Does a new PM mean a general election? The Mail can't decide

As the Conservatives ditched leader after leader during their chaotic time in office, the Mail titles were very clear: in our constitutional system, we elect a party, not a prime minister, and a change at the top does not require a general election.

When, in October 2022, Rishi Sunak was elected unopposed as Conservative leader and Britain’s 57th PM, Labour criticised his “unelected coronation” and demanded an immediate public ballot. The Mail, though, was having nothing of it.

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Noting that “the mandate from the 2019 election did not belong to any individual”, it ran an editorial headlined ‘A speech to calm the party… and country’. “Labour is calling for an election, but that is the last thing Britain needs in these parlous days (and they never complained when Gordon Brown was gifted power),” it noted.

The Mail also didn’t complain when Sunak’s short-lived predecessor, Liz Truss, became PM without a general election just a month earlier, rubbishing Wes Streeting’s claims that pledges she made to win over the Conservative grassroots differed markedly from the manifesto the Tories were elected on in 2019. “If the new prime minister were to call an election she would be campaigning against the backdrop of rampant double-digit inflation, soaring energy bills and the threat of strikes across the public sector,” it noted.

It also had no issue with Boris Johnson seizing the Tory crown without the public having a say in 2019, dismissing Jeremy Corbyn’s demand for an immediate public vote. Instead, it praised Johnson’s “bravura performance” and insisted that rather than an election distraction, his only focus should be “using his inherited parliamentary mandate to deliver on the Brexit referendum”.

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Similarly, the Mail titles dismissed calls for a general election when Theresa May became PM unopposed in 2016. In an editorial, it wrote: “Although Mrs May was the overwhelming favourite, many may be left feeling a little disgruntled not to have had their democratic say. However, none of this is Mrs May’s fault and the whole party must now unite behind her. Meanwhile, opposition calls for a general election are simply risible.”

And what was the front page of the Mail on Sunday the weekend before Andy Burnham became prime minister unopposed, just two years after Labour won a historic landslide victory? “Flutter those eyelashes all you like, Andy… we want an election NOW.”