The Tories Latest Constitutional Gimmick is Daft

Ian Leslie says much of what needs to be said about the Tories new and gimmicky tweak to the constitution – that anyone who becomes Prime Minister between elections must call an election within six months – a proposal that, as Leslie puts it, is “at once carelessly radical and hopelessly irrelevant.”

It’s also yet another indication that we now have an uneasy, perhaps even unhappy, hybrid political system that is neither fully Presidential nor fully parliamentary. We can see which way the wind is blowing, mind you. And this raises other questions too: all the party leaders pledge to restore parliament and increase its ability to scrutinise and perhaps even check the executive.

Yet as “legitimacy” questions increasingly dominate the election campaign and its coverage whoever becomes Prime Minister is likely to suppose that they have a genuinely personal mandate that parliament as a whole lacks entirely.