FOLLOW -UP

In groups and pairs discuss:

Do you flunk there's a future for the Monarchy in the UK? Why yes/no? If yes, how do you see it?

 

Read the following articles, make a list of the prerogatives of the royalties. What is the attitude of the British to them?

How the royal prerogative became a red herring Alan Watkins

15 April 2001

 

There is an old Carmarthenshire saying: "Be very careful what you say to a man with a beard offering free flagons of Buckley's bitter." Of course, it loses something in translation. That is only to be expected. But the drift is clear enough. I do not know whether the former Miss Sophie Rhys-Jones's ancestors came from that county. Evidently the saying did not become part of her own mental equipment. No doubt she was a silly woman. But what she said to The News of the Worlds do-it-yourself sheikh was neither particularly shocking nor particularly original. You can read much the same thing in The Daily Mail every day. There is no constitutional crisis. There is not even a more limited monarchical crisis. Minor members of the Royal Family - notably the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke and Princess Michael of Kent -have long exploited their connections in their constant endeavour to raise ready cash. In any case, what kind of business did the Queen and those famous advisers of hers think the former Miss Rhys-Jones was engaged in?It is somewhere between journalism and estate agency. It is a murky world, whose swirling fogs are scarcely dispersed by the existence of the Institute of Public Relations, a body set up in an attempt to persuade the public that the business is somehow on a par with the great Victorian professions which had been brought together in institutes.

And yet, though it was much ado about nothing, and there is no crisis, a national unease has been revealed, not only about the Royal Family - their foolishness, their apparently ever-growing numbers, their appetites for big houses and large stuns of money - but also about the monarchy as an institution. We have even had a revival of the debate about whether the Queen's prerogative powers should be taken away from her and given to someone else.

 

The Earl and Countess on their wedding day

 

It was inaugurated by Mr Tony Benn m the early 1980s, at the high tide of Bennery. Naturally no one took it very seriously at the time: "another of Wedgie's crazy ideas," was the general view. Today the representatives of respectable opinion, such as the Labour backbenches' own resident expert Mr Tony Wright, have admitted that there may be something in Mr Benn's views after all. Several other constitutional experts - a curious group whose qualifications are not always obvious at first sight - have been popping up on our television screens throughout the week. Let us have a look al the arguments. The Queen has numerous personal prerogatives. Though she is in theory the fount of all honour, most gongs arrive on the recommendation of ministers who, rather as the compilers of Wio's Who do, rely on discreet little committees to put up names. I can believe that the Queen not only appoints but chooses Knights of the Gaiter: many are former prime ministers of hers. I am less ready to credit her personal selection of members of the Order of Merit. She has never been known for her literary, scientific or philosophical interests. Why should she be? A few figures such as Lord Jenkins apart, I doubt whether she had ever heard of most members of the Order before appointing them, any more than the newspapers had. The other prerogatives are more important. They have all been taken over by the Government or by ministers -though not all ministerial powers are prerogative powers. There is a High-Tory-tomfool view, sometimes surfacing in The Daily Telegraph and spilling over into The Spectator, to the effect that Her Majesty possesses numerous prerogatives which she does not choose to use or uses on the quiet. This is baloney, wishful thinking. If the Queen tried to declare war off her own bat, she would rightly be forced to abdicate. The prerogatives to declare war and to ratify treaties are exercised by the Government. Sometimes the Government has limited its own powers and, for political reasons, transferred them to Parliament. This happened over European treaties. In 1978 the Callaghan government wanted to get its Bill on European elections through the Commons without too much trouble. To assist its progress, a provision was included requiring parliamentary approval for the ratification of any European treaty. This was to cause grave inconvenience to the Major administration over the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The government press officers gave out that the treaty could still be ratified under the prerogative. This was incorrect. In the end, the treaty was approved in the Commons by a cigarette paper. Accordingly, what people are now talking about is not so much removing powers from the Queen as from her ministers, notably the Prune Minister, and transferring them somewhere else. There are several possible beneficiaries: an individual such as the Speaker, a quango, the Commons or both the Commons and the Lords. It would be perfectly simple to have an Act restricting the life of a Parliament to four or five years. But it would still be necessary to set up a. safety net to catch a political crisis which required a premature dissolution. It would not be enough to specify merely that an election would happen when and if the Government lost a vote of confidence in the House. All sorts of other things could easily happen. In these circumstances the power to ask for a dissolution could revert to the Prime Minister or could be granted to one of those individuals or institutions just specified.

The monarch has not refused a single dissolution since the Reform Bill of 1832. The prerogative to choose a Prime Minister used to be more important. The young Queen's first crisis occurred in 1957, when she had to choose between R A Butler and Harold Macmillan. Lords Salisbury and Kilmuir polled the Cabinet and proposed Macmillan. So also did Winston Churchill, who forced his views on the Queen; or, rather, his private secretary, Mr Anthony Montague Browne, forced them on her. Mr Browne tells us that the old boy felt left out of various comings and goings. So he asked Sir Michael Adeane, the Queen's private secretary, to summon Churchill. Adeane grumbled, saying this was no way to run a sweetshop, but complied reluctantly. Churchill said to Butler afterwards: "I went for the older man, old cock."

In 1964 Macmillan fiddled the succession for Alec Douglas-Home over Butler. Iain Macleod's view was that the Queen had no alternative but to accept Macmillan's nomination; my own is that she allowed herself to be rushed and should have waited longer. Either way, such a crisis is unlikely to recur now that (he Conservatives have democratised themselves. John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990 without the slightest constitutional trouble; just as James Callaghan had succeeded Harold Wilson in 1976.

The truth is that the discussion of the Queen's prerogative powers is a way of lending respectability to a wish to cut her and her family down to size in more mundane areas. The prerogative powers are exercised by ministers, as they have been for some time. It may be that they ought to be transferred somewhere else. But why, in that case, should those ministerial powers which do not derive from the prerogative not be treated in exactly the same way? To this the new radicals have no answer that I can see.