One of the most remarkable things about the 2024 General Election campaign was the complete absence of discussion regarding the processes by which the major parties choose their leaders.

The four most recent prime ministers at the time of the election—May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak—had all been appointed between elections through internal party processes. It’s therefore clear that the electorate was being asked to trust not only the leader in post at the time of the election but also each party’s process for selecting a successor.

There was good reason to worry that these processes might not be robust. Both Labour and the Conservative Party leadership selection processes had recently appointed leaders who the electorate at large would not have picked: Corbyn and Truss. With hindsight, we can add Sunak to that list as well.

And yet, somehow, in all the unavoidable wall-to-wall coverage, I saw this issue raised not once.

In the most recent edition of the London Review of Books, Tom Hickman sets out yet more reasons why these internal party processes are at odds with the UK’s constitutional settlement. This one, in particular, is so egregious that I’m surprised I didn’t clock it at the time:

As the Cabinet Manual states, the monarch shall appoint as prime minister ‘the person who appears most likely to be able to command the confidence of the House’. In this case, that person was Rishi Sunak, who won each round of votes by MPs. He was, as events subsequently showed, the person whom MPs, left to themselves, would have selected. Yet in the final head-to-head between Sunak and Truss, in which party members voted, Truss was elected. MPs were, in essence, bound by contract with party members to act as though their confidence was reposed in Truss when in fact she was not the person most likely to command the confidence of the Commons.

The veil drawn over the discussion of these issues strikes me as most peculiar. Even as someone who reads more about UK politics than the average person, I couldn’t tell you what the Labour system is: I remember that Starmer altered it as part of his reform of the party, but I couldn’t tell you how. I know the Conservative system only because we’ve collectively lived through far too many of their leadership elections in recent years, including the one currently ongoing, and they have bafflingly made not a single change to the system that brought us Liz Truss.

Hickman argues that we’ve learned how not to appoint a prime minister. I disagree: the fact that nothing has changed suggests to me that we haven’t learned a thing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.