A political question

[drplokta]

By convention, the Prime Minister is the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons (assuming there is one). But the Prime Minister is really whoever can command the confidence of the House, and the convention only exists because that's probably going to be the leader of the majority party. If there were a situation where the leader of

Comments

[history_monk]

Well, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, The Ministers of the Crown Act 1937 gives the Speaker the power to decide which is the numerically strongest party not in government, and who the leader of that party is, should either of those things be in doubt. However, he doesn't have to use this power: there was no Opposition during the WWII National Government.

The question becomes significant should the PLP pass a motion of no confidence in Corbyn. At that point there's a potential constitutional crisis within the Labour Party: the conventional thing would be for him to resign, triggering a fresh leadership election, and the deputy leader would be acting Leader of the Opposition until the election was complete. If Corbyn didn't resign after losing the confidence of his party, there's no telling what would happen, but a split seems possible. However, that might well leave Corbyn in possession of the party organisation, which would put the anti-Corbynites in a curious position.

[pierre_fermat]

The complication here is that while Corbyn doesn't really have the support of the majority of his MPs, he does have the support of the majority of the party. So the likely scenario would involve almost all of the MPs who tried to ditch him being attacked and perhaps ditched by their constituency parties

[drplokta]

Neither Heath nor Wilson was leading a majority party in February 1974. A majority party is one that has an absolute majority of seats in the Commons (possibly excluding effectively vacant seats of refuseniks like Sinn Fein), not just one that has more seats than any other party. And Heath therefore got the first go because he was already the Prime Minister -- the Queen didn't have to ask him to form a government, because he already had one, which stayed in office until he resigned.

[andrewducker]

Buncha fascinating discussion of this on my journal, as you don't allow strangers to comment.