Among the many silly splendours in the state opening of parliament, one detail conveys the weirdness of British democracy more precisely than the rest. It isn’t the gilded carriage that brings the sovereign to the Palace of Westminster or the separate coach for the crown. It isn’t the pantomime of Black Rod knocking for admittance to the Commons, nor is it the goatskin parchment on which the legislative agenda is printed.
None of the pomp and frippery on display on Tuesday offends political modernity quite as much as the words “my government will …” This is the formula King Charles uses, as a matter of convention, when announcing forthcoming actions of what is, as a matter of constitutional fact, his government. This doesn’t mean that the king has asked for a ban on cigarette sales or tougher prison sentences for recidivist burglars, or extra licences for North Sea gas extraction. (If his well-known environmentalist credentials are bona fide, he is surely appalled by the dash for hydrocarbons.)
This first-person possessive pronoun is an artefact of history, but also a reminder that power in this country is loaned from on high as much as it is mandated from below. Prime ministers are crown appointees. Rishi Sunak was invited to do the job as leader of the party that commands a Commons majority. It was won four years ago under a leader whose epic disgrace and unfitness for office have never been properly recognised by the man who now enjoys the benefit of the hand-me-down mandate.
The additional accident of the prize slipping into Sunak’s possession via Liz Truss’s buttery fingers puts democratic legitimacy at one further remove. Such prolonged abuse of a party’s electoral endorsement highlights the monarchical character of a prime minister’s power. Executive control is wielded through parliament on behalf of the crown.
On what basis is Sunak setting the terms for political debate in the year leading up to a general election? The answer is in the question. There has been no attempt to camouflage the campaigning function of the programme laid out in parliament on Tuesday.
Downing Street’s strategy to prevent a landslide defeat focuses on people who backed Boris Johnson in 2019 and now tell pollsters they are undecided. They feel it is probably time for a change, but view Labour and Keir Starmer with wariness shading into suspicion. Even if they don’t warm to the opposition they can do the Tories plenty of damage by staying at home on polling day, or expressing general disgust for Westminster politics via Reform, the party of perpetual and paranoid Brexit-spirited grievance.
Repatriating those voters to the Tories involves reassuring them that no one else will be as tough on crime and immigration; also that Labour is for student ecowarriors who would rather stage a sit-in on the dual carriageway than get Britain’s economy motoring again. Hence locking more people up for longer, and drilling harder into the seabed. What these bills might practically achieve is wholly subordinate to the parameters they can impose on public debate. If all goes to plan, they will confine Starmer to corners of the political arena where he is least comfortable.
Britain’s chronically underfunded and demoralised Prison Service cannot cope with more inmates. The world’s overheating atmosphere needs fewer carbon emissions. But Sunak is relaxed about that if he can salvage a few Tory seats in the West Midlands.
This is not a constitutional innovation. There is ample precedent for unworkable statutes being drafted (and worthy ones sabotaged by amendment) to score tactical points at the expense of good lawmaking.
But it feels especially grubby when the government has such a tenuous claim to be acting on behalf of the electorate. It feels like another step in the degradation of a parliamentary ethos that values the responsible exercise of power over the shallow political sport of winning at all costs. Brexit played a large part in the blurring of that distinction. The referendum fed an ostensibly simple plebiscitary mandate – take Britain out of the EU – into machinery of representative democracy that couldn’t cope with the actual complexity of the task.
The resulting legislative impasse amplified the populist lament that remainer elites, nested in the Palace of Westminster, were thwarting the will of the people. (Although, in practice, leave-supporting Tory MPs stopped Britain leaving the EU many times by voting down Theresa May’s deal). The climax of that constitutional crisis was Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament in August 2019 – notable also as an abuse of those crown powers that are meant to be ceremonial. Ultimate resolution, once the supreme court had slapped the prime minister down, was achieved by the Tories’ subsequent landslide election victory.
That cleared the way for Brexit by also purging sensible administrators from Conservative benches. A cadre of circus blusterers and nationalist culture warriors was promoted instead.
The pandemic then further sidelined an ideologically neutered parliament. The Commons chamber operated through lockdowns, but in debilitated form. The expedient powers claimed by the government to act quickly in a national emergency combined with a culture of rule-bending and contempt for accountability in Downing Street to deactivate written and unwritten parts of the constitution that are supposed to keep executive power in check.
That would have been a dangerous situation even under a prime minister equipped with an ethical compass and the professional competence appropriate to governing in times of global peril. We had Johnson. His inadequacy for the task has been narrated in gruesome detail for the Covid inquiry by officials who had to navigate the foulness of No 10 during the pandemic. But it was never a secret. The Tories made him their leader precisely because he had an amoral gift for getting away with things that conscientious people would be ashamed to even try. They backed him every time he lied on camera and in parliament.
Those MPs who eventually abandoned Johnson did so not in shock at his true character, which they all knew, but in horror at the effect its exposure had on Tory poll ratings. Even then, scores of Conservatives fancied a reversion to “Boris” when the time came to replace Truss. When the Commons voted to censure the former prime minister for his serial derelictions of duty – a step towards reasserting the authority of parliament and its self-respect – Sunak abstained.
He wants distance from Johnson, because the legacy is befouled, but not a break so clean as to imply that the ousted leader’s mandate has expired, since it is the same licence that Downing Street now uses to dictate the legislative agenda – and in the same cynical spirit.
In constitutional terms, this is all above board, but as democracy in the 21st century, it stinks. There was a vacancy for a prime minister so the king asked Sunak to form a government; his government. And when all the pageantry is over, when the carriages are parked and the medieval tabards are back in the dressing-up box, that little possessive pronoun hangs in the air with a question attached. Whose government is this, apart from His Majesty’s? Not mine. Not ours.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
Rafael Behr will be discussing the legacy of Brexit with other Guardian journalists in a livestreamed Guardian Live event on 23 November. Find more info and tickets here.
