Chris

Hardly.

Our constitution is decorated by pageantry and crown authority but the reality is the King can’t do this without advice, and the advice is always that the leader of the largest party in the Commons is the choice for PM.

The largest party in the Commons is put there by the electorate which understands it is voting for a batch of local MPs who will support one of a range of published manifestos for a period of up to 5 years. And the electorate also understands that manifesto commitments do not override prevailing political or economic conditions, and also that the next opportunity to judge the party of government against its manifesto is the next election.

I know some people want to constantly paint this place like some sort of banana republic but the mess of the past few weeks ultimately shows that we are anything but. Truss and her fellow travellers tried to tear up the rules and conventions by force of will and they failed. The worst political instability in decades has simply demonstrated just how stable a system we fundamentally have.

If Sunak can stabilise the ship in the coming weeks, then he should have the two-and-a-bit years left to led the party elected to government, to try to implement its manifesto. And then we will get a vote on whether to allow them to continue. Meanwhile nobody is going to park tanks on College Green, take over the BBC or start yelling viva la revolución from the palace balcony.

If there’s one lesson to be learned here it’s that the constitutional position of the PM must be respected, and that means changing the leader mid-term must only be a job for those whose confidence the incomer requires, namely the Commons. Polling the wider party membership risks electing a Liz Truss and also gives succour to those who want to make ill-informed demands for a nationwide say in the process.

The USA can’t even agree whether to intervene to put down its own tin-pot revolutionaries right now … I think we’re safe enough.