Do the Tories just not understand the Constitution?

by Martin Odoni

Two reasons not to have the GE on 4th of July – one good one bad

There is a very good reason for not holding the General Election, announced yesterday, on the 4th of July; it is the start of the summer holidays in Scotland, and many families living there will be travelling during that week, making it very difficult for them to vote. But that is by the bye to the Conservative Party, who know that most Scots will vote for other parties than the Tories anyway.

But for completely unrelated reasons, many Tory MPs – at the time of writing keeping themselves anonymous – do want the Election called off. They are submitting letters of No Confidence in Rishi Sunak’s leadership to the 1922 Committee to force a last minute change of leader. They hope a replacement leader will call off the General Election, which they believe they have no hope of winning in the short term.

Divisions, chaos, ignorance, insanity and the rest of the backbenchers

This move shows the divisions, chaos, ignorance, and general insanity of the current Tory Party, which is now surely even less electable than it was in the late-1990s. Declaring no confidence in the Prime Minister going into a General Election is like declaring pork sandwiches your favourite snack at a Bah Mitzvah – it may be honest, but it will not help your popularity.

The real difficulty is that the backbenchers in question do not appear to understand the way General Elections work. Partly, they think that the Election process does not start until Parliament has been dissolved, which will happen on 30th of May. The other misunderstanding is that they think that whoever holds the office of Prime Minister has a right that he or she does not have.

Problem 1 – the GE process has already begun

To address the first problem: The Election process actually starts at the moment that the Prime Minister receives permission from the Monarch to dissolve Parliament. That has already happened. Under the Lascelles Principles, there are few circumstances these days under which the Monarch could realistically refuse such a request. Just for example, the King could have refused on the grounds that the move was an affront to democracy in the circumstances, or because he felt that the incumbent Government is adequately functional.

But the point is, the King did not refuse, and these points ceased to be relevant from the moment he said, “Granted.”

We are now in what is colloquially called, “The wash-up period”. This is because any Bills or legislation that have not yet been passed through Parliament are now either hurried through optimistically, or abandoned for good. No Bill in the outgoing Parliament can be carried over to the new one, on the principle that no Parliament can bind the hands of its successor.

“The wash-up period” is part of the General Election process. Therefore, from the point of Royal permission being given, the Election process has started, and can only be called off in the gravest of emergencies. This is made more or less explicit in Chapter 6 of the Government’s own Election rules summary, which states repeatedly that the processes are in play, “Once the Monarch has agreed to a dissolution and the Prime Minister has announced an election.” (Clause 11.) Both happened yesterday.

Problem 2 – A Prime Minister just cannot do that

The second misunderstanding of the Tory rebels is that, while the Prime Minister does have the right to request the dissolution for a General Election essentially whenever suits him or her, the Constitution does not say anywhere that the Prime Minister the right to ask for a General Election to be called off, once it has been called.

So even if there were a sudden change of leadership just between the grant of permission, and the actual dissolution, which is what the backbenchers are hoping for (in less than a week? Yeah, good luck with that, lads and ladies…), the new Prime Minister will have the same powers as the recent predecessor. He or she would not be granted one-off powers to call off the Election.

The Commons Library, where the UK Constitution is to be found written across dozens of volumes of legal texts.

Indeed, even if a Prime Minister did have the right to request a cancellation, it is arguably made explicit, this time under The Dissolution Principles, that the King would be compelled to refuse. This is because it is clear that the attempt at cancellation is being made for internal party considerations. In any circumstances, the Monarch is obliged to steer clear of that sort of business, but most firmly in matters relating to General Elections. As clause 2 of the Dissolution Principles states unambiguously,

The Sovereign should not be drawn into party politics, and it is the responsibility of those involved in the political process to ensure that remains the case.

Any new Prime Minister trying to get the King to call off the General Election, because members of the governing party do not think they have a chance of keeping their seats, would be shamelessly trying to draw the Sovereign into party politics. He would have no option but to say no.

All the Tory rebels are really doing therefore is wasting a week of preparation time. They are making their party look totally divided, ignorant of the rules of their own jobs, and completely unworthy of Government. Even if they somehow succeeded in calling off the Election, that impression of over-cooked chaos would only be enhanced.

Well done, Charles

Therefore, credit where it is due, the King was absolutely right not to withhold permission. The Government is not adequately functional to keep on governing. On the contrary, with a governing party this divided and unworkable in power, the only affront to democracy is that it did not fall on its own sword over ten years ago.