Why all the fuss about popularity?

I continue my exploration of this Liberal Democrat concept, and become more perplexed by the minute.

Mark tells me that he is involved in some sort of debate about selection of candidates for your rather quaint Parliament. Admittedly, you do get one thing right, in that it must be opened by the Monarch, although whoever writes her speeches really needs to get out and about a bit more.

What I don't understand is the rules he mutters about rather darkly. Obviously, whoever writes Lizzie's speeches wrote these rules, because they could evidently be a lot shorter if you had a system like ours here in Amaranth. Of course, having a constitution which allows the monarchs (that's us) to write the rules for electing Parliamentarians is an advantage, in that we don't have a particular interest in the result! We simply consult the head of our Imperial Electoral Commission, Uncle Otto, whose team of fearfully clever young men called the 'Sputnik Project' (or something like that) explain the latest trends in selection technology until we fall asleep.

As I recall, the last suggestion was that we move to something called a 'Finnish open list selection'. All very nice, Uncle Otto opined, but in a forty-eight seat Parliament where the Authentic Radical Liberal Party of Amaranth gained 99.1% of the vote last time, it all becomes a bit irrelevant. Perhaps you could use it to elect your Members of Parliament?

It seems clear to me that all you need is a military coup led by a group of genuine monarchists, the imposition of a liberal monarch (I quite like the sound of young Jo Swinson, she looks to have the ability to wear ermine well) and an imposed electoral system that favours a liberal society and the internal selection problem goes away. Surely there aren't six hundred of you who want to spend your time sitting in a dusty room debating Labour proposals to ban people from crossing the street without a licence, are there?