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Who Gets to be Prime Minister?
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The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In this course, Dr Richard Heffernan (Open University) thinks about the office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. We begin in the first module by thinking about the three essential qualifications that the UK Prime Minister must hold. In the second module, we move on to think about the role and responsibilities of the Prime Minister. In the third module, we conceptualise the relationship between the Prime Minister and Parliament. In the fourth module, we consider how powerful the Prime Minister can be said to be, thinking in particularl about the ‘institutional’ and ‘personal’ power resources that together constitute the office’s authority. In the fifth module, we compare and contrast the office of the Prime Minister with that of the President of the United States. In the sixth and final module, we consider the circumstances under which an incumbent Prime Minister ceases to hold office.
Who Gets to be Prime Minister?
In this module, Dr Heffernan outlines the three essential ‘job criteria’ that every prime minister must have, namely: (i) they must be a Member of Parliament (MP), (ii) they must be the leader of a political party in the House of Commons and, (iii) they must be the leader of a party which holds either a single majority in parliament or a minority government in a hung parliament in which an agreement has been reached with another party.
Hello. My name is Richard Heffernan.
00:00:05I'm a reader and government at the university in the United Kingdom
00:00:07and I studied the British Prime Minister.
00:00:10Amongst other things,
00:00:12British Prime Minister is the British chief diplomat the head of the government,
00:00:13the principal politician The United Kingdom.
00:00:18Uh, what is it that makes the prime minister?
00:00:20Well? The Prime Minister is the head of the government.
00:00:23She or she is not the head of state
00:00:25and then the head of the government because they lied a parliamentary majority
00:00:28in the House of Commons either by leading a single party government,
00:00:31a minority government which lacks a majority,
00:00:35or a coalition of one or two or more parties
00:00:37that together, commander majority
00:00:40The thing about the prime minister is that he
00:00:43or she has three qualifications to be prime minister
00:00:45and the only person in the universe who
00:00:48has those three qualifications become prime minister.
00:00:51It's Mrs May. It's Mr Cameron. It's Mr Black Brown or Mr Blair
00:00:54before that. John Major and Margaret Thatcher.
00:00:59Those three qualifications are firstly that they are a member of parliament
00:01:02There only 650 members of the House of
00:01:06Commons elected to serve in the House of Commons
00:01:07and so 650 people by convention qualified to be prime minister.
00:01:10The second qualification the incumbent has is that they lead a party.
00:01:15There are presently nine or eight parties in the House of Commons.
00:01:19There are two large parties. The Conservative Party in the Labour Party,
00:01:23the Conservative Party, has been led by Theresa May since due July 2016.
00:01:26Before that, the Conservative Party was led by David Cameron
00:01:34and before that the Labour Prime Minister,
00:01:37Mr Brown and Mr Blair led the Labour Party between in the case of Mr Blair 1994 and 2007
00:01:39and Mr Brown 2007, 2010
00:01:48so that being a party leader is the second qualification.
00:01:52Presently there are eight, as I say,
00:01:55party leaders in the House of Commons and all of
00:01:58those have the second qualification to become prime minister.
00:01:59The third qualification to be prime minister
00:02:03is to be the leader of a party which by itself has a majority in the House of Commons,
00:02:06a single party government or is a minority government in a hung parliament where no
00:02:10party has a majority
00:02:16and where a government can form an agreement with the second party.
00:02:18And that's Mrs May. After 2017, when the Tories lost the majority at that election,
00:02:22the largest party and they formed a supply
00:02:28and support agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party,
00:02:31the Northern Ireland Unionists,
00:02:35which gives them present a majority of 17 over all other parties
00:02:36in the House of Commons combined.
00:02:41So those three qualifications make the prime minister.
00:02:42The prime minister is not directly elected you and I don't cast a
00:02:45vote for him or her unless we live in the Maidenhead constituency.
00:02:48At the last election,
00:02:53when we voted for Mrs May to become
00:02:54the member of parliament for Maidenhead first qualification,
00:02:56making her prime minister following that she was the party leader, having become
00:03:00the previously having first been elected to parliament in 1997
00:03:04and then she is the leader of a party which can command a majority, presently 17,
00:03:09by having a supply and support agreement
00:03:14with the Democratic Unionists.
00:03:16So nobody else has those qualifications, and she, in the case of Mrs May,
00:03:18will remain prime minister for so long,
00:03:22but only for so long as they retain those three qualifications,
00:03:24and so they serve as a parliamentary creature.
00:03:28It is the parliament,
00:03:31the parliament that is returned in the House of Commons at the election
00:03:32that determines who becomes prime minister
00:03:35and therefore gives them the platform from which they
00:03:37govern the country as part of a collective government.
00:03:41
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Heffernan, R. (2019, September 26). The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom - Who Gets to be Prime Minister? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/how-does-the-prime-minister-cease-to-be-prime-minister
MLA style
Heffernan, R. "The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – Who Gets to be Prime Minister?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 26 Sep 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/the-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/how-does-the-prime-minister-cease-to-be-prime-minister