We’ve been here before. Many times. But some people never seem to notice.

Andy Burnham is about to become prime minister. You won’t get a vote. Neither will Labour members. If no Labour MP collects enough signatures to mount a challenge by 16 July, Burnham walks into Downing Street by appointment.

Cue the outrage. Cue the dreaded word ‘coronation’.

Here’s the thing: this is not an outrage. It is British politics operating exactly as designed. The outrage is that those who know and understand the system keep pretending otherwise.

Seven in a decade

Burnham would be the UK’s seventh prime minister in ten years — the sixth since the Brexit referendum, the result of which inaugurated the decade of instability and economic damage that floored Starmer and his predecessors. More specifically, Starmer had to go because Reform was eating Labour’s lunch, because Wes Streeting walked, because John Healey walked, because the local elections were a bloodbath. The crisis of leadership was real. The solution — anoint a successor, move on — is the one to which British politics usually defaults.

Burnham at least had to win a by-election — a local mandate, in other words — to get a seat in the Commons before he could stand for the leadership. Nominations open 9 July, close 16 July. If nobody else crosses the 20 per-cent threshold, it’s all over before it’s started.

Let’s talk about Rishi

Before anyone reaches for the smelling salts, consider what happened in October 2022. Liz Truss had torched the economy in forty-five days — unfunded tax cuts, a catastrophic mini-budget, a collapsing pound — and the Conservative Party faced a choice: go back to its members, who had chosen Truss, or go to the parliamentary party and sort it out quickly.

They went to the parliamentary party. Sunak became prime minister on 25 October 2022 without a single ballot being cast. Not by members. Not by MPs in any formal vote. When Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt withdrew, Sunak was simply the last man standing. He walked through the door of Number Ten on the strength of no meaningful mandate at all.

Now that is a ‘coronation’ in its purest form. No process, no contest, no mandate.

And yet the same commentators now fulminating at Labour’s ‘stitch-up’ spent the autumn of 2022 telling us that Sunak fully deserved the keys to Number Ten. The markets would approve. The ‘adults’ were back in the room. No talk of democratic deficit when their man was being ‘crowned’.

When voters finally had an opportunity to deliver their verdict in 2024, they gave Starmer and Labour a massive majority — thanks by and large to our deeply flawed electoral system.

The same can be said of Gordon Brown’s eventual elevation to the premiership back in 2007, when he was ‘declared’ Labour leader after his only challenger, John McDonnell, failed to secure enough nominations to get on the ballot. If Brown had been opposed, Labour Party members would for the first time have directly elected a new prime minister.

No guarantee

Go back to Theresa May in 2016. A field of five candidates collapsed around her — Johnson withdrew, as did Gove, and Leadsom stood aside before the membership had a chance to vote. May never faced a membership ballot. She became prime minister on the strength of successive parliamentary rounds of elimination and a great deal of collective exhaustion. Three years in office followed, two of them consumed by the Brexit horror show. When voters were unexpectedly called to the polls in 2017, in May’s attempt to bolster Conservative strength in the House of Commons, she lost her majority — but still carried on, her ‘mandate’ in tatters.

Boris Johnson stands out as the prime minister who met all the party conditions for the premiership in 2019. He faced four rounds of ballots in the parliamentary party before defeating Jeremy Hunt in the ballot of party members. But he avoided seeking a popular mandate. After a grotesque show of prime ministerial incompetence, he was jettisoned in favour of Liz Truss in 2022.

As for Truss herself — she, too, won a membership ballot, the one whose democratic legitimacy was loudly proclaimed by her supporters. She lasted six weeks before the financial markets sent her packing. The mandate of 170,000 — mostly elderly, often rigidly regressive — party members turned out to be worth precisely nothing in the eye of the political and economic storm.

The obvious lesson is that a membership ballot is no guarantee of competence in leadership or governance.

Borrowed authority

The problem with ‘unelected’ successors is not constitutional — it is political, and it depends to a large extent on what they do next.

Jim Callaghan governed on a mandate won by Harold Wilson and eventually lost to Margaret Thatcher. (Thatcher, like Tony Blair, fulfilled all the constitutional conditions — elected by their parties, then achieving the premiership in a general election.) John Major, having succeeded Thatcher in 1990 after a ballot of Conservative MPs, won his own mandate in 1992 — unexpectedly, with the largest popular vote in British history — and then spent five years wrestling with a gang of Eurosceptics whose antics foretokened the chaos and destruction of the Brexit fiasco two decades later.

The lesson is not that succession without a party or popular mandate is illegitimate. The lesson is that succession in these circumstances means governing on borrowed authority. The voters know it, and they will extract a heavy price if promises are broken, if basic services don’t improve, and if the cost of living remains unmanageable.

Burnham inherits a mandate — based on Starmer’s 2024 manifesto — a programme already battered by two years of turbulence in an increasingly volatile political environment.

The question is not whether he deserves a ‘coronation’. Our system facilitates his elevation in this way. The real question is what he does on the throne.

If he calls an early election, he accepts the logic of democratic renewal and rolls the dice. If he doesn’t, he is Brown — or Sunak — and the clock is ticking.

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Restart ≠ relaunch

After four decades years in broadcast journalism — with a focus on Welsh, British and French politics — I am still a keen observer of events. There will be some who do not wish to read my work, and I respect that choice. But for those who might be interested, I would like to start tentatively by offering some commentary and analysis based on my long experience.

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