In reality, the principal effect of the proposed arrangement would be party political. If Gordon Brown remained at Number 10 following an electoral defeat while Nick Clegg conducted coalition negotiations with the Tories, the Liberal Democrats could play the two main parties off against one other in an auction. They could gain additional concessions, crucially a Conservative commitment to a referendum on electoral reform, if Gordon Brown was still waiting in the wings.

This "auction" method would be new to British politics and would depend on persuading Brown that, even if he had been defeated and even if his party had no realistic prospect of being part of a new coalition government, it was his duty to postpone resigning while coalition negotiations took place between the other parties.

A new constitutional convention to this effect would obviously benefit the third party. Thus, far from removing the Queen from party politics, the pressure on her private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, to agree to such an arrangement effectively embroiled the monarch in a partisan innovation. As far as the other argument — governmental continuity —was concerned, this has been far more effectively assured by the Westminster model than by the Continental system. In the latter, coalition negotiations sometimes last for months with caretaker administrations being poor substitutes for the real thing. 

In subsequent evidence before a parliamentary select committee, one of the Liberal Democrats' main coalition negotiators, David Laws, made no bones about his party's preference for the auction method of governmental formation: "We would have been mad not to because it would have weakened our negotiating position, in terms of delivering as many of our policies as possible."