Monthly Archives: Sep 2021

The Deputies That Weren’t

Posted on by
Reply

In the long-awaited cabinet reshuffle it was announced that Dominic Raab, First Secretary of State since 2019, had been appointed Deputy Prime Minister. This would appear to be the latest in a long though intermittent line of appointments to that title. On closer inspection, however, the line may not be as long as once thought. A year ago the Wikipedia page listed eight people as having held the post, with a footnote about a possible ninth. By last month, that had been revised to just three official title-holders, supplemented by alternate lists of many more unofficial ones.

The main sources for these were Vernon Bogdanor’s 1995 book The Monarchy and the Constitution, Jonathan Kirkup & Stephen Thornton’s 2015 article ‘Everyone needs a Willie’: The elusive position of deputy to the British prime minister, Rodney Brazier’s 2020 book Choosing a Prime Minister: The Transfer of Power in Britain, and the Lord Norton of Louth’s 2020 book Governing Britain: Parliament, Ministers and Our Ambiguous Constitution. The latter has been much advertised on his lordship’s blog in recent months. The differences in the lists that they give shows that there is much scholarly dispute over who can be canonically considered a deputy prime minister in this country. In addition to those who were thought to have the title but actually didn’t, there are several listed as not having the title but still performing essentially the same function.

Different authorities have different criteria for who should be counted – Bogdanor lists those who chaired the cabinet in the prime minister’s absence and chaired numerous cabinet committees, Kirkup & Thornton use a five point checklist:

  • Styled as Deputy Prime Minister in Hansard or the Gazette
  • Designated as such by the Prime Minister
  • Recognised as such by their cabinet colleagues
  • Listed second in the cabinet hierarchy
  • Answered Prime Minister’s Questions

Clement Attlee, generally considered the trope maker and codifier, was Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955, a period which included the 1940-1945 wartime coalition government. Churchill had him appointed Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1940, then Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in 1942, then Lord President of the Council in 1943. He deputised for Churchill in parliamentary questions and cabinet meetings, with many sources saying he essentially ran all domestic business of the government while Churchill focused on the war. Curiously the time period usually given for his tenure as DPM begins only in February 1942. The Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield asserts that George VI’s minute for that reshuffle just said “Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs” and that it was Churchill who wrote “Deputy Prime Minister” on a separate paper. Bogdanor also asserts that Attlee was never formally given the latter title by the King.

Herbert Morrison was Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons through most Attlee’s premiership from 1945 to 1951, switching to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the last few months. He is counted by Bogdanor, Kirkup & Thornton and Norton but not by Brazier.

Sir Anthony Eden was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs during Churchill’s peactime ministry of 1951 to 1955. He is considered by all the lists to have functioned as DPM, though the King did not formally appoint him as such.

R. A. Butler is counted by all, though there is dispute as to when he took office. Under Eden and Macmillan he held several overlapping posts: Lord Privy Seal (1955-59), Leader of the House of Commons (1955-61), Chairman of the Conservative Party (1959-61), Secretary of State for the Home Department (1957-62) and First Secretary of State (1962-63). Brazier considers him to have been DPM beginning in 1955 but Norton believes he only started in 1962. Both agree he ceased when Douglas-Home replaced Macmillan in 1963.

George Brown became Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1960 and remained so throughout Wilson’s first two governments, resigning after the general election of 1970. From 1964 to 1966 he was First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, then he was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs until 1968. It could be a typo, but Brazier apparently still considered him to have been DPM after that despite him no longer being in government.

Michael Stewart was First Secretary of State from 1966 to 1968 then Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs from 1968 to 1970, succeeding Brown in both offices. He is counted by Bogdanor as well as Kirkup & Thornton to have been DPM in the last two years.

Curiously none of the authors consider Barbara Castle (First Secretary of State 1968-70) to be worthy of inclusion.

Reginald Maudling had been appointed by Heath as Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party in 1965. He was appointed Secretary of State for the Home Department following the party’s election victory in 1970. He resigned both posts in 1972. Bogdanor and Brazier consider him to have been DPM for two years.

