I have been making a chart tracking the fate of governments and prime ministers. I last published [or on Medium] on the defenestration of Liz Truss and the assumption of Rishi Sunak. We have a new government and so I have updated the chart which is available below.
The chart was originally designed to show if inheritors of the office of prime minister were more successful than those that came to power through an election. See the previous post for comments and qualifications, [or on Medium] although I have changed Truss from “couped” to “walked”. This version includes a key for the reasons that the PM left office. .
On first examination this is not so easy to read, and maybe I should consider the colour coding of the categories but, Up means that they became PM by winning a general election and all the up bars are solid colours, with blue and red being obvious to non US readers. Bars going down represent administrations that came into being mid-parliament, and a dark hatching is because the PM successfully won re-election, and the light hatching that they did not. Truss is actually a purple, as uniquely she did not fight an election.
I need to do a hypothesis test to answer the question whether inheritors are less successful than election winners, but I am sort of the view that historically the electorate gives a party about a 15 to 20 year mandate, the exception being Wilson’s loss to Heath in 1970.
Originally published at https://davelevy.info on July 13, 2024.
