Burnham and Starmer: Why Labour doesn’t need an election but a vote

We have tried this twice in recent years. Mr Johnson and Ms Truss were appointed by Conservative members across the country – some 100,000 people, certainly not representative of the country and likely not of Tory voters either. The Conservative MPs, a majority in the House, to whom a Prime Minister would be accountable and who knew the candidates, clearly had big reservations: about Mr Johnson’s honesty and, reportedly, about Ms Truss’s ‘weirdness’. But they were landed with the choice made by this external, somewhat random group. In a more constitutional frame of mind, they might have said that they accepted the person as the choice for party leader but that they would select someone who had their support to be Prime Minister. But I’m not surprised that no one was that brave.

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Mr Corbyn’s election as party leader made the same point the other way round. Labour could use whatever system they liked to choose whoever they liked in opposition. But he didn’t win a general election, so didn’t become Prime Minister.

This electoral safeguard does not exist if the party election is for a Prime Minister, not an Opposition leader.

If we were a Presidency, we would presumably have some sort of more or less democratic ordeal, like primaries, for individual candidates to test themselves against each other. The President is then personally elected, with his or her legitimacy based on that result.

In our system, parties present their policies and candidates, and the leader of the party who can hold a majority of the House becomes Prime Minister. He or she chairs Cabinet, thereby being the first among equals – but needing to get policies agreed by Cabinet. As a civil servant I have seen a PM go round the Cabinet table asking each member for their view – unthinkable in, for instance, a US ‘Cabinet’, even before the days of Mr Trump. And the PM’s or Cabinet’s decisions depend ultimately on the support, maybe grudging, from the parliamentary party and ultimately the House.

Having a new PM elected by outsiders messes this up: other Cabinet members don’t have the same legitimacy and can’t so easily challenge the PM. But nor has he or she been selected by a process that has wide national legitimacy, nor led by MPs. This structural instability may well have contributed to the widely lamented churn in Prime Ministers.

So, what are the implications of Mr Burnham’s emergence as, at the least, the hot favourite for the Labour leadership?

Mr Farage has demanded a general election. Mr Burnham himself, when Ms Truss resigned, called for one then. Ms Badenoch, not surprisingly, is distinctly not doing so. Political pragmatism underlies these positions, unsurprisingly. But there are good reasons for not having one. Labour has a big majority. There isn’t a clear political crisis to be resolved. Parliament isn’t deadlocked. We don’t usually have one in these circumstances. The famous reaction of Brenda from Bristol – “You’re joking. Not another one!” – when told Mrs May had called an early election would be even more justified if we had another one now.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election (Image: James Manning)

There are more respectable arguments for Mr Burnham to face some kind of tests of ideas, policies and character before walking into No 10. There is a case for him to have to set out his stall. But it isn’t an overwhelming case – and there are costs in having a contest for the sake of it.

First, if the contest means handing the choice to party members outside Parliament, it produces the serious complications already described.

Second, a contest, particularly going beyond MPs, is slow. This doesn’t matter much if choosing an Opposition leader. The country can struggle on for a few months without one. But it does matter for a Prime Minister. We saw the paralysis during the Johnson–Hunt and Truss–Sunak contests. Do we really want to do that again if we can avoid it? On May 10, 1940, Mr Chamberlain resigned in the morning and was replaced by Mr Churchill in the afternoon. The international scene isn’t quite as bad as it was then but it’s not great. Spending from now till September in a national argument we don’t really need seems self-indulgent.

Third, what are the real benefits of a prolonged contest? If the Labour party was riven by an obvious divide and couldn’t move forward without sorting itself out, a contest would be necessary and inevitable. But the party seems to be relatively unsplit, though of course with the usual wide range of opinions within it. Having a contested election when not needed, except for the purposes of having an interesting debate, risks exacerbating splits in the ruling party for largely theoretical reasons. I can’t see that being in the public interest or making the resulting government more effective.

A justification for MPs, not national party memberships, choosing leaders in these circumstances is usually that MPs know the candidates, for better or worse, in a way that party members outside don’t. This is a weaker argument than usual this time. Over half – around 350 – of current MPs have entered the Commons since Mr Burnham left Parliament in 2017. An even higher proportion of Labour MPs will be new.

This could point to not closing down the selection process too quickly, refraining from ‘crowning’ before the closing day for nominations on July 16. Mr Burnham should use that period to engage as much as he can with members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. If enough of them conclude that he really would be a terrible Prime Minister, the case for a contest would grow. But the threshold in their minds for a national contest should be high.

It isn’t like primaries in a presidential system. Mr Burnham – or any rival candidates – don’t need to run on fundamentally different personal policy platforms, though of course they will have their own emphases, interests and styles. The Labour party’s main policy for the Parliament was set out in their 2024 manifesto. Bits will (do) need to be amended in changed circumstances. But the main planks are there.

Finally, we should borrow a practice from Ireland. A new Taoiseach must pass a vote of confidence in the Dáil on taking office. Adopting this would give a Prime Minister arriving mid-Parliament a degree of formal legitimacy. (In more contested times, it could be more practically useful. It is unlikely that Mr Johnson would have cleared this hurdle: he failed to win any major Commons votes and provoked the prorogation crisis, until he resolved matters by winning a general election.) Mr Burnham could institute this small but important practice. Given the precedent-loving basis of our constitution, it could become his first reform. And a good one.

George Fergusson is a former official, at one stage head of the Human Rights and Elections Branch of the Northern Ireland Office and later serving in the Cabinet Office Constitution Group.