Stuff that gets my goat : Mandates for government

I heard some Tory on the radio yesterday, I'm sorry I didn't catch his name - I think he may have been someone well known. Although the daftest thing he said was about how the Daily Mail was too left wing ( The mind boggles !), what intrigued me more were the comments on how Gordon Brown has no mandate to be leader since no one voted for him in person as Prime Minister. I didn't catch the full broadcast, but do know that other Tories have similarly harped on about this. Tory MP Douglas Carswell for instance recently blogged about this : http://www.talkcarswell.com/show.aspx?id=641
I am stating the obvious I know but just for the record :

• David Cameron was not leader of the Tories at the last general election - it doesn't undermine his position as leader of the opposition.

• We don't elect ANY prime ministers in this country. We elect members of parliament, and by tradition the Queen approaches the leader of the largest party in parliament to form a Government. This usually means that the leader of this party becomes PM.

• If there's a change of leader mid-term then the Queen does this again - and it tends to be the new leader who becomes Prime Minister. Not really a surprise to anyone. Not the electorate anyway.
  

• The Tories know this because that's how the last Tory Prime Minister, John Major, first became PM

You don't need a degree in politics to know any of this . It's pretty elementary stuff. Come the next election things might be different. I'm sure the Tories hope so. But until then Gordon Brown's mandate arises out of the still rather larger number of MP's elected from the Labour Party as opposed to any other party; from the Labour Party's selection of him as leader, and from the Queen's decision to ask him to form a government and her acceptance of that government. OK it's not perfect, and some people may not like it, but that is the UK version of democracy as applied to Labour, Tories and all other parties. So let's not hear any more prattling on about not having a mandate.