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| ▲ | tialaramex 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ? The Government led by that person falls. Parliament can in principle pick a new government, but in practice is likely to trigger a General Election instead and replace all the MPs. Since the Prime Minister is chosen by those MPs, the new one even if it's the same person, clearly does have their confidence, at least for now, right ? Anyway, even when the PM survives a confidence vote that's often bad for them, if some of "your" people vote "No confidence" (as must happen for a Majority government) or even if those who've promised Confidence to you (in a Coalition) actually renege, you're done even if you carry the day in the House. This is also true for internal processes. You can, and often Tory PMs do, win a 1922 committee vote and then resign by next week because you'd expected to win by a huge landslide and instead it turns out dozens of people you'd thought were solid have doubts after all. | | |
| ▲ | xoa 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | >What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ? I don't know precisely what they were thinking, but in America someone who is impeached and convicted by the Senate can be personally barred (by simple majority vote at that point) from ever holding any federal office ever again, which seems the political equivalent of a "beheading". | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I presume Congress, like Parliament, cannot bind its future self, so "barring" a leader is just a pinky swear because any future Congress can just "unbar" them. The thing about beheading is that you can't undo it, cos that's not Man's law keeping them dead. Charles I was beheaded. Even if the day after Parliament had thought better of it, their only option was to make somebody else King instead, Charles I was dead. |
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| ▲ | OJFord 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because the PM technically isn't anything but the leader the majority party has chosen for itself, they don't even have to be an MP. This is muddied a bit in modern times with press and overseas engagements and higher salaries for PMs than MPs. | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | You do have to be in Parliament, you just don't need to be an elected MP in the Commons. Once upon a time it was the usual practice for the PM to be from the Lords, but in modern history that seems very unlikely to ever happen again. In principle (though this certainly was not how it was done historically) you could elevate somebody of your choice to become a Life Peer, just so that they can be PM. When I say this wasn't done, I mean Life Peers didn't even exist until relatively recently, so back when "Lets have Lord So-and-So as PM" made sense they were a Lord for life anyway, typically because their father and his father and so on, the Life Peers are a new thing - created in the 20th century. |
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