If we want ‘elected prime ministers’, let’s just have them

This is stupid:

Unelected prime ministers would be forced to hold a general election within six months of taking office, under proposals being announced by David Cameron today.

Let me reply with a précis of something I wrote a couple of years ago:

There are two-and-a-half interacting quirks to the British political system's psychology…
First, we think as though we vote for parties when we actually elect individuals…
Second, we think as though we vote for a government when we actually elect a parliament…
[And] while we think of parties over individuals and governments over parliaments, one of the major factors in choosing which party to vote for is the identity of its leader…
The effect of all this is that we often think as though we’ve got an executive-focused electoral system

But we don’t. The UK has never, never, not once, had an elected prime minister. We have elected MPs, and the balance of power in the Commons determines which party leader becomes PM. Yes, even in a hung parliament.

If the governing party changes leader, why is the personal mandate of every MP from every party suddenly rendered null? Why a forced election if the PM changes but sticks to the same programme as their predecessor, but not if the sitting PM replaces their whole cabinet and rips up all their manifesto pledges?

Cameron, always a fan of building media-powered populism into the constitution, is trying to create a pseudo-presidential system. Well, why not just go the whole hog?

I increasingly think – and the barely coherent frothing about ‘wasted votes’ and ‘vote X, get Y’ reinforces this – that electing MPs and the PM separately would save us from a lot of pointless bullshit.