The United Kingdom is a country governed, in large part, by convention —but in the heat of the Brexit debate, those conventions are beginning to evaporate. The Speaker of the House of Commons overturned long-standing procedure to limit Theresa May’s room for manoeuvre. The opposition used a humble address to the sovereign to force the publication of the government’s full legal advice on the withdrawal agreement, though the convention is that such advice is confidential. Parliament then impinged on the executive’s crown prerogative powers by passing a law dictating how the prime minister must behave at an EU summit.
Under May, Downing Street sighed at such behaviour but grudgingly accepted it. Boris Johnson and his team have a different response. If their parliamentary opponents want to push the constitutional boundaries, then they’ll do the same. The personal motto of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s senior adviser, is ‘with a pirate, a pirate and a half, with a gentleman, a gentleman and a half’.
As we now know, Johnson would not resign if he was defeated in a confidence vote, as most would expect him to. Instead, he would — as the fixed-term parliaments act allows — use the following two weeks to try to put together a majority. If he could not do that, he would go to the country and fight a general election after 31 October. The talk in Whitehall is that the election could be on the day after Brexit, 1 November, which would mean the UK would leave the EU during the election campaign.
Given that an exit date of 31 October is already in law, there’s logic to this position — but critics cry foul. They argue that during an election campaign, a government shouldn’t take any decisions that bind the hands of its successor.
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