31st May 2022
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!”
– from Antigonish, by William Hughes Mearns
The constitution of the United Kingdom is as much about absences as about content.
Other constitutions have gaps – for example the constitution of the United States does not mention judicial review, the key means by which the federal courts provide a check and a balance to the executive and the legislature.
But in the constitution of the United Kingdom, there are many more absences – things which are not there.
Take the office of Prime Minister – if you were only to look at the statute books, you would find little trace of the role and almost no express provisions conferring powers.
Indeed, until the early twentieth century you would find no legislative trace at all – even though the office had then existed for nearly two hundred years and been occupied by such powerful figures as Walpole, Pitt, Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone.
The power of the Prime Minister’s office comes from other elements of the constitution – by acting on behalf of the Crown (and thereby exercising the Royal Prerogative) and by having a majority in the democratic house of Parliament (which is important as Parliament is held to have legislative omnipotence with the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy).
The Prime Minister – or at least the governing party – can also often derive power from the electorate, with the notion of a ‘mandate’ if a party wins a majority of seats, and this mandate means that the non-democratic house of Parliament must yield when there is a conflict.
All this power – and for a position that, legally speaking, barely exists.
This means that the office can be pretty much what its occupant wants it to be.
For example, Boris Johnson when he became Prime Minister dynamically used the office in five ways to force through the Brexit withdrawal agreement and ‘get Brexit done’ :-
– he changed the policy from his predecessor;=
– he negotiated a revised agreement with the European Union;
– he then signed that agreement;
– he fought an early general election to get a mandate for his negotiated, oven-ready agreement; and
– he used his mandate and his overall majority to force the revised agreement through Parliament and into law.
Few Prime Ministers have used so many of the powers of the Prime Minister in so short a time.
But.
Since that agreement became law, the Prime Minister has become the proverbial dog that has caught up with the car.
It would appear Johnson does not now know what to do with the office – or with his majority.
And remember – a substantial Parliamentary majority is the greatest prize which the constitution of the United Kingdom can bestow on any Prime Minister – and it is not as common as you would think.
Indeed – after John Major lost his working majority not longer after the 1992 general election, it was not until 2015-17 and after 2019 that the Conservatives had an overall majority; and since 1977, Labour has only had an overall majority between 1997 and 2010.
What has the Prime Minister done with this overall majority, which has flowed from the Brexit referendum result for which he campaigned and the General Election at which he promised to get Brexit done?
Almost nothing – and, indeed, the ongoing politics of the Northern Irish Protocol show that he did not even get Brexit done.
Johnson has gone from using the office of Prime Minister to the full to doing almost nothing with it.
The last Queen’s Speech – like a football team defence not impressing Alan Hansen – was all over the place.
The nasty ‘anti-woke’ noises from various ministers do not indicate a programme, but a lack of one.
The government is at one a high-spending, large-state levelling-up government that also now, somehow, wants to substantially cut the civil service.
A government that thinks nothing of partying at Number 10 while imposing the most illiberal restrictions on the rest of us ever known in peace time.
The only theme is that the government will pick fights with and seek revenge on any entity of the state which offers any check or balance.
This is not ultimately about a government or a Prime Minister, but about the lack of a government – and a lack of a Prime Minister.
And so, match our constitution of absences, we now have a government of absences, and a Prime Minister who may be in office, but who is not really there.
Perhaps it is time for him to go away.
*
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!”
**
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Interested in the powers used by Johnson to promise protection to the Norwich States before accession to NATO without even a debate in Parliament
Brilliant
As always, very enjoyable.
I think Disraeli was the first to use the phrase “Prime Minister” – in signing a treaty. Previously the No 1 was “The Minister”. Queen Anne was the last monarch to dismiss a Minister.
You refer to the lack of powers prescribed in statute. The government of the country can continue to function (taxes can be collected, people released from prison, pensions paid) for a long time without a prime minister.
The necessary role in the British structure of government is the Secretary of State – of which there are a number. Only a secretary of state can authorise a number of documents under Acts of Parliament (a few require a minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer to sign).
So long as secretaries of state and ministers remain in post it might not matter if there were a period in which there was no PM.
If the whole government resigned, it would be different. However in 1834, when the Whig government fell, Peel was in Italy so until he returned Wellington was appointed secretary of state and drove from departmental office to departmental office to sign the necessary documents to keep the government functioning.
A good point, well made – I might write this up as a blogpost – how the country could operate without a Prime Minister.