William Whitelaw was Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1991, being created Viscount Whitelaw roughly halfway through this period. He was appointed Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1979, then Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords from 1983 to 1988. All the lists include him as DPM while he was in government, but are clear that he did not actually hold the formal title.

Sir Geoffrey Howe is widely considered to have been DPM from a reshuffle in 1989 until his famous resignation in 1990. He held the posts of Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons. When I commented on Norton’s blog suggesting his inclusion the noble lord replied:

Sir Geoffrey Howe was offered the title, but as he explained in his autobiography:
Charles Powell then contacted him to tell him that Buckingham Palace ‘had had a little difficulty in accepting the official description “Deputy Prime Minister” . They were proposing to follow the precedent of Eden with Churchill and use the form of words: “Sir Geoffrey will act as Deputy Prime Minister”.

Michael Heseltine, it seems, is the first to be definitively appointed Deputy Prime Minister. He held the title from 1995 to 1997 as well as being First Secretary of State.

John Prescott was the second canonical incumbent. He had been elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and was appointed Deputy Prime Minister after the general election of 1997, resigning both posts in 2007. For his first four years in government he was Secretary of State for Environment, Transport & the Regions. Thereafter he was First Secretary of State.

It is another curiosity that none of the lists include anyone for Gordon Brown’s premiership, even though the Lord Mandelson (First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council 2009-2010) was widely considered to be DPM for the last eleven months of New Labour.

Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats throughout their coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, was the third canonical DPM. He was also appointed Lord President of the Council and Minister for Political & Constitutional Reform. He regularly stood in for David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions.

William Hague was First Secretary of State through the same period. He was the second Conservative in the cabinet hierarchy and answered Prime Minister’s Questions when both of his superiors were absent. He was the senior member of Cameron’s shadow cabinet and so probably would have been DPM had the party won outright in 2010.

George Osborne was First Secretary of State and second in the cabinet ranking during Cameron’s second government of 2015 to 2016. He answered Prime Minister’s Questions in Cameron’s absence.

Theresa May did not appoint a DPM for FSoS during her first ministry. Most seem to have assumed that Philip Hammond (Chancellor of the Exchequer) was deputy by default. When she missed PMQs on 7 December it was David Lidington, Leader of the House of Commons, who stood in for her.

Damian Green was appointed First Secretary of State and Minister for the Cabinet Office in June 2017 but had to resign in scandal in December. He was second in the cabinet ranking and deputised at PMQs.

David Lidington was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from January 2018 to July 2019. He was second in the cabinet ranking throughout despite not holding either of the usual titles. He again deputised at PMQs during this period.

Dominic Raab was appointed First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs in July 2019. He resigned both posts this month in favour of Deputy Prime Minister, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice. Bizarrely many press sources called this a demotion. He took charge of the government last year when Boris Johnson was in intensive care, and has deputised at PMQs many times, including last week. He would appear to be the fourth canonical DPM, having the title in Hansard as well as in government publications (no Gazette mention yet). Oddly the cabinet rankings until recently had him below the Chancellors of the Exchequer (Sajid Javid, then Rishi Sunak) and the most recent list of cabinet committees showed he wasn’t chairing any of them.

One might reasonably be wondering at this point as to the constitutional distinction between Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State. Put simply, the latter actually exists in law. Every time a new first secretary is appointed there will be an order in council recording it, in the same way as for all the other secretaries of state. The office commands a salary in its own right and so an incumbent does not need to hold a sinecure in conjunction. This is in contrast to Deputy Prime Minister, which has no legal existence and is, in effect, simply a courtesy title given by the actual Prime Minister. Every holder of the title has simultaneously held at least one other ministerial office.

There is, though, one way in which First Secretary of State is like the Deputy Prime Minister and unlike the other secretaries of state. As I commented to Norton last year:

The main difference between the First Secretary of State and all the others is that he is a minister without a ministry. While there is an Order in Council to appoint a new First Secretary of State each time, there has never been a statutory instrument to establish a corresponding First Department. For this reason there is a little similarity with the title of Deputy Prime Minister in that leaving the position vacant has the same practical effect as abolishing it (indeed the press often don’t know which term to use), because the role cannot be proven to exist if it is not occupied.

