Deputy Prime Minister of Australia accepted the view put to him by McEwen that to commission a Liberal temporarily as Prime Minister would give that person an unfair advantage in the forthcoming party room ballot for the permanent leader. McEwen's appointment was in keeping with the previous occasion when the main non-Labor party was without a leader; Earle Page of the Country Party was interim Prime Minister between 7 and 26 April 1939—the period between Joseph Lyons' sudden death and the United Australia Party naming Robert Menzies his successor. Since 1968 only two Deputy Prime Ministers have gone on to become Prime Minister: Paul Keating
The Accidental Prime Minister slated for release on 21 December 2018. The Accidental Prime Minister The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh is a 2014 memoir by Indian policy analyst Sanjaya Baru, who was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's media advisor from May 2004 to August 2008. Published by Penguin India, the book alleges that Singh was not entirely in control of his cabinet—or even the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Instead, significant power was wielded by the Congress party's president Sonia Gandhi, to whom Singh was completely "subservient". "There cannot be two centres of power", Baru remembers Singh explaining to him,