Politics as entertainment

Why does Britain keep having new prime ministers? Perhaps television's to blame. There are annual competitions on TV, like Strictly Come Dancing or Masterchef, where people dance and cook; maybe politics has started to copy them.

Plus, there's Bake Off, where people bake cakes. Or The Apprentice, where people try to succeed in business. And so on and so forth.

The competitions last for weeks, in order to fill the TV schedules with the minimum number of new formats. You start with lots of participants and send one away each week. When only two or three are left, you somehow choose the winner.

It's a bit like musical chairs and it makes for great television. Similarly, the way of deciding the next person to move into 10 Downing Street can be highly entertaining. Who decides the winners in all these TV shows? You either need a panel of judges, or you let viewers vote democratically.

Strictly's a hybrid: there's a panel of experts to judge the dancing, and then viewers to ring up to vote for the person they want to win. It's not totally unlike the system the Conservative party uses to choose a new leader, which seems to be happening more and more often, like thunderstorms and heatwaves. When they finally decide to do it once a year, it can be a regular part of the TV schedule.

The format for the race to become prime minister starts with Tory members of parliament: they're like the panel of judges, and each time they vote, one or two candidates have to leave the competition. For the final choice, though, members of the party are asked to say who they prefer.

In case that seems to be getting a bit democratic, let's not forget that there are less than 200,000 of them. The rest of us have to wait until the next general election before we can say whether we think they chose the right person to be PM.

There's an argument for saying that this system's the worst of all worlds. If the nation chooses an idiot, at least that's democratic. When members of the Tory party choose our political leader, it's undemocratic, and they still may not choose wisely.

But can we rely on democracy? When the British public was asked to name a new boat that was being built to carry out important scientific research in the South Atlantic, the name Boaty McBoatface got the most votes.

The next time members of the Conservative party choose Tory McToryface as prime minister, I hope they'll allow the BBC to step in and say, "Yes, it's great television, but we'll ignore you. You're being deliberately silly, so we're choosing one of the judges from Strictly Come Dancing instead."