At this time of the accession of King Charles III, I feel it is appropriate to reflect on the monarch’s role in the British Constitution.
I make no claims to the validity of my views; this is simply my interpretation of the monarch’s role in our system.
Much of what I say will I’m sure will be seen by most people as – in the words of Monty Python – ‘the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious’. But there is, I believe, a sadly significant minority of our electorate who have a disappointingly vague understanding of the unwritten British constitution.
The first key point is that our monarch is essentially apolitical and has no political powers (the Royal Veto last being used by Queen Anne in 1708). He or she is simply the human face behind our flag, playing the very important ritual role of presiding over the pomp and ceremony of state functions.
The flag itself represents all of the people, who are in turn represented by the members of parliament from all political parties. It is, in effect, the flag over the Houses of Parliament and our whole parliamentary democracy.
Diagram © Gordon Stainforth, 2022
The reason I am raising the subject now is that many people in recent days have suggested that the time is ripe for us to abandon the monarchy and resort to a presidential system.
There are two problems with this.
The first is that such a President (as they have in France or the United States, to pick obvious examples) is bound, to some extent, to be a political animal in a way that our monarch is not. In the case of America, very strongly so.
The second problem – again to state the Bleeding Obvious – is that the President has to fulfil the impossible task of being both a monarch and the First Minister. Would we really have wanted the vainglorious Boris Johnson to play the role of a monarch? The appallingly dishonest, even more vainglorious Donald Trump in America was a chilling reminder of just how precarious and open to abuse such a Presidential system is.
The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that those in favour of a presidency simply have not thought it through. How could they? It just makes no sense.
It is incredible to me that people are advocating a Trump-like Presidency in Britain.
One of the great safeguards, surely, of our monarchial system is precisely that it is hereditary, and our successive ‘rulers’ have for two centuries been steeped in all the traditions and restraints of our Constitution.
The point of my diagram is to emphasise that our Prime Minister, being strongly political, always lies on one side or the other – Left or Right – of the central, apolitical axis that runs all the way from the Crown, through the flag and the Houses of Parliament, to the British people as a whole.
A two-strand system of this kind – of a Monarchy and Parliament on the one side (representing the people), and a Prime Minister, his cabinet and the government on the other – seems to me to be vitally important, with the central axis of the Crown and Parliament always keeping the Government in check, always having the final say (although Boris Johnson set an alarmingly unconstitutional precedent of proroguing Parliament – desperate at all costs it seems to undermine its crucially important powers. I hope we never see such irresponsible, fascist ruthlessness again by our UK government any time soon.)
It seems that Boris Johnson actually wanted to weaken and undermine the relationship – shown by the grey dotted arrow, top right – between the Prime Minister and the Crown and parliament: the fact that the Prime Minister is always answerable to both. Very seriously, he lied to both, thereby posing a serious threat our parliamentary democracy.
I think it is very fitting that many have described the Queen, our longest reigning monarch, as ‘Elizabeth the Great’. She set a very high standard of relentless constitutional rectitude that will be a very hard act to follow.
