Don, not 'fallacious reasoning' at all, but a statement of fact about the UK electoral system. See, you're doing it again - trying to draw a parallel between our electoral system and a presidential system such as they have in the USA.

Whether you, or anyone else, thinks they're electing a Prime Minister is irrelevant. Fact - nowhere on your voting slip is there a space to put a cross against the name of the person you want to be prime minister. We don't elect a Prime Minister, we elect a party to form a government, by a system of electing constituency MPs and, generally speaking, the party who capture most seats form a Government and, generally speaking their leader, elected by party-menbers only, not the general voting public, becomes Prime Minister. However, that's not a compulsory routine, and the leader can be changed, the constitution contains nothing to preclude that happening.

We do not have a mechanism for electing a prime minister by public vote. And anyone who believes that the General Election is only about electing a Prime Minister is deluding themselves and, even worse, ignoring a myriad other important issues. The only sensible way to vote is for the party whose policies you believe will be the right ones to bring about the best result for the UK as a whole. Simply voting on the basis of one personality is short-sighted and ridiculous, as ridiculous as voting for a party 'because I always vote for them', or 'because my parents voted for them'.

And, of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a future Tory government could switch horses mid-stream in exactly the same way that New Labour have done (God knows, the Tories have had enough trouble finding a leader they can stick with over the past twenty years or so, and who's to say that The Boy Wonder won't suffer the same back-stabbing that they dealt out to their one-time darling, the scorpion Thatcher?). I trust that such a leader-swap situation, should it happen whilst the Tories were in power, would attract the same expressions of outrage from you - that the new PM is a "prime minister who nobody elected"? :-) :-)

FWIW, I agree with you that Brown's never been the man for the job, I believed right from the time he was first mooted as Bliar's replacement that he would be a disaster as PM, and I wish anyone other than him had got the job, but get it he did, legally and within our constitutional rules, so there can be no gripes on that score. But, as you rightly say, there's an election coming............