Prorogation is the democratic thing to do

If, as Harold Wilson’s adage claimed, a week is a long time in politics, then seven months is an aeon. Last January the Conservative MP Sir Desmond Swayne suggested to Theresa May in the House of Commons that prorogation of Parliament might provide a solution to certain little Brexit-related difficulties. Both he and the Prime Minister treated the question in a fairly flippant style and the exchange was light-hearted.

This commentator, however, had already been mulling such options as a response to the feral behaviour of the House of Commons under the leadership of a maverick Speaker and, considering prorogation a serious possibility, canvassed such a course of action in a piece published by Reaction. The response was a torrent of outrage and derision, focusing chiefly on the state of mental deterioration that must be afflicting anyone who could publicly promote such a suggestion.

Prorogation of parliament, chorused the Remainers, was a device of Charles I, long obsolescent in British constitutional practice (an argument that conveniently ignored the fact that John Bercow had resorted to a precedent dating from James I to implement one of his constitutional coups).

In fact it was all nonsense. Prorogation is, as Jacob Rees-Mogg stated at Aberdeen airport on his way back from Balmoral, “a completely normal constitutional procedure”. It occurred every year between 2012 and 2017, at a time when Charles I was not very evidently engaged in the affairs of his sometime kingdom. There is no need to rehearse here the history, technicalities and enduring relevance of parliamentary prorogation since those issues have already been covered in another more recent Reaction piece: Proroguing parliament is legal and should be on the table. 

So, in January, the accepted orthodoxy in the Westminster bubble was that prorogation was a lunacy. Yet, on 28 August, we find the following announcement published following a meeting of the Privy Council: “It is this day ordered by Her Majesty in Council that the Parliament be prorogued on a day no earlier than Monday the 9th day of September and no later than Thursday the 12th day of September 2019 to Monday the 14th day of October 2019…”

There is no valid constitutional objection to this measure. This parliamentary session has been the longest since the reign of… yes, you’ve guessed, Charles I. It is high time we had a Queen’s speech to revitalize public policy on the eve of Brexit. Remainer rebels – for that is what they are transforming themselves into in reaction to a royal command – have no grounds for complaint. The dogs in the street know their objective is not to avert no-deal tailbacks at Dover but to negate the will of 17.4 million voters.

Remainers crying foul is parody. John Bercow, in contravention of the convention that the Speaker does not comment on political decisions, denounced the prorogation as a “constitutional outrage”. That is rich, coming from a man who has outraged every inconvenient constitutional propriety in the House of Commons in his partisan attempt to block Brexit.

Sir John Major is seeking legal advice on how to block prorogation – despite the fact he was the last prime minister to use prorogation controversially, to prevent publication of a report that would have provoked a scandal on the eve of a general election. Philip Hammond called the prorogation “profoundly undemocratic” – so, not like his unremitting efforts to overturn the largest democratic verdict in British history, then.

Liberal leader Jo Swinson condemned prorogation as a “dangerous and unacceptable course of action”: less than twenty-four hours previously she had been cavorting in Church House, Westminster, with other extravagant Remainers proposing to set up a pantomime parliament at that venue in defiance of the majority will of the electorate.

Remainers will now hope to challenge prorogation in the courts. Good luck with that. The act of prorogation belongs to that part of the royal prerogative that is non-justiciable. All that lawyers could do is claim that the advice given to Her Majesty was illegal. What court has the competence to adjudge that? Here we are at the innermost nerve of our constitution: any destructive intervention there would be as great a de facto revolution as 1688.

And the elephant in the room is the universally recognized attempt by the elites to overturn the legally expressed will of a majority of the electorate. That electoral majority is what it is all about. That is what the Queen, by exercising irreproachably her legitimate constitutional function, is preserving.