Gordon Brown and the Liberal Democrats

Gordon Brown's attempts this week to coax Liberal Democrats into government suggested to me that the incoming prime minister has as shaky an understanding of the realities of the prime minister's constitutional position as Tony Blair. Some of Blair's utterances indicated that he thought he had a direct relationship with the British people, which the British prime minister does not quite enjoy. Setting apart the important but circumstantial factor that the governing party is only the least unpopular of a series of minority parties in terms of the popular vote (and in the 1951 parliament, not even that), the prime minister only enjoys his position as leader of the largest 'gang' in the House of Commons; he is the person whom the monarch can rely upon to manage business effectively there because the majority of the elected representatives there have chosen him as their leader. In turn, the members of parliament who follow their party leader, submit to party discipline and the whips' office, expect as part of the bargain that only members of their party should be chosen as government ministers, unless the government is a coalition between two or more parties. In this case Gordon Brown seems to have envisaged individual members of the Liberal Democrats joining the government without there being a formal coalition. The Liberal Democrats would have remained an opposition party, presumably co-operating on issues where their MP or peer was a minister, or perhaps not.[1] The Liberal Democrats, in retaining their independence, might strain the ties between the Liberal Democrats and their members-in-government, which while not regretted by Gordon Brown, could potentially have consequences for Labour Party discipline as well. While I'm all for freeing up MPs from the diktats of the whips, the evaporation of the quid pro quo of mutual loyalty could set the executive and its parliamentary majority adrift from one another without the executive's independence having its own independent representative basis.

I could see the arrangement working where the head of the government had an independent popular mandate, such as in France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy of the UDM has appointed Bernard Kouchner, a socialist, as his foreign minister; but where Gordon Brown's mandate comes from his party it seems unworkable for him to appoint ministers from another party without seeking a coalition, which does not seem to have been under discussion. Graham Allan MP suggested on The Week in Westminster this morning that Gordon Brown might be the last prime minister not to be directly elected by the people; this would be an interesting constitutional experiment, and I think that it was abandoned after being tried in Israel in the 1990s.

[1] I'm not sure what happened in 1964 when Harold Wilson brought the Liberal Alun Gwynne Jones into his government. In any case Gwynne Jones was not an MP, and Wilson created him a peer, Gwynne Jones becoming Baron Chalfont in (unintentional?) tribute to Kind Hearts and Coronets, Garter King of Arms rejecting his original suggestion of a Welsh placename on the basis that a peerage title needed to be easily pronounced by the French.

Newspaper observation

My nostalgic hot metal-loving side was pleased to see that, over twenty years since the Durham Advertiser ceased to be a paid-for weekly (reversed into by its sister freesheet, the Durham Shopper) there is now once more a paid-for weekly paper in Durham, the Durham Times. I picked up a copy when calling at RoadChef at the A1(M), J61, last night. It shares some advertising and copy with the (daily) Northern Echo in Darlington, and has the same editor as its other paid-for weekly sister, the Darlington and Stockton Times, but is otherwise very much its own title. Lots of local history, too, with old photographs. The publishers, Newsquest, have even opened an editorial office in Durham, though advertising is sold from Darlington and the paper is printed on the presses of The Herald in Glasgow. There's a website, of course - www.durhamtimes.co.uk - but I'm glad to see that a new start-up in print newspapers can still be considered by a large newspaper group these days.