No, Jacob Rees-Mogg – ousting Boris Johnson does not automatically mean a general election

For a man who likes to affect a great reverence for the British constitution, the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has been playing fast and loose with its finer points lately. He told the BBC’s Newsnight: “It is my view that we have moved, for better or worse, to essentially a presidential system and that therefore the mandate is personal rather than entirely party, and that any prime minister would be very well advised to seek a fresh mandate.”

Citing and then dismissing the most recent example – when Boris Johnson took over from Theresa May in 2019 and there was no immediate election (and no suggestion of one before he too failed to get Brexit deals through parliament) – Rees-Mogg argued that the days when prime ministers could take over from one another without recourse to the electorate were gone. This is arrant nonsense.

First, there is nothing new about “presidential” politics in Britain, and they have been carried out mostly through the parliamentary party system. The leaders of two, or more rarely three, parties competing head-to-head for the keys to Downing Street. Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a gladiatorial contest, has been going in its recognisably modern form since 1961, its drama deriving from the forum of the Commons. Some of the most famous and long-running rivalries in history have had a “presidential” flavour defining them – Gladstone vs Disraeli, Heath vs Wilson, Thatcher vs Kinnock, but they faced one another in the chamber of the Commons. Presidential-style TV debates are a more recent innovation – 2010 – but a telling one, because they are the exception not the rule, and hardly compulsory.

Political parties have long been associated pre-eminently with their leaders: their images appear on posters, on the front of manifestos, and they dominate media coverage. But other figures matter too: especially in the cabinet, those perceived as future leaders, charismatic backbenchers sometimes far from office, or past leaders. The “presidential” flavour depends on the personalities involved – how much a leader is a “big” figure and overshadows their party. Thatcher much more than Cameron, say, or Corbyn more than Starmer, and Johnson much more than May. However, it is not a constant feature of political activity.

It is still true that we have a parliamentary system with a number of quasi-presidential features – some of those quite venerable. The people vote for parties, tactically or otherwise, for individuals to represent them in parliament, and the government and prime minister take their mandate from the people as expressed through parliament. If they “voted for Boris” fair enough, but if parliament is sovereign then it means that he must carry the support of a majority of the House of Commons to remain in office. It is a democratic check on the exercise of crown prerogatives and powers largely inherited by the prime minister from the monarchy over the centuries. In the British system, with so much power vested in the executive, to weaken the role of the legislature would be especially dangerous.

The precedents for not holding a snap election are many and varied. Indeed, there are very few examples of a prime minister coming in and holding a general election straight away. The only one since the Second World War was Anthony Eden in 1955. Gordon Brown considered it, but famously “bottled it”, at least according to legend. Theresa May held an early election, two years after the 2015 one delivered a slim Tory majority for David Cameron, but she was under no pressure to do so (and it did not end particularly well for her).

After John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, just as the first Gulf War was brewing, he waited until well after it, and the afterglow of victory, before going to the polls in 1992. Every other handover was followed by a gap of a year or more before the people were invited to vote on the “new” government’s performance – 1976 (Wilson to Callaghan), 1963 (Macmillan to Douglas-Home, 1957 (Eden to Macmillan), 1955 (Churchill to Eden), 1940 (Chamberlain to Churchill), 1937 (Baldwin to Chamberlain) and so on. There is a tradition that such a transition brings claims from the opposition that it’s “undemocratic” and calls for an immediate general election, even though they themselves have changed leaders without a such a poll in the past. It’s mostly panto (and depends on how the opposition is faring in the polls). The supposed crisis of democratic legitimacy is quickly forgotten.

Rees-Mogg cannot simultaneously claim that getting rid of a prime minister at a time of international crisis, as now, would be wrong and also advocate that such a move must always trigger an even more disruptive general election. What if a prime minister was to resign through ill-health? In the American presidential system a directly elected vice-president takes over, and in the French presidential system a new presidential election is organised, war or no war. The British do not have such mechanisms because they are incompatible with the parliamentary system.

Rees-Mogg should know better, but, as with his views on the unlawful prorogation of parliament in 2019, he seems to be the usual sort of politician, placing party before constitutional propriety or country. In that respect he is extremely traditional.