Should Boris Johnson — assuming he becomes Prime Minister — prorogue Parliament? That would mean suspending it so that it couldn’t prevent the United Kingdom leaving the EU on October 31.
At the moment, that is the law of the land. All Mr Johnson has to do is to tell MPs and peers to extend their summer holidays for a couple of months, and our membership of the EU will automatically cease on Halloween.
Or so runs the theory. But he might have John Major to contend with. The former PM took to the airwaves yesterday morning to warn that he will seek a judicial review in the courts if Boris tries to prorogue Parliament.
Former Prime Minister John Major took to the airwavesg to warn that he will seek a judicial review if Boris Johnson tries to prorogue Parliament
Can you imagine it? Months of torturous discussion by learned judges while the country is on a knife’s edge. A constitutional crisis as the judiciary is pitted against the executive. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
If Sir John is intent on this ruinous course of action, he would do well to get his facts straight. He declared on Radio 4’s Today programme that Parliament hadn’t been prorogued ‘since Charles II in the 1640s, and it didn’t end well for him’.
I think he meant Charles I, who prorogued Parliament in 1629 for 11 years. As almost every schoolchild knows, King Charles’s head was removed from his body by parliamentarians in 1649.
Sir John is not even correct in saying that Parliament hasn’t been prorogued since then. King Charles II prorogued it in the 1670s, and his younger brother James II did the same in 1685.
In fact Prorogation is the term for the formal end of a parliamentary session, and so is an habitual occurrence. Sir John is talking about suspending Parliament as a means of circumventing opposition.
The device has been employed much more recently than the 17th century. In 1948, Parliament was prorogued by the Labour government after the Tory-dominated House of Lords had opposed the Parliament Bill.
If John Major is going to lecture us about constitutional practice, it would be better if he didn’t fill our ears with dud history while we are trying to enjoy breakfast.
In fact, if we choose a looser definition of prorogation — namely, suspending Parliament for political reasons — it seems that Sir John himself is a culprit.
When, in 1997, he prorogued Parliament to call an election, he was accused of doing so earlier than was necessary in order to delay the publication of an embarrassing report into the ‘cash for questions’ Tory scandal.
Critics fear Boris Johnson would prorogue Parliament in order to force through a No Deal Brexit if he became Prime Minister
After Major’s bizarre radio interview, someone in Boris’s camp suggested to the BBC that the former prime minister ‘has gone completely bonkers’ and had ‘clearly been driven completely mad by Brexit’.
This was crudely and rudely phrased. But in truth Sir John is somewhat unhinged on the subject of Brexit, and such good sense as he once possessed would appear to have deserted him.
He has described the referendum vote to leave the EU as a ‘colossal misjudgment’ and the ‘worst foreign policy decision since the Second World War’. He is certain post-Brexit Britain will be a poorer and unhappy country.
As for Boris Johnson, Sir John has called his Brexit campaign ‘squalid’. He has also expressed the view that the NHS will be ‘about as safe’ in his hands and those of fellow Brexiteers as ‘a pet hamster would be with a hungry python’.
Quite witty, but wrong. Boris is a soft-hearted creature who will cheerfully throw at the NHS the enormous extra funds already earmarked by Theresa May, and probably chuck in a few more billions for good measure.
Isn’t it striking how some ultra Remainers — the same can be said of the nuttiest hard-line Brexiteers — undermine their cause by wild hyperbole and spine-chilling prophecies?
There are, in fact, powerful arguments against proroguing Parliament. If only Sir John could make them calmly and reasonably without promising to mire us in the mother-of-all legal battles.
I can understand why Boris should want to keep the prospect of prorogation ‘on the table’. It may serve to convince Brussels that he is serious about being prepared to deliver No Deal, and so wring some last-minute concessions from the EU.
But he must know in his heart — and I suspect Brussels realises this — that proroguing Parliament to force through No Deal would strike at the core values of the Leave campaign.
In 1997, John Major prorogued Parliament to call an election
When I think back to the now distant referendum, I have no doubt that my main reason for voting Leave was to restore Parliamentary sovereignty. There were other reasons, but none of them was more important than being governed by our own directly elected representatives.
I wish Parliament had been able to honour the Brexit vote. I deplore the cynicism of the Labour front bench, as well as the dishonesty of a small band of Tory Remainers who have done everything possible to scupper Brexit despite having stood on an election manifesto to deliver it.
And it is also true that Remainers who swoon at the unconstitutionality of prorogation have been perfectly happy to seize the parliamentary agenda from the Government in defiance of long-established procedure.
For example, in March an amendment tabled by Tory Remainer Sir Oliver Letwin enabled backbenchers to hold a series of votes on alternatives to Mrs May’s Brexit deal.
But the dubious tactics of some Remainers do not begin to justify the momentous leap of suspending parliamentary proceedings in order to drive through Brexit without the approval of a majority of MPs.
Imagine that Boris took this fateful path. Such bitter divisions as already exist in our country would be deepened to a chasm as anti-Brexiteers complained, not without justice, of an anti-democratic outrage.
In such a scenario, Brexit would finally have been delivered, but at a terrible price. Some, perhaps many, Remainers would regard such an outcome as unconstitutional. The shared values that normally hold together people of very different political outlooks would be torn asunder.
I also believe it would be the end of Boris. For it would not only be disgruntled Remainers who believed that their country and its democratic traditions had been turned upside down.
Many voters — including, I suggest, plenty of Brexiteers — would say that a man who had campaigned to leave the EU under the banner of parliamentary sovereignty had shown he had about as much respect for democracy as a South American dictator.
And that is why I can’t believe Boris will prorogue Parliament. He would lose the support of millions of moderate and reasonable people who may be exasperated by the shenanigans of MPs but don’t want Parliament to be excluded from a decision of such magnitude.
In life it is usually unwise to make a threat you are unwilling to fulfil. Boris is in the position of a cowboy in an American western who portentously places his gun on a table. Everyone in the bar knows it isn’t loaded.
If MPs reject whatever deal he presents to them, there is one solution — to go to the country and seek the people’s endorsement. That is the democratic, and British, way. I think he’d win.