Shall we tell the president?

Yesterday Gordon Brown announced that he was running to serve a full term at the next election. It was precisely the nightmare statement the Cabinet plotters had feared most, that Gordon Brown might win the next election and then remain in situ for the duration.

This is perhaps one explanation as to why unspectacular but nevertheless seasoned politicians chose to strike at the very moment that Labour’s electoral fortunes showed the stuttering of revival.

The Blair-Brown years have proved what Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major proved before them. Once elected you cannot remove “the president”.

For that is what the prime minister of the United Kingdom has now effectively become in all but name. The electoral process is presidential – what could be MORE presidential than the current decision for the “presidential candidates” to go up against each other in debate in the run up to the next election?

The fact is that parliamentary control, and more seriously Cabinet control, over the premier has all but collapsed. Downing Street has become proportionately more powerful even than the White House.

The prime minister is free to go his own way. The party system ensures that unless a minister “revolts” all his decisions are rubber-stamped – even going to war. Something the Iraq inquiry is likely to demonstrate in spades.

So Gordon Brown has been able to mimic his life as chancellor, keeping his lieutenant Ed Balls at his side throughout – a man more powerful than any other minister with the possible exception of Peter Mandelson.

What last week’s failed putsch demonstrated was that there is no mechanism for getting rid of a president, not least because the people who think they elected him, think they should be consulted. Nobody likes to tell them that they didn’t elect him, and that only in a general election in which they must defeat his party can they do so.

I have no idea whether the head of government should be elected or not, but the present situation seems to suggest that he should be.

And while we are on leaders and candidates. Driving into London on the A40 last night I was confronted by not one but two of the current David Cameron “presidential” election posters, one each side of the same stretch of road. But what bright spark chose to follow Barack Obama’s “We Can” with “We Can’t…”?