The One Thing Queen Elizabeth and Boris Johnson Have in Common

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The Brits find themselves in need of a new head of government and a new head of state without a worked-out plan for either.

Moreover, the respective challenges are very different. In the case of the prime minister, Boris Johnson, the need is to replace somebody who was never fit for the office with somebody who is. In the case of the monarchy, the worry is that someone who was a complete master of the job will be replaced by somebody who will never measure up to it, Prince Charles.

So much for the long-held conceit that two centuries of experience balancing a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy would always guarantee seamless transitions of power.

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As it is, nobody can ever say with any confidence that they know Queen Elizabeth’s opinions on anything, even the weather, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think that she loathed Johnson—first of all, because he conned her. In 2019, when Johnson was trying to conceal how he was rushing headstrong into a deeply flawed deal to pull Britain out of Europe, he persuaded the queen that it was lawful to suspend Parliament for five weeks (technical term, to prorogue Parliament) so that he could escape their scrutiny. The English supreme court later ruled this to be unlawful.

But, more deeply offensive to her than even that, Johnson brought to the top job a sweeping debasement of the qualities of leadership that she expected and had found in all of the 13 prime ministers who preceded him.

No doubt she maintained a glacial composure in the weekly audiences that the monarch conducts with her chief minister, while seeing through his Falstaffian levels of bonhomie to the mendacious charlatan beneath. These encounters were made a good deal less odious for her when, as a result of the pandemic, they became virtual.

What goes on in those audiences is never recorded, and prime ministers have always been silent on their experiences. The queen is constitutionally stripped of any power to sway a policy, however strongly she may object to it. The one time she apparently made it clear that she was at odds with a prime minister was when Margaret Thatcher slow-walked applying pressure on the white South African government to end apartheid. Even so, the relationship between the two women gradually thawed and, one month after Thatcher was forced out by her party after 11 years in power, the queen awarded her the Order of Merit, the highest honor in the land and one that is in her personal gift.

How different it is with Johnson. The queen must now feel that nothing defined the man so much as the cause of his leaving. He had ignored warnings that Chris Pincher, the man he appointed as a deputy parliamentary whip, was a serial groper and drunk. Johnson’s fall was finally precipitated when, barely two weeks ago, it turned out that Pincher had attempted to grope two men at the bar of the Carlton Club.

The queen has had many years to acquire inside knowledge of the political importance of London clubs, and they don’t get more influential in the upper crust than the Carlton. It’s the central switchboard of Tory party networking (and a place where whoever succeeds Boris will need to seem fit for purpose). Her Majesty and her advisers would have immediately known that dragging the Carlton into such a squalid scandal was politically unsurvivable—even if, at first, Johnson did not.

As shambolic as the parliamentary procedure for dumping a leader may seem, this episode shows that it does have one advantage over the American system: a leader who seems programmatically incapable of operating within the law can be sent packing at any time. That’s because a prime minister is always the party leader and it is the parties, not the people, who elect their leaders and can eject them. There is no inflexible constitutional barrier to prevent that.

There were fleeting fears that Johnson could cause a constitutional crisis by calling a snap election, but that risk, never very plausible, vanished when he resigned. The queen is expected to remain regally aloof as the Tory party goes through the process of choosing its new leader, who then automatically becomes prime minister without going to the country in a general election.

The only time the queen was accused of allowing herself to be implicated in the choice of a new prime minister was in 1963. Harold Macmillan, the Tory prime minister, resigned because of failing health. In an unprecedented move, the queen visited Macmillan in hospital to receive his recommendation for his successor. The two of them were left alone for half an hour and no record was made of what was said. Within an hour of returning to Buckingham Palace the queen sent for Macmillan’s nominee, Sir Alec Douglas Home, and he was anointed prime minister.

But a large faction of the Tory party alleged that it had been a stitch-up arranged by “a magic circle” of the Tory elite and the monarchy, and that the queen had ignored a message sent to the Palace warning her of this. Home was, for sure, a spectacularly anachronistic choice (he admitted to counting with the use of matchsticks on a table) as well as a Scottish laird and friend of the queen, and was duly defeated by Labour at the next election.