It would also be interesting to know what would happen if a PM, despite losing a general election, decided that it was ‘in the national interest’ to stay on as PM. I think you mentioned in one of your blogposts that minsters do not need to be elected MPs – so you have a ‘rogue’ government. In what way could this action of a ‘rogue’ PM be prevented, in what way could this action succeed? (We talk about parliament being sovereign, but isn’t this being undermined by the use of secondary legislation containing actual meat of a policy?) Although my question seems far fetched I would liked to be reassured that the checks and balances in this extreme case are not based on a good chaps theory.
Useful primer:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/conservative-party-leadership-contests
> Take the office of Prime Minister – if you were only to look at the statute books
I initially misread this as “if you were only to look at the satire books”, and honestly, it doesn’t change a lot.
This was always the problem with Brexit – what do you do with it.
No one knows because it was a silly idea from the very start but a good diversion away from the real problems.
To my mind the problems that led up to some voting to leave had little to do with the EU and a great deal to do with the organisation and power structure of Parliament. But to change Parliament in any meaningful way is difficult and for some unpleasant. Even a change of government from Tory to Labour seems very unlikely to change much. Change would need to go much further.
The snag is we have become an over-mature democracy with too much settled too comfortably in. You can see why Mao Zedung adopted a somewhat bracing approach to an ossified society. Something similar may be necessary.
The other issue is that many of the ills blamed on the “EU” were in fact policy decisions that were fully supported by the UK government.
Like most Member States, it suited us to be able to agree a necessary but painful change as an EU-wide change, and then to blame the “EU” for the pain, while taking credit for the benefits of that change.
The Brexit vote was in part won by the argument that we would not face the pains inflicted on us by the EU; implied by this was that we would still get the gains from the changes, we’d just no longer face the pain of necessary reform. Having opted out of the pain, however, we’re not getting the benefits either – and worse, if the Government of the day wants to engage in reform, they can no longer push the change EU-wide and then blame the “EU” for the pain.
In turn, that means that we are unlikely to get much in the way of necessary reform in the next decade or so – it needs a Government that is willing to be unpopular in its own right and that is gambling that by the time of the next election it will be clear that the gain outweighs the pain.
“The other issue is that many of the ills blamed on the “EU” were in fact policy decisions that were fully supported by the UK government.”
I think you might be approaching “half right” here, but also that the picture is both more subtle and complex than you suggest.
If you want to point to a government “missing a trick” with respect to the UK’s relationship with the EU, then I think you have to go back to the time prior to 1993, the Maastricht Treaty and the formation of the EU. This is (IMHO) the point of the pivot/point of no return, because, even though the sitting UK government negotiated various “opt out” exceptions (for example the right to remain outside the EU’s single currency), this was the moment when the dream of the European Super-State first came close to reality.
Whether you are “pro-EU” or “pro-Brexit”, you might also be willing to agree that the area where things seem to have come unstuck has been the “forced bundling”, the imposition of conditions through the evolution of the arrangement. Free trade agreements like (NAFTA/USMCA) are necessarily elastic, respective of sovereign rights and boundaries and relatively easy to adjust if required. The commitment to the EU, by contrast, was much more binding.
And it’s worth bearing in mind that when the UK was a member of the EU we were a member of the “rich, industrial north” and not a “poor man of Europe” like the so-called PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Those nations are in many senses in an even less favourable position than the UK – they are part of the EU, but their economies have been so devastated by decades of EU economic and monetary policy set to favour the wealthier north that unlike the UK, they simply couldn’t afford to leave, even though the EU patently isn’t working for them.
So: have we “blamed” the EU?… I think we should agree with you on that score. Have the EU been blameless? Not even close. Perhaps most crucially of all: have they listened? Have they been willing to be flexible and adaptable and inclusive. Well, try asking Spain. Or Portugal.
One of the perhaps definitive differences between the EU and her member nations is that although the change in political leadership at the national level can bring about significant societal change for the country, nothing, it seems, is able to bring about significant change within the EU. It is as though, as an entity, as an organism, it is able to protect itself and remain inviolate. That’s good when it bring benefits, but bad when it harbours trouble.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but one of the things I find most disconcerting about the EU is that it is like a runaway train – you’re either on it or off, but if you’re on it, you’re a passenger. You might get a choice of meal if you can find the buffet car, but the destination, the en route scenery and the arrival time are not subject to change.
A Cultural Revolution to end the Culture Wars perhaps?*
You are spot on thought about how change has to be much deeper. For me it’s the incestuous relationships between political parties, think tanks, client journalism, finance and the ‘Big 4’ accounts turned consultants** that needs undoing before real change could happen.
