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.

Magna Carta: we can all celebrate the anniversary, even if we don't all understand it the same way

Anniversaries are the moment when the present chooses to reinterpret the past to suit its purposes.

800 years ago, on 15 June 1215, England’s leading landowners met at Runnymede, on the Thames, to the West of London. To hold land was, at that time, to hold huge power – it was, indeed, the only road to power. Land produced rent and, out of that rent, the owners could fund small armies, personally loyal to themselves.

The Magna Carta Monument at Runnymede

On that day, they met to cut down to size one of their number. They had all accepted that it was important that one should have authority over all of them but, though he might hold the title of King, they didn’t feel that was something he ought to let go to his head. He had to remember that he was ultimately just one of them, and he maintained his pre-eminence only with their consent.

The holder of that position in 1215, King John, was weak, and his peers, the barons, took advantage to extract concessions from him about just what a King might or might not do. They wanted rights guaranteed in writing, over his signature. In particular, they denied him the right to act against them at will, and they insisted that any of their number only be convicted of a crime if tried by a jury of his peers.

No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised [dispossessed], outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.

The words “his” and “peers” are important in this context. The barons weren’t concerned with the rights of women. And they weren’t interested in “the people” – they were interested in their peers. 

But the present imposes its own interpretation on the past. What happens if you extend the meaning of “free man” beyond the narrow ranks of the barons? Then the Great Charter (literally Magna Carta) becomes a statement of basic rights of all Englishmen (and possibly Englishwomen).

By the seventeenth century, the view was taking hold that the English had always enjoyed certain liberties, but they’d been trampled on by foreigners forcing their way into the country (echoes of our own times). In this case, the foreigners were the Normans who conquered the place in 1066. This is a view which conveniently ignores the fact that the English – Anglo-Saxons – had themselves been invaders only a few centuries earlier, when they’d usurped the lands of the Celts.

In this view, what the barons obtained from John was a restatement, or reinstatement, of those primordial English rights. And Englishmen everywhere began to demand that they be recognised, including those fine Englishmen who set up the colonies in North America. When their representatives met in Congress in 1766 to protest a new tax imposed on them from Britain, the Stamp Act, they called on the authority of the Great Charter:

The invaluable rights or taxing ourselves, and of trial by our peers, of which we implore your Majesty’s protection are not, we most humbly conceive unconstitutional; but confirmed by the Great Charter of English Liberty.

Sadly, George III took a more jaundiced view of the Great Charter, and refused his loyal subjects in the thirteen American colonies the protection they required, losing their loyalty in consequence, and, after a disastrous war, the colonies too.

The tradition, however, persisted. Nearly 750 years after the signature of the Charter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt assured us in his 1941 inaugural:

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was written in Magna Carta.

Five years later, in his “Iron Curtain” speech, Winston Churchill declared:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The Great Charter itself

And then we get to David Cameron. He told the anniversary celebration at Runnymede:

Why do people set such store by Magna Carta? Because they look to history. They see how the great charter shaped the world, for the best part of a millennium, helping to promote arguments for justice and for freedom.

Sadly, he also declared that “here in Britain ironically, the place where those ideas were first set out, the good name of human rights has sometimes been distorted or devalued.” This is his justification for trying to repeal the Human Rights Act, which guarantees the Charter’s rights, and others besides, for every one of us.

The view that this is the spirit of the Charter may be ahistorical, but quite a few of us rather like it. As did Roosevelt and Churchill.

Cameron, it seems, disagrees.

As I said. Anniversaries are moments when we respect not the contemporary significance of events, but the significance that we draw from them today. Cameron, I suppose, has a right to his own. It’s just sad that it has to be so idiosyncratic.

Not to say more than a little worrying.

Spads, Spuds, a Hunt and a skinned Prime Minister

Those who have been following the Hunt saga with bated breath won’t need any introduction to its salient points. Just in case, however, there are readers in some remote and benighted corner of the world like the United States, who haven’t been enthralled by this edifying tale, here is the gist of it.

Firstly, it has nothing to do with pursuing a fox to extinction. That activity has been banned in Britain for many years, a matter on which we liberals congratulate ourselves with great satisfaction even though the practice continues unabated, with the police turning the kind of blind eye towards it that they reserve for the misbehaviour of the ruling classes.

No, in this case the quarry is the Hunt himself. More specifically, it is Jeremy Hunt who is our Minister of Culture. If you tend to think of ‘culture’ as the kind of thing a life scientist produces in a lab in order to grow large numbers of unpleasant bugs, then you’ve probably got a pretty accurate picture of the man.

It has recently been revealed that he, or at any rate his office, had been far too close to Rupert Murdoch’s empire, at a time when Hunt had to adjudicate over an acquisition which the Murdochs were keen to make and which would have been very lucrative to them.

It has to be said that Hunt has shown all the honour we expect of him, and allowed a special adviser to fall on his sword on his behalf.

I didn’t get much further with this story because at about this point the article I was reading began to refer to this special adviser as a ‘spad’. I’d forgotten that this was the familiar term for these characters. My problem is that I can’t see the word without thinking of ‘spud’, the humble potato that naturally bears so little resemblance to the noble spad.

But then, on the other hand, perhaps they’re not that different. We used to have a chain of shops int this country, and possibly in others (perhaps including the benighted States), called ‘Spud-U-like’. It used to serve jacket potatoes which you could take with any of a wide range of toppings. They always smelled mouthwateringly good and turned out to be rather disappointing: once the topping, the superficial attraction, was gone all you had left was a mushy pile of starch with little flavour and even less nutritional value.

Which, come to think of it, isn’t that different from a spad.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Hunt goes on. Yesterday Members of Parliament summoned the Prime Minister to come and talk to them about the affair. David Cameron looked deeply upset at being treated this way.

‘Me? They dare to summon me? To appear in front of them?’ He looked like Charles I, the last British monarch convinced of his divine right to rule, a delusion Cameron probably shares.

Playing the role of Cromwell to Cameron’s Charles was one of the great institutions of the House of Commons, Dennis Skinner. Despite being eighty, Skinner can still wield a mordant wit as sharp as any executioner’s axe. He asked the Prime Minister whether he was protecting Hunt out of a sense of self-preservation, knowing that if Hunt went he, the Prime Minister, would have to face the ‘bullets’ himself.

‘Well, the honourable gentleman has the right, at any time, to take his pension and I advise him to do so,’ Cameron quipped back.

Oh dear, oh dear. I’ve always thought that the saying ‘the truth never hurts’ revealed particularly limited understanding of life. Didn’t Cameron prove the point? If Hunt goes, he certainly is the next in the firing line. And that truth has got him so rattled he can no longer control his temper. Not even in Parliament.

Perhaps he ought to remember what happened to his illustrious predecessor who believed he ruled by the grace of God. Charles I also treated parliament and certain hard-hitting parliamentarians with contempt.

Look where that got him.

The moment Charles I realised he could have
chose his tactics more judiciously