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The British find themselves in need of a new head of government and a new head of state, with no plan in place for either.
Moreover, the respective challenges are very different. In the case of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the need is to replace someone who was never fit for the job with someone who was. In the case of the monarchy, the concern is that someone who was a complete master of the job will be replaced by someone who will never measure up to her, Prince Charles.
So much for the long-standing conceit that two centuries of experience balancing parliamentary democracy with constitutional monarchy will always ensure a smooth transition of power.
Anyway, no one can ever say with confidence that they know Queen Elizabeth’s opinion on anything, even the weather, but it is not too much of a stretch to think that she hated Johnson – firstly because he frauds. In 2019, when Johnson was trying to cover up how he was rushing headlong into a deeply flawed deal to withdraw Britain from Europe, he convinced the Queen that it was legal to suspend Parliament for five weeks (a technical term for proroguing Parliament), so that he could escape their notice. The English High Court later ruled that this was illegal.
But, even more insulting to her than that, Johnson brought to the top job a broad disparagement of the leadership qualities she had come to expect and found in all 13 prime ministers who preceded him.
No doubt she maintained a glacial calm in the weekly audiences the monarch holds with her chief minister, while seeing through his Falstaffian levels of good-nature to the lying charlatan below. Those meetings became a lot less hateful for her when they went virtual as a result of the pandemic.
What goes on in these auditoriums is never recorded and prime ministers have always kept quiet about their experiences. Constitutionally, the Queen is stripped of any power to impose policy, however strongly she may object to it. The only time she apparently made it clear that she was at odds with the Prime Minister was when Margaret Thatcher was slowly putting pressure on the white South African government to end apartheid. However, relations between the two women gradually thawed and a month after Thatcher was forced to leave her party after 11 years in power, the Queen awarded her the Order of Merit, the country’s highest honor and what is in her a personal gift .
How different it is with Johnson. Now the queen must feel that nothing defines a man more than the reason for his departure. He had ignored warnings that Chris Pincher, the man he appointed deputy Parliamentary Speaker, was a serial groper and drunk. Johnson’s downfall was finally hastened when it emerged just two weeks earlier that Pincher had tried to grope two men in the bar of the Carlton Club.
Boris Johnson resigned as British Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party in a statement to the country on Thursday.
Li Ying/Xinhua via Getty Images
The Queen had many years to acquire inside knowledge of the political importance of London clubs, and they did not become more influential in the upper crust than the Carlton. It is the central dashboard of the Tory party network (and a place where whoever succeeds Boris will need to look fit for purpose). Her Majesty and her advisers would have known at once that involving the Carltons in such a sordid scandal was politically unviable—even if Johnson had not at first.
As shambolic as the parliamentary procedure for impeaching a leader may seem, this episode shows that it has one advantage over the American system: a leader who appears programmatically incapable of acting within the law can be sent packing at any time. This is because the Prime Minister is always the party leader and the parties, not the people, elect their leaders and can fire them. There is no hard constitutional barrier to prevent this.
“There were fleeting fears that Johnson might trigger a constitutional crisis by calling an early election, but that risk, which was never very credible, disappeared when he resigned.”
There were fleeting fears that Johnson might trigger a constitutional crisis by calling an early election, but that risk, never very credible, disappeared when he resigned. The Queen is expected to remain royally on the sidelines while the Tory party goes through the process of electing its new leader, who will then automatically become prime minister without going to a general election.
The only time the Queen was accused of allowing herself to be involved in the selection of a new Prime Minister was in 1963 when Harold Macmillan, the Tory Prime Minister, resigned due to ill health. In an unprecedented move, the Queen visited Macmillan in hospital to get his recommendation for his successor. The two were left alone for half an hour and what was said was not recorded. An hour after returning to Buckingham Palace, the Queen sent for Macmillan’s nominee, Sir Alec Douglas Home, and he was anointed Prime Minister.
But much of the Tory party claimed it was a clash orchestrated by a “magic circle” of Tory elites and the monarchy and that the Queen had ignored a message sent to the palace warning her about it. Home was certainly an impressively anachronistic choice (he admitted to counting using matchsticks on a table), as well as a Scottish laird and friend of the Queen, and was duly defeated by Labor at the next election.
A photo illustration of the front pages of British newspapers after Boris Johnson’s resignation speech yesterday, July 8, 2022 in London, England.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
In effect, Macmillan’s council followed the rules of the party at the time, an opaque “sounding board” of opinion in the Cabinet, Tory members of Parliament, Tories in the House of Lords and ordinary party leaders. The Queen was not compromised.
After this altercation, Home changed the system. The leadership will be decided by the parliamentary party. They still have a role, but not the last word. In the hiatus following Johnson’s belated resignation, it’s still unclear when the selection will begin or how long it will take.
There will be many contenders. The 358 Tory MPs hold a series of secret ballots until the shortlist is whittled down to the final two. Those names go to around 200,000 ordinary party members to choose the winner – meaning the new prime minister will be chosen by 0.29 per cent of the population.
“Johnson leaves his party so crushed and humiliated by the service of his all-consuming ego that finding backbone among the candidates is difficult.”
But Johnson leaves his party so crushed and humiliated by the service of his all-consuming ego that finding backbone among the candidates is difficult. The winner will be the Queen’s 15th and almost certainly her last prime minister. The extraordinary number of politicians who have served her provides a context in which she should be as clearly aware as anyone of the appalling damage done to the office by Johnson—a cumulative bombardment of all previous standards of personal integrity, competence, and public duty. .
At the same time, the future of the Queen herself is hampered by the lack of a clear road map. Consultations on how and when she might choose to step down are haunted by the implications of two words: regency and abdication.
The 1937 Regency Act, which updated earlier versions dating back to the 18th century, was very specific about the constitutional step to be taken if a living monarch was to be replaced by a regent until that monarch died. A “declaration of incapacity due to mental or physical infirmity” is required.
There is no provision for a monarch simply deciding to retire, because in 1937 no one foresaw that there might be another reason to give up work: to live so long that old age slows you down.
At 96, the Queen is certainly not impaired either mentally or physically, apart from the obvious problem of greatly reduced mobility. However, this means that she no longer meets the demands of everyday work, as she herself has always met them.
And so the Regency Act was vilified because it implied that the monarch was seriously ill. The specter that always hovers over this state is George III, who in 1811 was judged to be “violently insane”. He lived until 1820, when his son, the Prince of Wales, took over as regent. (The prince was a notorious plunderer, but after becoming regent and later as George IV, he recovered, surprising everyone with his political skill and cultural sophistication.)
“No one understands better than the queen the iniquity of the renouncer. That’s why she won’t give up like that. And that leaves the whole question of succession in limbo.”
A ‘declaration of incapacity’ must be signed by three or more officers of the Crown – the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice or Master of the Rolls and the Speaker of the House of Commons. They must present supporting medical evidence – a process that smacks too much of the bailouts that removed George III, rather than a civilized settlement that clears the way for Charles as regent. In fact, there is no mechanism to take the simple step of allowing the Queen to retire, like any normal mortal.
The act of abdication—a personal departure—was equally toxic because of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, who abdicated in 1936. He was a weak-willed proto-fascist who chose marriage to a divorced woman, Wallis Simpson, over service to the crown. His departure made the young Princess Elizabeth next in line to the throne after her father George VI, changing her life forever. And no one understands better…
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