British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks to the media during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at UN Headquarters in New York, on Sept. 24, 2019.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
The Prime Minister, as everyone now knows, has for many years enjoyed dressing up as someone he is not. He’s well versed in putting on a face that isn’t his, appropriating an identity foreign to his nature and mocking fellow citizens by making himself up to look like a member of a faith he does not practise.
In so doing, the PM has trampled on ideals, insulted millions and sowed discord across the land.
We are of course describing Boris Johnson, PM of the United Kingdom. The Brexit-or-bust PM has long passed himself off as some kind of a traditionalist. A Conservative. A preservationist of ancient things, such as Westminster democracy. Defender of the wisdom of the past; lover of parliamentary supremacy; champion of the rule of law.
But it turns out that, other than a steamer trunk full of appropriated ideological garb, the emperor has no clothes. Not a stitch. He’s a con artist who’s been flouncing around in Tory-face for years, wearing his “Make Britain Great Again!” mask while pushing crackpot ideas that have nothing to do with what made and makes Britain great. And nobody called him on it – until Tuesday, when the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom did just that.
Citing precedents going back to 1362, the court ruled that, when Mr. Johnson in late August advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament, he gave her unlawful advice. In the plainest of Queen’s English, he lied to her.
As a result, the state of suspended animation Mr. Johnson put Parliament into earlier this month is itself suspended. Legally speaking, it never happened. When royal commissioners doing the PM’s bidding came to Parliament on Sept. 9 and announced prorogation, the court ruled that it was as if they “had walked into Parliament with a blank piece of paper." The order sending members home was “unlawful, null and of no effect. Parliament has not been prorogued.”
In other words, Parliament is not just back in session; it was never out of session. It can resume its duty of overseeing the executive and ensuring the government of the day has the confidence of the House of Commons – without which it cannot govern – and is held to account by Parliament.
Otherwise, as Mr. Johnson knows, what you have is not Westminster democracy but unaccountable despotism.
Wasn’t Brexit supposed to be about revitalizing the former and rejecting the latter? Or was that just Mr. Johnson’s line when he was wearing limited-government face?
The British constitution is a system of largely unwritten rules, developed over a millennium, through civil war, Glorious Revolution and (take that, continentals) centuries of domestic peace. It involves delicate balances and assumes a certain degree of reasonableness on the part of all players.
The PM can prorogue Parliament, but he has to ask the Queen for permission. Only the monarch (or, in Canada, her representative, the governor-general) has this power, but she must only use it on the PM’s advice, which she is almost duty-bound to take. That’s because the Queen reigns but does not rule, and the PM represents the will of Parliament.
But what happens if the PM advises the Queen to prorogue when he doesn’t have the confidence of the House of Commons? What if his advice to suspend the sitting of the peoples’ representatives isn’t supported by the people’s representatives? What if he’s telling the Queen to send lawmakers home so that he can continue to rule without Parliament?
Could there be anything less democratic, or less respectful, of traditional Westminster self-government? Probably not.
Mr. Johnson was trying to do an end run around Parliamentary supremacy, the work of ages, for the sake of his own political skin and in furtherance of his plan for immediate Brexit chaos.
He’s still insisting that Brexit will happen on Oct. 31. And throughout the prorogation-that-never-happened, he never stopped hinting that he somehow would refuse to obey a law passed earlier this month, forbidding him from embarking on a no-deal Brexit.
William F. Buckley once said that a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.”
Mr. Johnson, pretend Conservative, tried to disable the brakes and push the car over the cliff. It fell to the U.K. Supreme Court, which will be unfairly accused of judicial activism, to preserve the constitutional order by yelling, “Stop!”
The judges have thereby prevented a reckless PM from doing further harm to what was once the world’s most stable and respected democracy.