LIZ TRUSS was elected as Tory leader and hence appointed Prime Minister after beating Rishi Sunak by 57 per cent to 43 per cent of the 141,000 votes cast. The turnout was 82 per cent (it was largely an e-ballot) meaning the Tory membership is currently 172,000.

The 80,000 votes Truss got was rather less than the 85,000 CWU members who have recently taken strike action over a 2 per cent pay offer. That vote easily passed the 50 per cent threshold of those entitled to vote which applies to trade unions, but not elsewhere. Truss got 47 per cent of the vote — so were it a union ballot, it would have been declared invalid, as the TUC noted.

Membership of political parties is not high in Britain with the exception of Labour. Here membership rose to over 500,000 under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership but had declined somewhat to 432,000 by December 2021. It may well now be lower still, but easily dwarfs Tory numbers.

The SNP and Liberal Democrats are the next highest placed in terms of party membership.

However you look at it, appointing a new Prime Minister where the vast majority of the electorate have no say and not even a majority of the winner’s own party backs them, does not confer a high degree of legitimacy.

In fact, the election of Truss is reminiscent of Parliamentary elections between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. In this period very few people had the vote, and hardly any working men (women didn’t get the vote until much later).

Elections went on for several days with open air hustings. Radicals and Chartists would often attend in numbers and propose their own candidate. On a show of hands they often won, but of course most were not eligible to vote.

Even so, this pressure from without had an impact, and measures reflecting working-class interests were passed from time to time in the Commons.

Just a few days after Truss became Prime Minister, Queen Elizabeth II died at 96, sparking an official mourning period, cancellation of most planned events and Prince Charles automatically became King Charles III at 73 years old.  

The record of his two namesakes does not inspire confidence. King Charles I lost his head on January 30 1649 in pursuit of the “divine right of kings” — the idea that his absolute authority came directly from God.  

That ushered in a period of republican government, after which came King Charles II. His dissolute behaviour — he had far more children than Boris Johnson, for example — did much to promote the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which set the British ruling class on its modern course.

Because Britain is a constitutional monarchy rather than a parliamentary democracy, King Charles III has a political role and one which will, based on his activities while prince, amount to more than giving royal assent to parliamentary Acts.  

He also has a role in the official state church, the Church of England. He was of course, elected by no-one and is accountable to no-one — not even God since the monarchy abandoned the “divine right” claim a good while ago.

Whether the Tories can continue in government and whether King Charles III can keep a monarchy going that appears fractured at best, despite what the bourgeois media has churned out in the wake of the death of Elizabeth II, will depend — as it did in the 17th and 19th centuries — on what popular protest can be organised from below.

And protest is coming, in the shape of the burgeoning class struggle: the fight for a truly democratic society is also a fight to make sure the working class doesn’t pay the price for the energy crisis.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.