Discerning Dukes

Posted on by
Reply

This afternoon I missed a turnoff on the way to my second COVID vaccination. While navigating back to where I should have been I discovered Church Street where there was a pub called the Duke of York. This struck me because the pub’s sign showed an illustration of the duke’s coat of arms which I instantly recognised as Sodacan’s illustration from Wikimedia Commons. Unfortunately I wasn’t in a position to stop and take a photograph and what I can find in the pub’s own galleries or on Google Street View isn’t very clear, so I cannot work out which particular duke is being honoured here.

The Prince Andrew, Duke of York since 1986, uses the royal arms of the United Kingdom differenced by a label of three points Argent, the centre bearing an anchor Azure. This same cadency label was also used by his grandfather George VI from 1920 to 1936, and by his father George V from 1892 to 1901. It plainly cannot be George V represented here since his arms as Duke of York included the inescutcheon of Saxony. The main identifier, therefore, is the harp of Ireland – versions made during the present reign use a plain harp, while those issued in earlier reigns show a woman’s head and chest carved into the side. I think that this pub sign shows the modern version but the image resolution is too low to be sure.

Ever to Succeed

Posted on by
Reply

News has broken that two days ago Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice, Mrs Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, gave birth for the first time. Her yet-unnamed daughter is eleventh in line to the throne. I wished to edit the relevant Wikipedia article accordingly, but that proved difficult as the list had multiple levels of indentation to reflect the generations and all the numbers had to be changed manually.

There is a challenge in deciding just how many names to include on the page. The legitimate non-Papist descendants of George I’s mother number well into the thousands nowadays and the vast majority of them are non-notable. The editors have here decided to limit the display to the descendants of the sons of George V. In practice this just means Bertie, Harry and Georgie, since David and John both died without issue. Even that restricted selection comprises sixty-three living people, of whom thirty-two have no pages of their own.

The clumsiness of editing this list brought up an idea I had some years ago for giving each member of the diaspora a numerical code to indicate their position within the succession. The electress herself, being the origin of the succession, would be 0. Her eldest son Georg Ludwig would be 1, her next son Frederick Augustus 2, Maximilian William 3 and so on. For each generation a digit is added, so Georg’s offspring George Augustus and Sophia Dorothea would be 1.1 and 1.2, while George Augustus’s children would be 1.11, 1.12, 1.13 and so forth. Under this system Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent & Strathearn would be 1.11141 while Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York would be 1.111411221. Prince Philip of Greece & Denmark would, I think, be 1.111416331. The beauty of this system is that the crown always goes to the living person with the lowest number, rather than each new birth or death close to the throne forcing everyone downstream to be renumbered.

There are downsides, of course. First, there is always the danger of one day discovering a missing sibling who died young and was forgotten to history. Second, until the commencement of the Perth Agreement the crown followed male-preference primogeniture, so any girl’s code was liable to change upon the arrival of a brother. Third, if any person in the line has more than nine legitimate children then the numerals would be inadequate (as in George III’s case, though perhaps there one could only number his nine sons and omit his nine daughters, none of whom had surviving children of her own), and an alphabetical system might be needed instead – Elizabeth II would be AAAADAABBA and the late Prince Philip AAAADAFCCA.

On a related note, I have been keeping tabs on Judiciary UK for some months looking at new judgements as they come out. My main interest was Bell v Tavistock, but the day before that was resolved my eye was caught by the decision of Sir Andrew McFarlane (President of the Family Division) not to publish the Duke of Edinburgh’s will. Sir Andrew spoke at length about official etiquette regarding the royal family, and shed some light on that term’s definition. For Wikipedians, academics, press and others, there has always been a little confusion as to when membership of the family ends**. Is it the top X in line to the throne? Everyone descended from the current monarch? All descendants in the male line from George V? From Victoria? Everyone styled Royal Highness? Everyone on the balcony at Trooping the Colour? Then there are the gradations – often the headlines talk of “minor royals”, usually meaning the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent but sometimes including the Prince of Wales’s siblings and niblings, while mentions of “senior royals” are even more nebulous. One reason for this difficulty is that there are really three separate types of rank within group – precedence is determined by one’s relationship to the incumbent monarch, style and title by generations’ removal from any monarch and succession by primogeniture of descent from Sophia. McFarlane, in his judgement, may have given some more substance on which to build at least the latter’s definition.

