Cameron's Election Proposals For Unelected PM Not Thought-Out

David Cameron has put forward  proposals on whether and when to hold a fresh general election should the leader of the governing party change midway through a parliament.

However, like all of the other Tory policy ideas, these have not been thought through.

He is suggesting that a new general election must be held within six months of a new leader taking over. But is this really necessary in all circumstances?

Let's take Labour's landslide victory in 1997.  Tony Blair wins the election for Labour with a whopping 179 seat majority.

What if, God forbid, something had happened to Blair within say, a few weeks of taking office?  The country had only given Labour a huge mandate to govern very recently.  The mood of the nation would not have changed so radically in such a short space of time.  It would have been totally unnecessary to ask the electorate to go to the polls twice within twelve months.

Cameron is ignoring the fact that we have a Parliamentary, not a Presidential system. The people vote in general elections for a party, not a Party leader.  It is therefore a political party who is given the mandate to govern. A party manifesto lays out its programme for a five-year parliamentary term.

I wonder whether the Tory leader would be making such an issue of this had his party been in power. John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, a year and a half before the 1992 general election.  Nobody questioned his mandate to govern until then.

So in my view, it should not matter if a party changes leader during a parliament.

This is a vain attempt by Cameron to score political points by implying that the Labour Party are less democratic than they claim to be.

However, raising this issue does underline the need for certain reforms.  I have long believed that we should have fixed-term parliaments.  So the people will know precisely when an election will be that even if a governing party changes its leader during a parliament.

One solution could be to adopt an US-style system and have each party choosing a two-person ticket to run at each election.

That way, if a leader does not complete a full term of office and there is a change during a parliament for whatever reason, the electorate is aware of who will assume power should this situation arise and the same party is allowed to continue governing until the next election.