Lord Wallace reviews 'Could it Happen Here?'
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Lord Hennessy and Andrew Blick have produced a short but powerful exploration of whether the UK has the constitutional resilience required to resist the demands of a rogue prime minister
As we watch the carefully constructed written constitution of the United States bend and give way to the personal autocracy of President Trump, it’s high time for British politicians to consider the question Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick pose: could it happen here?
The authors wrote this short but powerful book before Donald Trump’s second term began, arguing that “it is precisely when there is no immediate danger that the circumstances attending possible future constitutional crises can be aired”. They nevertheless note the surge of violence that broke out after the 2024 British general election, triggered by rumours and fears about illegal immigrants and refugees, and warn that a similar surge under more difficult conditions might “inject the blight of authoritarianism into mainstream British politics”.
Their scenario is of a “limpet prime minister” – emerging from a polarised election campaign as leader of the largest, but non-majority party – refusing to resign to allow others to form an alternative government or to allow parliament to meet.
There are, after all, few hard constraints on the power of our prime minister in an uncertain situation. Hennessy and Blick run through the various office-holders who might resist, from other ministers through to the Speaker, the judiciary, senior civil servants, military officers and heads of the security services, ending with the ambiguous constitutional role of the monarch and his advisers.
The 2029 election could return a parliament of multiple minorities, with contested claims to power
I concluded from this enumeration that constitutional monarchy may have some advantages over a directly-elected presidency; the authors note the strength of King Charles III’s repeated commitments to “defend our laws”. They however remain worried that not enough ‘good chaps’ would resist such an attempt, and call for “a Committee of Privy Counsellors to examine the long-term resilience, protection and preservation of British parliamentary democracy”.
There follows a reminder of how far British political behaviour wandered from observance of traditional conventions in the turbulent decade from the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and its narrowly-won Brexit successor: a prime minister who attempted to stop parliament meeting; a contested intervention by the Supreme Court; damage to the principles of cabinet responsibility and of trust between ministers and civil servants, with attacks on an alleged ‘deep state’; bitter divisions within both major parties, including expulsions; evidence of foreign interference in British politics; breaches of domestic and international law, and multiple breaches of the ministerial code.
And, for historical context, they remind us that under a Labour government in the late 1970s there were similar fears of ‘elective dictatorship’; the authors quote William Waldegrave (now Lord) warning in 1978 that “our constitution is dangerously vulnerable to… the capture of the executive by a totalitarian clique”.
The 2024 election appears to have returned the UK to the strong and stable single-party government which the Conservatives promised in 2019 but failed to deliver. But opinion polls stubbornly show our two major parties sharing less than 50 per cent of voter support. The prospect of a global recession in an increasingly unstable world is likely to feed public disillusionment – perhaps even disorder.
If Reform UK and the Greens are as effective at targeting voters as the Liberal Democrats were last year, the 2029 election could return a parliament of multiple minorities, with a caretaker prime minister without popular legitimacy, contested claims to taking power and political rivalry spilling over onto the streets. Are we confident that those contesting for power under such fraught circumstances would observe all the necessary conventions?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire is a Liberal Democrat peer
Could it Happen Here? The Day a Prime Minister Refuses to Resign
By: Peter Hennessy & Andrew Blick
Publisher: Haus Publishing
