to form a government. Such a person will be the one who can expect to get a majority of MPs in favour of whatever important legislation he or she proposes. It is only by convention that this is a party leader, more specifically a party leader at the head of a party in its right mind.

The person the Queen chooses to form a government remains as such until he goes in person to Buckingham Palace and tenders his resignation. National elections have no bearing on the matter: they simply choose the MPs to represent the 650 constituencies of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Consequently there is no reason at all, at this stage, why Gordon Brown should tender his resignation to the Queen. People born in recent years imagine that a general election is somehow like an American presidential election: that we get to choose the Prime Minister. The recent beauty competition on television between three of the major party leaders must have reinforced this view in the public mind. It is wholly wrong. The voters do not choose the Prime Minister. Nor, constitutionally speaking, do they even so much as influence that choice. The political parties do not choose a Prime Minister: as constitutional faculties they do not even exist. Nor do the elected MPs as a body.

The Queen does.

Albeit her constitutional choice is influenced by the preference of Parliament for the leader they will follow. Such influence is not a formal one, and in practice it's the Queen's advisers (members of the Royal Household, an extension of the Civil Service—or perhaps that should be the other way round?) who suggest to her whom to invite to form the next government.

It is by no means clear who that person should be.

These last few days I have been terrified that the chickens would succumb to the blandishments of the foxes and forsake their principles for the trappings of power. Trappings in name only, which would be torn away the very moment the Prime Minister, presumably in such a case the Conservative party leader, chose to call a general election. The Liberal Democrats are campaign champions, for that is how their supporters see them. It is a campaign they are fighting: a campaign for a more representative Britain. Were they to sell out in return for the pretence of power, they would find themselves abandoned by their disappointed electors at the next election, which might not be far off.

But it seems, from word that has come to the BBC, that Nick Clegg has refused the blandishments of the Conservatives, keeping his eye on his party's main goal: that of electoral reform. That indeed may be the only valid task of this Parliament, but it will be a significant one and a worthy one: a landmark in British politics. Thereafter the Liberal Democrats can take their chance (an improved one) with the voters along with everybody else—except that the voters' hand will be immeasurably strengthened. No longer will an individual have to vote for people he doesn't think much of, in order to keep out of office people who dismay or disgust him. We, the informed electorate, will be at liberty to return MPs whose policies actually appeal to us.

Judging by Gordon Brown's action in resigning, it is quite likely that his secret telephone conversation with Nick Clegg ended with a declaration by the latter that the Liberal Democrats might indeed be ready to form a coalition government with Labour, but not with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. He has told his party however not to be in any great hurry to choose a successor. Nick Clegg is an untried quantity, but he is faced with decisions for which he could go down as a leading statesman—indeed the leading statesman in British history since Cromwell.

Quite apart from a natural unwillingness to trust implicitly a person who has rejected one's leadership, Gordon Brown should be in no hurry to go crawling to the Queen to lay upon her, without recommendation, the task of choosing the next Prime Minister. The Queen does not vote. In a very real sense she is the least qualified person to decide in the whole of Great Britain.