In order to form a British government you need a working majority in the House of Commons (the elected half of Parliament), this is because you need Confidence, as if a majority don't have Confidence in the government it can be dissolved.
The very least you can scrape by with in practice is called "Confidence and supply". An agreement between your political party and whatever other tiny parties or individual members can make up a simple majority (half plus one vote) of the Commons, to vote that they have Confidence in the government, and to vote through "Supply" bills, taxes and spending.
Parliament can choose to do whatever it wants, but as we see, in general the Parliament will be dominated by the governing party. So to an extent this is a distinction which makes no difference. Except, as Democrats are keenly aware in the US, just because somebody is a member of the Party doesn't magically mean they do whatever the executive led by that party says they should do...
So yes, in practice the UK Government and Parliament are much more cohesive than in the US where the Executive and Congress are run by completely different people with different agendas even on the rare occasions they're politically aligned, this is on purpose, but not by definition. If Johnson annoys enough "back bench" (ie elected politicians who aren't part of his executive) Tory MPs there's nothing he can do to ensure they vote how he wants and then he's probably fucked.
The very least you can scrape by with in practice is called "Confidence and supply". An agreement between your political party and whatever other tiny parties or individual members can make up a simple majority (half plus one vote) of the Commons, to vote that they have Confidence in the government, and to vote through "Supply" bills, taxes and spending.
Parliament can choose to do whatever it wants, but as we see, in general the Parliament will be dominated by the governing party. So to an extent this is a distinction which makes no difference. Except, as Democrats are keenly aware in the US, just because somebody is a member of the Party doesn't magically mean they do whatever the executive led by that party says they should do...
So yes, in practice the UK Government and Parliament are much more cohesive than in the US where the Executive and Congress are run by completely different people with different agendas even on the rare occasions they're politically aligned, this is on purpose, but not by definition. If Johnson annoys enough "back bench" (ie elected politicians who aren't part of his executive) Tory MPs there's nothing he can do to ensure they vote how he wants and then he's probably fucked.