Gordon Brown

In this day and age, only in so far as rubber stamping what the party with a majority wish to do, surely?

What if there is no party with a overall majority which is very likely in the next election.

Well in the first election of 1974 - Heath got a higher percentage of the vote, but Wilson had more seats - after Heath failed to try and keep his govt together, the Queen asked Wilson to become PM.
Generally the party with the largest number of seats will hold a better claim to the keys of No10.

I'd say that is true. I believe the point of First Past The Post is that the party with the highest number of seats in the HOC wins. Wilson had to hold another election that year (October) to boost his majority:
Feb 75-- Con 297 (38.2%) Lab 301 (37.2)
Oct 75-- Con 277 (35.8%) Lab 319 (39.3%)

Alec Douglas-Home was the last PM directly appointed by the monarch.

This was in 1963, when Harold Macmillan resigned suddenly due to ill-health with the backdrop of the Conservative Party Conference. Back then the Tories no formal procedure for selecting a leader, just some series of confused precedents. QEII was expected to choose on the basis of advice given by the party's elder statesmen.

Alec Douglas Home was selected from the House of Lords (the last time such an appointment happened), thus he renounced his peerage so he could enter the Commons AIUI.

His tenure as PM only lasted a year, he was beaten by Harold Wilson in 1964's GE. He stayed on as party leader for a while longer, before a leadership contest was announced, with Douglas-Home revising the rules himself. Ted Heath won the leadership contest thence 1970 general election.

NEWS: BBC News Special
On: BBC 1 London
Date: Wednesday 27th June 2007 (starting tomorrow afternoon)
Time: 12:35 to 13:00 (25 minutes long)

Sorry no additional information is currently available
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt taken from DigiGuide - the world's best TV guide available from http://www.getdigiguide.com/?p=1&r=7646

Copyright (c) GipsyMedia Limited.

On radiotimes.com it says its till 3.00.

The answer to that is here.

I see Gordon Brown isn't being astoned at all on N24 now he's PM.

I know this is Wikipedia, but has anyone heard of this before?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Hundreds

I accessed it from Blair's entry.

First I've heard of it.

Even Mother's never heard of it!

Yip - its true. MPs cannot resign, hence they are given this title.

Is there any point in keeping this thread open? I clicked on it expecting - as this is TV Forum - for it to be have some relation to presentation, but no, there's no connection at all.