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In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister is the head of government, exercising many of the executive functions nominally vested in the Sovereign, who is head of state. According to custom, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet (which he or she heads) are responsible for their actions to Parliament, of which they are always members. The current Prime Minister is The Right Honourable Tony Blair (of the Labour Party), who has been in office since 1997.
As the title suggests, the Prime Minister is the monarch's principal advisor. Historically, the monarch's chief minister (if, as was not always the case, any one person could be singled out as such) might have been any of a number of officials: frequently the First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal, or one of the Secretaries of State. With the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of government by a cabinet of these ministers, its head came in time to be called the "Prime Minister" (sometimes also "Premier" or "First Minister"); to this day the Prime Minister always also holds one of the more specific ministerial positions. Sir Robert WalpoleRobert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford ( 26 August 1676 18 March 1745), normally known as Sir Robert Walpole is generally regarded as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. The position of Prime Minister was only a de facto one, having no official recogni is generally regarded as the first Prime Minister in the modern sense.
The Prime Minister is appointed by the Sovereign, who is bound by constitutional conventionAlternative meaning: Constitutional Convention A Constitutional convention is an informal and uncodified procedural agreement that is followed by the institutions of a state. In some states, notably those Commonwealth of Nations states which follow the We to choose the individual most likely to command the support of the House of Commons (normally, the leader of the party with a majority in that body). Should the Prime Minister lose the confidence of the House of Commons (indicated, for example, by the passage of a no confidence motion), he or she is obliged by custom either to resign (in which case the Sovereign can try to find another Prime Minister who has the House's confidence) or to request the monarch to call a general electionA general election is an election in which all members of a given political body are up for election. The term is generally used to refer to elections held for a nation's primary legislative body, as distinguished from by-elections and local elections.. Since the premiership is in some sense still a de factoDe facto is a Latin expression that means "in fact" or "in practice", commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning "by law") when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as create position, the office's powers are mainly a matter of custom rather than law, deriving from the incumbent's ability to apoint (through the Sovereign) his or her Cabinet colleagues as well as from certain uses of the royal prerogative exercised on the Prime Minister's advice. Some commentators have pointed out that, in practice, the powers of the office are subject to very few checks, especially in an era when Parliament and the Cabinet are seen as unwilling to challenge dominant Prime Ministers whose attention is increasingly turned not toward Parliament but toward the news mediaThe news media is a term used to describe print media ( newspapers, magazines); broadcast media ( radio stations, television stations, television networks), and often Internet-based media ( World Wide Web pages, weblogs). Usually the term includes all wor.
