Category Archives: Politics

Washing Up, Washing Out

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Yesterday evening the fifty-eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom was prorogued for the fourth and final time, pending dissolution next Thursday. This meant that MPs had just two days of “wash up” in which any bills already in the pipeline are either hurried to completion or abandoned altogether.

Parliament is not always prorogued before dissolution, sometime it is merely adjourned – in the past fifty years the 46th, 47th, 48th, 49th, 52nd, 53rd and 57th parliaments were all open-ended. Irrespective of whether or not a prorogation was involved, the time elapsed between a parliament’s last sitting day and its dissolution varies highly: For the second general election of 1974 it seems that the 46th Parliament sat last on 31st July before rising for the summer recess then got dissolved on 20th September just before it could convene again, whereas in 1992 the 50th Parliament sat last and was dissolved on the same day.*

Rishi Sunak’s motivation for this particular timetable is unclear – if he had let the legislature sit on 28th and 29th May it would have allowed four days instead of two to finish business, so that fewer bills would have needed to be dropped. Perhaps Sunak felt it would be a waste of commuting time to sit for just two days between the bank holiday and the dissolution. Some have also speculated that he wanted Parliament closed as soon as possible to reduce the opportunity for his backbenchers to unseat him as party leader. A precedent might be found in John Major in 1997, who had the 51st Parliament prorogued more than a fortnight before it was dissolved and was suspected of doing so to block the publication of a select committee report against Neil Hamilton.

When a general election is looming, incumbent MPs have to make a decision: Step down and make one’s valedictory speech in the chamber before prorogation, or stand again and risk having to make it instead from the returning officer’s podium in the early hours after polls close. By the time the house closed more than a hundred members (over seventy of them Conservatives) had chosen the first option. The valedictory debate lasted nearly seven hours and obviously I have not yet been able to properly take in all of the speeches. So far my favourites were Sir James Duddridge (with its interventions by both Alicia Kearns and Dame Eleanor Laing), Julian Knight (who took the chance to lash out at former colleagues who had wronged him) and Tim Loughton (differentiating knowledge from wisdom in terms of putting tomatoes in fruit salads).

The prorogation ceremony was carried out in the usual way. There were two substitutions among the Lords Commissioners – Liberal Democrat leader Lord Newby was replaced by his deputy Lord Dholakia (as in 2019) while Convenor of the Crossbench peers Lord Kinnoull (still not a privy council member) stayed on the crossbenches and left his place on the woolsack to his predecessor-but-two Lord Laming. Eleven acts received assent.

As in the prorogation last November, the letters patent acknowledged that there had been a demise of the crown since the last general election, hence the phrase

…whereas Queen Elizabeth The Second did lately for divers difficult and pressing affairs concerning Us the State and defence of Our United Kingdom and Church ordain this Our present Parliament to begin and be holden at Our City of Westminster the seventeenth day of December in the sixty-eighth year of Her Reign on which day Our said Parliament was begun and holden and is there now holden…

which as Jack Blackburn of The Times aptly pointed out is the last time that the former monarch will be mentioned in Parliament in this context.

As I have mentioned before, the dissolution of Parliament creates a headache for Wikipedia editors as hundreds of people who for years or even were incumbent members of the House of Commons cease to be so for a matter of weeks, then (most of them) become so again after polling day. This time, rather than have many of us hurriedly scouring hundreds of pages to remove any trace of incumbency, I am trialing a solution I piloted at the devolved elections three years ago by placing a disclaimer tag at the top of each affected article. The beauty of this trick is that the template can be centrally edited, so I can go at a more leisurely pace adding it to MPs’ articles in the days before dissolution with the notice written in future tense and then on the day of dissolution change it to present tense. Of course, that still leaves a lot of work making long-term edits to the pages of those members who will permanently leave the house at this election (whether willingly or not) and creating new pages for their successors.

EXTERNAL LINKS

House of Commons Library

Privy Council Office

UPDATE (2nd June)

When looking through the Hansard records for this sitting, I noticed an interesting mistake:

End of the Fifth Session (opened on 7 November 2023) of the Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the Second Year of the Reign of His Majesty King Charles the Third.

The last sitting day before 7th November 2023 was 26th October, and the record for that day says it was the end of the third session. Quite when the fourth session came and went I have no idea.

*The 1993 documentary Days of Majesty covers the prorogation and dissolution process.

Calling it a day

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Today, after many months of speculation, the Prime Minister announced that a parliamentary general election will be held on Thursday 4th July. In advance of this the current fifty-eighth parliament will be prorogued on 24th May and dissolved on 30th May. Sunak had previously said that the general election would be “in the second half of 2024”. This date just barely qualifies, being the 186th day out of 366. Some ministers had hinted at a “working assumption” that the election would be in October.

This is the first time a prime minister has been able to “call an election” in this manner since Gordon Brown in 2010, with those in between being constrained by the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, which was finally repealed in 2022. This timing means that it is obviously not a “snap” election like those of 2017 and 2019, but also doesn’t have quite as long a build-up as those of 2010 and 2015.