The way some elements of the right (and to a lesser extent the left so I’m biased) use their time and energy to pick fights with whoever they dislike that day and the constant gaslighting can only become more dangerous I fear. Plus all the bollocks emanating from Johnson and his acolytes and defenders have helped keep most people’s attention away from the (alleged) frauds that may have occurred during covid and mistakes (care home deaths) made in that time.
The words ‘He got all the big decisions right’ fill me with fury.
*I’m not literally advocating bloodshed.
** Dishonourable shout out to Capita, G4S and Serco etc who seem to have magical powers when it comes to still getting government contracts despite a long and winding road of failure over many years.
I (and I am sure many others) have asked: what is the point of the current Prime Minister?
My personal view is that he is a larger than life (hence popular) waste of space who distracts the population via the MSM (and shrills) from the actual task of dismantling the remaining checks and balances that prevent the less benign (malignant) politicians from enacting their unpalatable, undemocratic and harmful policies. A new unscrupulous PM can then carry out the real policy.
Johnson may now be superfluous, but politically, for his MP’s they are worried about their own political skins, so he is the safe option.
The question is who is to follow him and what is their real agenda?
Isn’t the clear and proper answer here to have an election?
They have said themselves that we should express our opinions about Partygate at the ballot box, but on what grounds should we have to wait to do that?
The law requires “Reasonable intervals”: what is a reasonable interval when the prime minister has proven to be such a crook?
There are no reasonable grounds to delay at all, apart from the lack of any competent alternative, and that is not a good ground when a flange of baboons would be an improvement on what we have.
Constitutionally we have met the grounds set out for the Crown to intervene: “A dissolution is allowable, or necessary,
whenever the wishes of the legislature are, or may fairly be presumed to be, different from the wishes of the nation.”
They wish we would move on from Partygate.
The nation doesn’t seem to want to.
I think Tom Tugendhat might well be sufficiently competent, or maybe Tobias Ellwood. Even Sunak is reasonably competent whatever else he might be.
No way is Sunak a competent Chancellor of the Exchequer whatever else his other competences might be.
There are things that go on in the foreground, and things that go open in the background.
It may be that the Prime Minister is not apparently doing much in the foreground. But what is going on in the background may be at least as important.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”
T S Eliot on today’s Cabinet
There have been non-dominating PMs in the past. You can think of Macmillan spending lots of time reading or shooting, for instance. Part of a good PMship is delegating to good ministers.
The trouble now is that a bad PM delegates to bad ministers, and then they all change their minds whenever there is a hint of trouble, and get behind something even worse. There is no coherent end-point, no strategy, and frankly even if there was it would probably be a bad one, executed badly.
Thank you for reminding me of that old business adage: “A first rate manager hires first rate people; a second rate manager hires third rate people”. What does a fourth-rate Prime Minister hire? I ask that because, of course, it will be the members of this cabinet, appointed solely by the sitting PM, who will be the ones vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party when this PM steps down and, potentially, ascending to the same role if the Conservative Party are still in power or are subsequently returned to the majority. Frankly I am so unimpressed by this cabinet that my irrelevant opinion would be, to paraphrase, “e. None of the above”…
One thing we need to be mindful of is the simple reality that when the storm-in-a-teacup that is Boris Johnson’s premiership ends, the EU will still be there. We’ll still have to negotiate trade, borders and associated matters with them. As shown by news headlines this morning (concerning the UK’s access to scientific collaboration, with 140 universities and centres of higher learning warning that Johnson’s position on the NIP putting academic collaboration with Europe at risk), the EU are going to be there and are going to be making life difficult for the UK long after Boris goes.
On the one hand, the EU’s position on academic collaboration, which clearly doesn’t have much to do with trade across the Irish border, is yet another in a long (*long*) list of scenarios where the EU “bundles” and “conditions” one thing upon another. In that context it doesn’t matter if you’re a supra-national quasi governmental entity or a used car salesman: that’s bullying and intimidation. On the other hand, it rather feels like we are walking blindly into issues of our own making by a PM whose cavalier attitude and careless remarks are clearly antagonistic to our European neighbours.
I find it particularly galling that we collectively pay the salaries of these buffoons to make our lives better (to paraphrase Ivan Reitman’s “Dave”), yet our current crop of elected representatives are not only incapable of that, they charge gleefully in the opposite direction.
I live in hope that the EU will not make things difficult when Johnson is gone. Turning things around with light touches on the tiller and the right people in charge will change the climate.
When I read the present Prime Minister’s explanation that he was shocked, shocked, at what the Gray report had revealed – but he hadn’t been there and had known nothing about what was going on, I was instantly reminded of Eliot’s Macavity.
I’m sure we all recall Macavity, the mystery cat, the master criminal who could defy the Law.
