It may seem arcane, but the 55% no confidence rule could cause some real pain to the Cameron government at the beginning of its term.
Put simply the 55% no confidence rule means that the house of commons has to have 55% of the MPs to vote that they have no confidence in the government before it can make the government resign. The old situation used to be that Parliament needed 50% plus 1 before the Prime Minister was forced to call an election.
The reason that the rule was put in was that the Liberal Democrats were rather worried that if they were going to commit for five years then they would then be in trouble if David Cameron decided to dash to the country and went for a second term after three years. This somehow gave the idea that it could not happen. There was also the case that when there were a fixed term parliament then it should be harder for there to be a no confidence motion, as there is in the Scottish Parliament - which actually has a 66% requirement.
There are some problems with this. For a start this is a real change to the power of Parliament, and it is not just Labour MPs who are worried about this, a number of Conservative MPs and journalists have spoken out about this. There is also the problem that the change was not mentioned in any manifesto. The House of Lords will have no problem in throwing a law that is not in a party's manifesto.
This makes little sense. It is very rare that a popular government gets a vote of no confidence, so essentially there will be a vote of no confidence that will be lost even though a majority has been reached. So the government would be a lame duck government, seeming to rule without the will of parliament. An opposition would love to get this sort of result.
Tony Blair did something very similar when he unilaterally changed the Prime Ministers' Questions from two days to one day a week, although that did him very little good as the greater time meant that William Hague bested him at almost every opportunity.
However the Tory right is looking to stop this. This is partly because this will annoy the Liberals and modernisers, and partly because these are just the sort of people who care about constitutional niceties.
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Stephen Canning is the editor of The Tory Boy (www.thetoryboy.com) one of the fastest growing online political news blogs. He is also the Chairman of the Braintree Conservative Future and is actively involved in local, regional and national politics. Join him on Twitter (@StephenCanning) for regular political news and information.
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