Democracy is all very well but, to adapt the title of Ken Livingstone’s memoirs, when voting threatens to change anything, they stop you doing it. So it was with Labour in 2007 when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as party leader and PM without a vote of party members. Now the Tories have pulled off the same trick with Theresa May. Labour MPs had hoped to do something similar, persuading Jeremy Corbyn to resign or disqualifying him and then putting forward a “unity candidate” for a Brown-style acclamation.
Internal party democracy has produced mixed results for both leading parties. Labour’s not very democratic electoral college, which gave more weight to MPs’ and unions’ votes, produced the “right” result – the one favoured by the Westminster hierarchy – in the first four contested leadership elections. It only narrowly failed to do so in the fifth, when Ed Miliband beat his brother. The introduction of “one member, one vote” produced Corbyn, emphatically the “wrong” result. The Tories’ adoption of a similar principle has produced one “right” result in a contested election (David Cameron), one “wrong” result (Iain Duncan Smith) and two uncontested elections, in the first of which IDS, chosen by the members just two years earlier, was unceremoniously dumped in favour of Michael Howard.
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