From paragraph 15: This Court has been informed that in recent times the definition of the members of the Royal Family whose executors might,as a matter of course,apply to have the will sealed up has been limited to the children of the Sovereign or a former Sovereign, the Consort of the Sovereign or former Sovereign, and a member of the Royal Family who at the time of death was first or second in line of succession to the throne or the child of such a person. In addition, the wills of other, less senior, members of the Royal Family may have been sealed for specific reasons, or, as the list of names suggests, a wider definition of “Royal Family” may have been applied in this context in earlier times.

From paragraph 23: The confidential note that was disclosed and is attached to Charles J’s judgment contains an interesting account of the development of the practice of sealing Royal wills during the last century. That note provided that, in particular,the practice of applying to the Family Division applied, as a matter of course,to ‘senior members of the Royal Family’ who were defined as:

•The Consort of a Sovereign or former Sovereign;

•The child of a Sovereign or former Sovereign;and

•A member of the Royal Family who, at the time of His/or Her death, is first or second in line of succession to the throne or the child of such a person.

This means that, for judges’ purposes “senior royal” essentially means monarchs themselves, their consorts and their children (not necessarily children-in-law), as well as the first two in line to the throne and their children. Monarchs’ children are easy enough to spot from the rest, with the definitive article in their princely styles and their coronets of crosses interspersed with fleur-de-lys, but the latter category could be unstable – Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret of York would have been senior by this definition during their grandfather’s reign but would have lost that status had Edward VIII sired children of his own.

Applying it to the current situation, then, we can see that the seniors of the present royal family are:

  • HM The Queen
  • HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales
  • HRH The Prince Andrew, Duke of York
  • HRH The Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex
  • HRH The Princess Anne, Princess Royal
  • HRH Prince William, Duke of Cambridge
  • HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex
  • HRH Prince George of Cambridge
  • HRH Princess Charlotte of Cambridge
  • HRH Prince Louis of Cambridge

There is one part of the judgement with which I take issue – paragraph 13 says It is understood that the first member of the Royal Family whose will was sealed on the direction of the President of the Probate, Admiralty and Divorce Division was His Serene Highness Prince Francis of Teck. Prince Francis was the younger brother of Princess Mary of Teck who, upon her marriage to King George V, became Queen Mary in 1910. Later that same year, at the age of 40 years, Prince Francis died. An application was made for the will to be sealed and not published. The application was granted. This is a little misleading, as Mary married Prince George, Duke of York in 1893 and became Queen on his accession in 1910. The judge’s text implies that she didn’t marry him until he was already King.

*Some in the press have claimed that as her father is an Italian count, the baby will be a countess, but the title is not recognised by the Italian republic or by the United Kingdom. Most likely she will be Miss [[Firstname]] Mapelli Mozzi.
**Of course, any family can present this difficulty as few are consciously defined by any formal rules.

UPDATE (1st October)

Princess Beatrice’s baby is named Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi.

In Those Circles

Posted on by
Reply

Five years ago I discovered a project called the Culture Concept Circle. It is run by Carolyn McDowall, an “independent cultural and social historian”. The YouTube channel comprises a long series of short documentaries about the history of art and design, a lot of them focusing on British architecture. The videos are not as polished as those you’d see on television – they are mostly just zooming or panning along stock still images (often low resolution) with a voiceover lecture – but this should not diminish their appeal for anyone already interested in the subject matter. If anything, they highlight how much of a modern TV documentary is essentially padding. The People Profiles are somewhere in between, as are History Matters and Extra History.

I’ve also recently discovered English Heritage podcasts. They cover an eclectic range of subjects from royal romances to Darwin’s gardens. The one that particularly caught me was How the railways shaped the nation. This is less because of its actual content than because it is narrated by collections curator Dr Matt Thompson, whose voice sounds remarkably similar to that of Ted Robbins.