BoJo's British coup

Let’s be absolutely clear: the decision to prorogue parliament was taken by Boris Johnson, but it was issued in the name of the Queen. Why? Because Johnson was exercising a royal prerogative.

You thought the British monarchy was just a matter of pageantry and ceremonial? Think again. It is no longer the monarch who rules, but many of the powers of monarchs persist and are exercised by the government. That allows ministers, in particular the Prime Minister, to rule almost arbitrarily at times, and to dismiss any kind of scrutiny by elected representatives.

In a fuller democracy, such behaviour by the executive would not be tolerated. It would be thwarted by a powerful judiciary. By the equivalent of Parliament, in fact. But in monarchical Britain, Parliament can still be overruled, and that’s what Johnson has done. He’s issued a diktat – well, strictly, got the queen to issue a diktat for him – and anyone we actually voted for is out of the picture, apart from those, handpicked by him, who are in his government.

Boris Johnson: author of a very British coup

There’s nothing unusual about this, historically. A man – it almost always is a man – who wants power untrammelled by constitutional niceties, starts on his road to autocracy by a coup d’état against a parliamentary body he finds vexatious.

Julius Caesar took on the Roman Senate. He came unstuck personally, murdered by a group of aristocratic senators, but in the civil war that followed, his successors won the imperial power in Rome that had eluded him.

In Britain, Charles I was no more successful than Caesar in breaking the power of parliament, and he too paid with his life, but again at the cost of a civil war.

Napoleon came to power in a France drained by tyranny, misgovernment and war, and secured his own rule by emasculating parliamentary authority. That meant he could exercise arbitrary and unconstrained power. The consequence was even more deaths in war leading to ultimate crushing defeat.

When Hitler managed to get MPs elected to the Germany parliament, they infamously showed their contempt for the institution of which they were members by turning their backs on the speaker. In short order, the Nazis had reduced parliament to a speaking shop only, wholly docile to Hitler’s rule.

Why do they get support when these would-be autocrats go down that road? After all, the people suffered terribly in every one of the cases I’ve mentioned and, as a general rule, things ended pretty badly, above all for them.

There is a naïve belief among many citizens, even in a democracy, that elected representatives are all lying, corrupt, power-hungry and ineffective. They look instead to a strong man who will sweep all these timeservers and timewasters out of the way and get things done. The things that everyone – by which they mean everyone who thinks like them – know to be necessary and which are being held up by the corrupt opportunists who occupy parliamentary seats.

That, after all, is exactly what has happened with Boris Johnson. Parliament has been unable to legislate Brexit. It hasn’t been able to do so because it is divided within itself, but that is a true reflection of the state of the nation. However, for some voters, the failure of parliament to reach a decision is a simply a failure of parliaments, and it’s time to move on, to find the man free of the corruption and personal ambition which parliamentarians serve, and have him deliver the Brexit the people voted for.

The irony is that the strong man in this particular instance is the most corrupt and lying of them all. But so were Hitler or Caesar. What BoJo’s supporters are looking for is strength, and none of the rest really matters. BoJo provides the strong smack of authority they crave.

The other irony is that in reality, no one voted for a hard Brexit. It wasn’t an option on the ballot paper. And the people who are clamouring most loudly for it will be among the hardest hit by it. But again, none of this concerns them. They see stalemate now, they see action from the strong man, and that’s what they admire.

People will tell me that BoJo’s nothing like the historical characters I mentioned. Certainly, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, he’s not making a bid for indefinite and unlimited power. But make no mistake about it, what he has done today is a coup d’état. He has seized personal power, monarchical power, for himself by eliminating the possibility of parliamentary scrutiny of his actions or opposition to them.

The coup d’état is temporary. It’s due to end on 14 October when parliament will be allowed, by grace of Boris, to convene again. And should take immediate action to cut back on the royal prerogative powers the executive exercises.

Or will it reconvene? Another lesson of history is that once autocrats have tasted such power, they find it hard to give up. And Brexit is going to lead to difficult times ahead, in which a strong man is going to be seen as still more necessary.

Will normal service resume on 14 October? I hope so. But do I think it’s guaranteed? I most certainly don’t.