WI: British political parties had a coup mentality (à la Australia)

The Labor Party has had no fewer than eight leadership contests in the last 12 years (albeit not all of them were contested) and from 2007-2009 the Liberal Party had four different leaders. One of the main reasons for this are the opinion polls - politically they have more influence in Australia than almost anywhere else, and if a leader has poor personal ratings and/or his party are trailing badly in the voting intentions, then he/she will be fairly likely to face a challenge.

Occasionally the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats in Britain show signs of adopting this method, but the Labour Party is historically loyal to its leaders. What if all three parties took the same attitude to their leaders as the two main Australian parties?
 
The Labor Party has had no fewer than eight leadership contests in the last 12 years (albeit not all of them were contested) and from 2007-2009 the Liberal Party had four different leaders. One of the main reasons for this are the opinion polls - politically they have more influence in Australia than almost anywhere else, and if a leader has poor personal ratings and/or his party are trailing badly in the voting intentions, then he/she will be fairly likely to face a challenge.

Occasionally the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats in Britain show signs of adopting this method, but the Labour Party is historically loyal to its leaders. What if all three parties took the same attitude to their leaders as the two main Australian parties?

When and where does this attitude come from? The butterflies are too vast. A panicky Labour that removes Major Attlee in 1936 would be unrecognisable today.
 
When and where does this attitude come from? The butterflies are too vast. A panicky Labour that removes Major Attlee in 1936 would be unrecognisable today.

Let's say (for whatever reason) it begins after Profumo and Macmillan's resignation. The parties also stick with MPs-only ballots.
 
Let's say (for whatever reason) it begins after Profumo and Macmillan's resignation. The parties also stick with MP-only ballots.
Well that in itself is going to be a major change for the Labour party, they've always been very strong with their links to the unions and the money it brings in, even more so nowadays. You either need to change that from happening in the first place, which is going to see a whole host of butterflies flapping their wings over the development of the party, or have Blair really cut back on the ties when he was pushing New Labour and they had more than enough private donations to safely ignore the unions.
 
I know this whole concept of 'teh Oz coup mentality' is a thing in British foreign news reporting, but I don't know if they've diagnosed the real historical roots of the phenomenon--it really goes back to the Liberals' inability to come up with a successful moderniser after Menzies, and it was revived by both parties during the nineteen eighties because of the new ascendancy of opinion polling.

The difference now is that a governing party has taken it up, to the point that they look more unstable than the federal Opposition in leadership terms.
 
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