Every prime minister since 1974 has either taken or left office between general elections, or both. Callaghan gained office between elections only to lose it at the 1979 general election; Thatcher took office at that election only to lose it midway through the 1987-1992 parliament. And then the premiers alternate in that pattern: Major/Blair and Brown/Cameron. May managed to do both, gaining and then losing power between elections, and somehow managing to lose the 2017 general election in the meantime.
This means that what many would regard as a “classic” model of the premiership—of a prime minister both taking and losing office at a general election—is actually quite rare. Since the 19th-century extensions of the franchise, it has happened a handful of times. But the norm is for the greatest office to be won or lost without there being a general election.
This shows that the United Kingdom does not have a presidential system of government, despite what once-hubristic supporters of Thatcher and Blair—and now Johnson—may have believed. Being head of the executive can depend far more on support in the Cabinet and the House of Commons than with the voters. After great victories prime ministers sometimes forget this, but they never last long. "Ten more years!" shouted the Thatcher supporters in 1989, one year before she was deposed.
Indeed, the office of prime minister has substantial limitations. In legal terms, it hardly exists. Few acts of parliament even refer to the role, and even fewer provide it with any express statutory powers or obligations. The office of prime minister is at the constitutional intersection of the royal prerogative and the supremacy of parliament. Both doctrines confer immense constitutional and legal power, but that power derives ultimately from elsewhere in the polity: not from the premiership.
The uncodified (often called “unwritten,” which isn’t strictly right) constitution of the United Kingdom has many detractors, and many will have stock objections to the current arrangements. The arguments for a codified (“written”) constitution are legion, well-rehearsed and oft-repeated. But one should not underestimate the merits of our current system—or lack of a system. The experience of the last 50 years is that our body politic is adept at regurgitating and then spitting out prime ministers who have sought too much power and taken their coalitions of support for granted. Just as there are infinite ways in which a prime minister can misbehave, our constitution seems to provide infinite ways of getting rid of them, or at least weakening them.
Any worthwhile constitutional reform must work with the natural tensions and pressure points of our current arrangements. Well-meaning attempts at codification—from the Fixed-term Parliaments Act to the ministerial code—that paper over these tensions and points tend not to work for long in practice, as they are not realistic about where power is in the constitution and what can be enforced.
Of course, there are many faults with our current constitution—especially when we are confronted with figures like Johnson who care nothing for convention and precedent. But the fact that we came very close this week to ejecting a prime minister who in 2019 won a substantial majority at a general election shows that—sometimes—flexibility works. The further fact that he is now substantially weakened and his supposed majority has become, in effect, nothing more than a confidence-and-supply relationship with his own backbenchers also evidences the merit of a flexible constitutional approach.
Johnson now has no natural Commons majority for any policies in particular nor the incoherent programme set out in the Queen's Speech as a whole. He faces a Privileges Committee investigation when he is hardly in a political position to contest adverse findings and sanctions. This is where Johnson's casual law-breaking and relentless dishonesty have taken him very quickly within our unrigid constitutional arrangements.
The United Kingdom is not a presidential political system, and nor is it one which accommodates such alien doctrines as the “will of the people.” Indeed, those political supporters of Johnson who claimed that Brexit was at risk with the confidence vote gained little or no traction with their alarmism. The United Kingdom is instead a prime ministerial system within a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy—and there is nothing wrong with that.
