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

The precedents for not holding a snap election are many and varied. There are very few examples of a prime minister coming in and holding an election straight away, writes Sean O’Grady

Wednesday 26 January 2022 18:20 GMT
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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.

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