“..the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair: For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!”
So yes, I’d agree with your analysis that we have a government of absences. Alas not as efficient as a character from Cats.
Except that Macavity’s somewhat humorous.
To describe the Covid restrictions as “illiberal” is to imply that their purpose was repression. This government has exhibited a general inclination in that direction, but any government would have been morally obliged to limit contact between the uninfected and the potentially infectious. One led by Rory Stewart would have done so with an exemplary promptness to rival that of Jacinda Adern, and would have saved thousands of lives.
Your image of the proverbial dog that has caught up with the car concurs with the opinion of Dominic Cummings in this interview by Suzanne Moore:-
https://unherd.com/2022/05/dominic-cummings-i-dont-like-parties/
“To describe the Covid restrictions as “illiberal” is to imply that their purpose was repression”.
There is no such necessary implication – and had that been my intention in using the word ‘illiberal’ I would have simply said so.
I don’t see how either “liberal” or “illiberal” can carry a meaning that excludes intent or motivation. To use either as a purely objective, quantitative measure of the degree of restriction seems odd to me.
[Incidentally, I tried to italicise “degree” using “Ctrl” and “I”. It didn’t work.]
Like this?
(Using HTML tags: “” with “i” and “/i” within them, before and after the italic text.)
We can only thank our lucky stars that Johnson and his cabinet of sychophants haven’t a clue how to govern and a demoralised Civil Service isn’t going to give them any clues!!
I rather fear that this post should have ended with ‘Brace, Brace’.
The UK is in very grave danger because the man occupying the office of PM and thus able to wield its huge powers untrammelled because the whole system is built on the Good Chap
Theory is a Pathological Liar & Narcissist.
Psychiatrists will tell you that such a person builds a castle of lies and lives in it and absolutely cannot accept being wrong as that would collapse their whole persona. So as time and the lies progress they get increasingly unhinged and totally preoccupied with not being proven wrong and will do anything to preserve their false reality.
Put such a person in the Prime Ministership of the UK with its awesome amount of unchecked personal power – relatively a lot more than the US President has and they will bend the organs of state to their will.
As an example of what this means I am convinced that the prime reason the NI Protocol issue has become intractable is that Johnson promised (lied outright) that there would be no sea border checks and so now he cannot admit he was wrong and would rather take the whole UK into pariah status and a very damaging trade & diplomatic war with the EU and USA.
I don’t agree that such a person cannot accept being wrong. That implies such a person, in this case Johnson, can’t help it. On the contrary he has deliberately manipulated his way to the top, even though he won’t engage with the appurtenant gravitas.
‘He cannot help it’
This is exactly what happens to a pathological narcissist at the end of years of building a castle of lies they inhabit in their mind.
DAG talks of the UK having an absent PM and IMO while day to day he maybe in the office what he is doing is spending his entire mental effort constantly monitoring his castle and shoring up his lies and nothing is more important to him even if it means catastrophic consequences for those around him and in his case also the nation.
It’s not for nothing the term pathological is used.
History has hinge moments large and small and very often these happen due to the personality and force of will of a single person amplified by the powers of the position they occupy.
But I don’t think there is any such thing as a “pathological narcissist” and I do think the term “pathological” when applied to well-being, the soul, the spirit, one’s essence is indeed used for nothing. I am against the medicalisation of everyday life because I think ultimately we can help what we do, however difficult that may be.
Dominic Cummings interviewed by Suzanne Moore confirms much of this post. Looking forward to the one promised about the absence of a first minister.
There seems to be a curious absence of government also in the US in respect of children’s rights and that this absence is related to that other contentious absence of effective gun control. The US is the only country in the world not to have signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. One reason for this is given in a Google comment:
“What is the MOST likely reason the United States has not ratified the treaty? The treaty concerns a matter of little relevance to U.S. interests. The Supreme Court determined that the treaty was unconstitutional. The treaty failed to get the required majority for approval in the Senate.”
I was reminded of an article by Will Wilkinson about the Trump administration where he says: ” Hardcore property-rights libertarians are chasing a fantasy—a legal perpetual motion machine capable of reinforcing and protecting the institutions of liberal capitalism _by keeping politics from happening_. ” (The last 5 words are italicized in the article.)
Also Ezra Klein recently in the NYT refers to diminished state capacity and that ” a weak government is often an end, not an accident”.
While there is no doubt that Johnson has demonstrated all the attributes to succeed at being the man-who-isn’t-there, it does seem that the institutions of liberal capitalism do prefer to have do-nothing governments. It isn’t just due to the personality of the current incumbent.
(I have referenced US articles as I do not see this discussion in UK sources)