Tuesday 8 July 2008

The Rule Book and Harriet Harman

A general election is needed now. Confidence in the Prime Minister can be lower only in the face of the end of the world. Many economic and financial commenters suggest, with a great deal of unnerving evidence, that the end of the world is what we are entering. So just to set out, straight and true, the formal rules governing what happens should our intellectually, morally and emotionally challenged new Labour Prime Minister be clawed down by his rabid colleagues:

when the Party is in power and the Leader, for whatever reason, can no longer serve as Prime Minister, the Cabinet will choose the new Prime Minister.

Alles klar? Not the deputy Leader stepping up to the plate, that's for when the Party is in Opposition, and is why Margaret Beckett took over automatically until a Party election for Leader could be held.

When in power the Cabinet chooses.

The notion that in such times the new Labour cabinet should impose yet another unelected Prime Minister upon a country that has used every means to express its rejection of Labour and its policies (where we have been able to discover them, its vision is still a shy creature) signifies either that we are now wholly bereft of any remnant of a constitutional state governed by democratic and extra-party rules, or that some part of the constitutional state is no longer performing its duties.

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