A mandate is a real thing

Britain is on its fifth prime minister in four years, and for the third time in that run the office has changed hands without a general election. Every constitutional textbook says this is in order. The textbooks are right about the law and wrong about the country.

The rule itself is old and it is not a loophole. Britain elects a Parliament, not a president. The prime minister holds office because the Commons sustains them, and a governing party that loses faith in its leader is entitled to change them without dragging the nation to the polls. There are real advantages in that design. It lets a government correct a failure quickly, and it spares the country a constitutional crisis every time a leader loses the room.

All true. And the ground has still moved.

The campaign sells a person

The doctrine was written for a politics of parties and programmes, where the local candidate was the ballot and the leader was a name in the newspapers. That politics is gone. A modern general election is fought on the leader''s face. The debates are between two people, the literature carries one photograph, and the closing argument in every marginal seat is a sentence that begins with a first name. The system asks voters for a personal choice in the campaign and then explains, at the moment of handover, that they only ever chose a Parliament.

Both halves of that cannot be true at once. If the leader is the offer, the leader''s departure changes the offer. The small print says otherwise, but the small print did not win the votes. The advertising did.

Legal at every step, strange in sum

Run the sequence. The country voted in 2019. It was then governed by two further prime ministers it never elected before it voted again in 2024. Two years later the office has passed once more, by internal party process, to a new prime minister - and a new programme has arrived with him. Each step was constitutionally clean. The sum is a country that now gets most of its heads of government from party arithmetic rather than from elections.

That would matter less if the office changed hands quietly, on a caretaker''s terms. It has not. The first week of the new government produced a run of announcements - VAT off energy bills, business rates cut for pubs and venues - reported across the captured record as a new programme, assembled at speed, by a government the country has not voted on in its present form. The measures may be popular. Some may be wise. But a mandate is a specific thing: it attaches to the offer that was put to the electorate, not to the building the winners moved into.

Confidence is not consent

The defence writes itself: the confidence of the Commons is the mandate, and the Commons still stands. That is the correct legal answer, and it should be given honestly - in which case the word mandate should be retired from the podium. A government resting on parliamentary confidence alone is entitled to govern. It is not entitled to claim the country asked for what it is doing.

There is an older remedy, and it is not a statute. Anthony Eden inherited the office in April 1955 and put himself to the country within weeks. Nothing compelled him. That is what a convention is: the thing politicians do when no one can make them. The habit of treating an inherited premiership as a borrowed one - deliver what was promised, or ask again - is the convention that kept the textbook rule honest. It is the convention that has quietly died, and its death is why each legal handover now lands as a small affront.

The repair does not need a written constitution or another fixed-term experiment. It needs the old manners back, enforced the only way conventions are ever enforced: by the electorate noticing. A prime minister who inherits mid-term holds the office on trust. Govern the programme the country chose, or go to the country for a new one. Rewriting the offer in week one, while insisting the mandate carried over with the keys, is a claim the constitution permits and the country does not.

Mandates are issued by voters. They are not inherited with the furniture.