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:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“We don’t want bores in the theatre. We don’t want standardised acting, standard actors with standard-shaped legs. Acting needs everybody, cripples, dwarfs and people with noses so long. Give us something that is different.”
—Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976)
“Being prime minister is a lonely job.... you cannot lead from the crowd.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)