In fact, Macmillan’s advice had followed the party’s rules at the time, an opaque “sounding” of opinion in the cabinet, the Tory members of parliament, Tories in the House of Lords and grassroots party leaders. The queen had not been compromised.

After that fracas, Home changed the system. The leadership would be decided by the parliamentary party. They still have a role, but not the final say. In the hiatus following Johnson’s belated resignation it’s still unclear when selection will begin or how long it will take.

There will be many contenders. The 358 Tory members of parliament hold a series of secret ballots until the list is culled to the final two. Those names go to around 200,000 grassroots party members to choose the winner—which means that the new prime minister will have been chosen by 0.29 percent of the population.

But Johnson leaves his party so crushed and demeaned by serving his all-consuming ego that finding vertebrates among the candidates is hard. The winner will be the queen’s 15th and, almost certainly, her last prime minister. The extraordinary number of politicians who have served her provides a context in which she has to be as acutely aware as anyone of the appalling damage done to the office by Johnson—a cumulative carpet-bombing of all previous standards of personal integrity, competence and public duty.

At the same time, the queen’s own future is beset by the absence of a clear road map. Consultations about how and when she might choose to step down are haunted by the implications of two words: regency and abdication.

The Regency Act of 1937, which updated previous versions that originated in the 18th century, is very specific about the constitutional step that has to be taken if a living monarch is to be replaced by a regent until that monarch dies. It requires a “declaration of incapacity, due either to infirmity of mind or body.”

There is no provision for a simple decision by the monarch to retire, because in 1937 nobody foresaw that there could be another cause to give up the job: living so long that old age slows you down.

At 96, the queen is surely not incapacitated in either mind or body, except for the obvious problem of greatly reduced mobility. However, that does mean that she is no longer up to the demands of the day job as she herself had always met them.

And so the Regency Act is stigmatized because it implies that the monarch is seriously sick. The ghost that always hovers over that condition is George III, who in 1811 was judged to be “violently insane.” He lived until 1820 while his son, the Prince of Wales, took over as regent. (The prince was a notorious rake, but on becoming regent, and later as George IV, he got his act together, surprising everybody with his political skills and cultural sophistication.)

A ”declaration of incapacity” has to be signed by three or more officers of the crown—the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice or the Master of the Rolls (a senior judge) and the speaker of the House of Commons. They have to present supporting medical evidence—a process that smacks all too much of the salutary measures that put away George III, rather than a civilized agreement that clears the way for Charles as regent. In effect, there is no mechanism to take the simple step of allowing the queen to retire, like any normal mortal.

The act of abdication—personally quitting—is similarly toxic because of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, who abdicated in 1936. He was a weak-willed proto-fascist who chose marriage to a divorced woman, Wallis Simpson, over service to the crown. His departure made the young Princess Elizabeth next in line for the throne after her father, George VI, changing her life forever. And nobody understands better than the queen the iniquity of the quitter. That’s why she won’t quit by such means. And that leaves the whole issue of succession in limbo.

And this is happening at a time when the heir’s public reputation is looking rocky. His basic problem is not any lack of integrity, but gullibility. This springs from his susceptibility to fawning—those who fawn tend to win his trust with catastrophic results.

The most egregious example was his association with Jimmy Savile, the cigar-chomping TV host who turned out to be a lifelong sexual predator. At one point Charles asked Savile to screen candidates for top positions on his staff. Last year Charles lost one of his most trusted, long-serving and obsequious aides, Michael Fawcett, in a scandal involving an offer of honors in return for donations to his charity, the Prince’s Trust. Then there was the recent jaw-dropping revelation of Charles accepting a suitcase stuffed with more than a million dollars in cash from a former prime minister of Qatar.

In her new book, The Palace Papers, Tina Brown reports that in 1993, at the height of the so-called Camillagate exposures of Charles’s carnal devotion to his future wife, his exasperated father, Prince Philip, reflected that Charles was “not King material.” That was obviously colored by a strong public bias in favor of Charles’s betrayed wife, Diana, that has since been superseded by far more favorable public views of Camilla.

But that critique seems a lot better founded when Charles’s executive abilities are scrutinized. Part of being a monarch is being a chief executive, not so much in running the firm as in choosing those who do. On that score he is, apparently, clueless.