An acting Prime Minister is a Cabinet member (often in a Commonwealth nation) who is serving the role of prime minister, whilst the individual who normally holds the position in unable or unwilling to do so. The role of Acting Prime Minister is often performed by the Deputy Prime Minister. The office is also commonly used when the prime minister is absent from the territory of that nation. An Acting Prime Minister should not be confused with a caretaker prime minister, which refers to an outgoing prime minister following an electoral defeat, and who by convention does not implement new policies or an Interim Prime Minister who is appointed to perform a similar role to a Caretaker Prime Minister, but who is typically not a prime minister at the time of being appointed.
Read more about Acting Prime Minister: Statutory Authority
Famous quotes containing the words prime minister, acting, prime and/or minister:
“One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)
“If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Just let him be minister if that’s what he desires, but without his brother and his brother-in-law.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)