The Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom is no more. It dissolved just after midnight… or did it?

Parliament’s own website and guidance documents seem to indicate that dissolution took effect at 00:01 today, but I doubt the factual accuracy of this and I am not the only one.

I spent much of today keeping a close eye on the Privy Council website to see when there would be an update about today’s meeting. It arrived sometime before 13:00. The PDF records that His Majesty ordered the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal of the Realm to the proclamation, and also (alongside the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) to arrange the issuance of writs of summons and election. The text of the proclamation itself is reproduced below:

Whereas We have thought fit, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, to dissolve this
present Parliament, which stands prorogued to Friday, the thirty-first day of May: We do, for
that End, publish this Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby dissolve the said Parliament
accordingly: And the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Members of the House of
Commons, are discharged from further Attendance thereat: And We being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in Parliament, do
hereby make known to all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new
Parliament: and do hereby further declare, that, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council,
We have given Order that Our Chancellor of Great Britain and Our Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland do respectively, upon Notice thereof, forthwith, issue out Writs, in due Form
and according to Law, for calling a new Parliament: And We do hereby also, by this Our
Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm, require Writs forthwith to be issued
accordingly by Our said Chancellor and Secretary of State respectively, for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly
returned to, and give their Attendance in, Our said Parliament on Tuesday, the ninth day of
July next, which Writs are to be returnable in due course of Law.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of May in the Year of our Lord
two thousand and twenty four and in the second year of Our Reign.

The Privy Council website does not give texts like these for 2010 and earlier, but sound recordings of those earlier occasions confirm that the same wording was in use. The most notable feature of these proclamations is that they specify dissolution taking place immediately upon the date given and also fix the date for the new parliament to assemble, but don’t actually say when polling day will be.

The FTPA Era

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 substantially altered the mechanics of British general elections. No longer could the sitting prime minister simply “go to the country” whenever he pleased, instead the date of the general election would be fixed as the first Thursday in May in the fifth year since the previous general election, unless two thirds of the House of Commons voted to have one earlier. Dissolution of the outgoing legislature would occur automatically twenty-five working days before polling.

In a moment of supreme constitutional pettiness, the act even transferred the authority for writs of election for MPs (though curiously not writs of summons for peers) to the Lord Chancellor and Northern Ireland Secretary to act without the monarch’s instruction, so that this element was taken out of the proclamation.

Three general elections occurred while the FTPA was in force – the fifty-fifth Parliament was allowed to run its natural course, the fifty-sixth was dissolved early by the two thirds motion and the fifty-seventh by a special act of its own passage. Despite these very different constitutional circumstances, the proclamations in all cases were identical (save of course the specific dates mentioned). Below is the text of the proclamation from 2019:

Whereas We, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in
Parliament, do publish this, Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby make known to
all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new Parliament to be
holden at Westminster on Tuesday the seventeenth day of December next: And We do
hereby also, by this Our Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm,
require Writs to be issued by Our Lord High Chancellor for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal who are to serve in the said Parliament to give their
Attendance in Our said Parliament on the said date.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this sixth day of November in the Year of
our Lord two thousand and nineteen and in the sixty-eighth year of Our Reign.

The 2017 version can be read here, and that of 2015 heard here. The 2017 election also had a different proclamation nine days earlier to appoint the polling date, though this proclamation did not enjoy any of the latter’s accompanying ceremony despite clearly being the more politically important of the two.

As you can see, this version of the proclamation is a pathetic sliver of its former self – the issuance of writs refers entirely to the House of Lords and thus doesn’t actually say anything to the general public about participating in an election. The only substantive agency which Her Majesty retained was in choosing the date on which the new Parliament met – and per the other provisions of the FTPA this no longer had any knock-on effect for subsequent elections. Even the name was changed – it became simply “A Proclamation for declaring the calling of a new Parliament” instead of “A Proclamation for dissolving the present Parliament and declaring the calling of another”.

Changes in Procedure

Although it may seem a question of semantics, there is an important difference in the sequence of events between FTPA-era elections and earlier ones: Traditional practice involves a proclamation to dissolve Parliament with immediate effect, then an election happening a certain time after that. FTPA practice was for the election date to be fixed far in advance (whether by the other type of proclamation or by statute) and dissolution would happen a certain number of days before that. In the old system a privy council comprising incumbent parliamentarians would convene to cause their own dissolution and the other matters connected, whereas in under the FTPA they would meet to arrange the other matters several hours after dissolution had already occurred.

That brings us to the key point of this article – the time of day at which dissolution actually takes effect: With the FTPA in place and thus the dissolution date pre-ordained without the need for further action, it was logical to treat it as happening as soon as that date arrived*, which would also have been the case under the old system if a Parliament had been allowed to run its full course. When Parliament is being dissolved by a specific proclamation for that purpose, then it obviously must stay in existence until the proclamation is actually produced – and it is rare for a privy council to be convened at midnight. None of the proclamations specified delaying their effects until the end of the date, and obviously they cannot be retroactive to the beginning of the date because, as mentioned in the previous post, there have been instances of Parliaments still sitting earlier on the same date as that on which they would be dissolved, and retroactive dissolution would have meant that the sitting (including any acts passed and royal assents given thereat) was invalid.

In today’s example, the fifty-eighth Parliament had already been prorogued from 24th May to 31st, but until the privy council held around noon there had been nothing in law to cause it to dissolve, and its natural expiration was still many months away. If Sunak’s government had suddenly gotten cold feet about calling an election, or if His Majesty was somehow prevented from attending (for the sake of the hypothetical let us assume he could not arrange any counsellors of state to be there either) and thus the meeting to approve the proclamation had not gone ahead, then Parliament would have remained in existence and reconvened the next day for the beginning of a fifth session.

Given that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act with the explicit intention to revert to pre-2011 procedure as far as possible, it does not make sense for parliamentary authorities to declare in their guidance and press briefings that the legislature had dissolved many hours before any such thing had actually taken place. The most logical explanation (pending further research) that comes to mind is that that the guidance was written during the 2011-22 period and not updated thereafter, so that the FTPA mentality remains in force even though the law itself does not.

This whole business also caused some difficulty for me as a Wikipedia editor, since I noticed upon rising this morning that another editor had, just after midnight, already changed the tense of my disclaimer flairs on the biographies of still-current MPs. I reverted the change and did not set it forward again until many hours later when I had actually seen the proclamation published online. In all fairness the other editor was merely following reliable sources as we are bound to do. Unfortunately this goes to show that there are many times when the reliable sources can still get things wrong.

*There is a secondary deliberation as to whether this means exactly midnight or, to avoid ambiguity, one minute later. I will not quibble with that particular question here as it does not affect the primary matter I am discussing.

UPDATE (May 2024)

David Torrance has produced a research briefing for the House of Commons Library. Page 7 cites this post and states that “This timing was intended for operational purposes rather than as a statement of the legal position.” with page 10 confirming that the actual dissolution occurred at 11:57am with the application of the Great Seal to the proclamation.