It has been just over a month since Mary Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss became the last prime minister of Her Late Majesty’s reign, and the first of King Charles’. What have we learned? Constitutional Matters From a constitutional point of view, the famous ‘unwritten conventions’ of the British state have been put under severe strain. Truss is the fourth Prime Minister to lead a Conservative administration since 2015, and the second not to have won her majority in a general election. Such situations are not meant to overly trouble the state, since the conventional wisdom is that the Conservative Party won the 2019 election, not Boris Johnson, and so the mandate to govern from the electorate belongs to the party, not a person. This is not a novel idea, and not in itself problematic. Of the past twenty Prime Ministers, Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Major, Callaghan, Home, Macmillan, Eden, Churchill, Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Bonar Law all became Prime Minister in such a...
This is a collection of personal and largely unedited observations covering the years from 2006 to now; I assert my copyright but am fine with links and footnotes. Some posts are obviously much more researched than others, and any errors are wholly mine except where I have innocently disseminated or linked to other bloggers or commentators.