One consequence of having the campaign period throughout the month of June is that the royal family, as per tradition, will postpone any high-profile events from that period to avoid distracting attention from the politicians. Exactly how many events will be rescheduled is not yet confirmed: It has been said that the 80th anniversary D-Day commemorations will be going ahead as planned, but no word yet on the timing of Trooping the Colour, Garter Day or the King’s Birthday Honours.

This election will also be the first since 2010 to see significant boundary reforms enacted. My own constituency of Beverly & Holderness will be slightly reduced in size, the North Holderness Ward being transferred to the new seat of Bridlington & the Wolds.

In Honour of the Occasion

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Photograph by sbclick, 2011 (CC-BY-1.0)

In theory the monarch can bestow practically any accolade on any person at any time and for any reason. In practice, since the late Victorian age there has been a trend towards grouping announcements into two big lists each year – one in June for the sovereign’s official birthday, one in December for the upcoming new year. There are also smaller lists issued at irregular intervals to commemorate particular events e.g. the deaths of senior royals, the dissolutions of parliaments and the resignations of prime ministers. The latter two types tend to be particularly controversial.

Wikipedians have generally maintained pages for all of the lists, great and small. They  have also created an annual page called “Special Honours”, which they use as a catch-all term for those titles and decorations which were issued outside of any named occasion.

Today’s announcement is a little confusing for those seeking categorisation – the Prime Minister’s office has released a list of honours and appointments for March 2024. The document as a whole does not have any particular name, but paragraphs within it do: Creative Industries Honours, Technology & Artificial Intelligence Honours, and Political Honours. The former has provoked the most recognition, appointing film producer Emma Thomas as a DBE and her husband Christopher Nolan (already a CBE since 2019) as a knight bachelor. There is also a short list new privy counsellors (e.g. Vaughan Gething, recently appointed as First Minister of Wales), though whether these count as honours in the way knighthoods do is debatable.

This new publication comes just forty-eight days after the list of “Political Peerages” (e.g. yet more new members of the House of Lords). It eludes me why today’s list was not brought forward to be merged with that one, or pushed back to fold in with the Birthday Honours in June. The only likely explanation is that these were Rishi Sunak’s personal picks and he (or His Majesty) wanted that distinction made clear in the public mind. Of course, that could also have been achieved by waiting for the looming dissolution honours at this year’s general election – or indeed Sunak’s resignation honours, which may well come earlier!

A Cluster of Camerons

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Donald Andrew John Cameron was elected to the devolved Scottish Parliament in 2016 on the regional list for Highlands & Islands. He served in many roles in the shadow cabinet at Holyrood, but last month resigned his seat upon appointment as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland in the national government at Westminster. To facilitate these duties he was ennobled yesterday as Baron Cameron of Lochiel, of Achnacarry in the County of Inverness. Although this is a life peerage, he also holds the hereditary chieftancy of Clan Cameron, of which two other members currently sit in the upper house – and both of them acted as supporters to his introduction ceremony.

Ewan James Hanning Cameron, Baron Cameron of Dillington, has sat as a crossbencher since 2004, having previously worked in semi-political rural advocacy roles during the premiership of Tony Blair. He is a grandson of Sir Donald Walter Cameron, the 25th Clan Chief, thus making him an agnatic first cousin once removed of Lord Cameron of Lochiel.

David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, should already be familiar to most readers as the former prime minister and current foreign secretary. His consanguinity to the new peer is very distant, his great-great-grandfather Sir Ewen Cameron having claimed descent from the Camerons of Erracht, themselves being descended from a younger son of the 13th Lochiel and branching from the main clan in the sixteenth century.

The arms of Clan Cameron are Gules three bars Or. Lochiel naturally bears these undifferenced, while Dillington differences with in the honour point an escallop of the second. Chipping Norton differences with four bezants in chief.

The House of Commons also saw an introduction ceremony yesterday when George Galloway returned after a nine year absence having been elected MP for Rochdale. MPs who win by-elections are also traditionally escorted to the clerks’ table by two incumbent members. There were reports that Galloway had asked Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) and Sir David Davis (Haltemprice & Howden) to act as his sponsors but both had turned him down. He was instead accompanied by Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) and Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldey & Cowdenbeath).

EXTERNAL LINKS

A Patten Emerges

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On St George’s Day last year His Majesty appointed two new companions of the Order of the Garter – Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes. Obviously that would mean their banners of arms would at some point be erected at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. At the time it was not public knowledge what their lordships’ arms actually were, if indeed they had any, and given how long it was taking to find out about Blair and Amos I was not optimistic of learning any time soon.

Today they were revealed by Major Alastair Bruce of Crionaich via what used to be called a Tweet. He shows photographs of two banners of arms along with an excerpt from an online article, which I will quote below:

Baroness Ashton served in the Ministry of Justice and later as the EU’s first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security policy. She contributed towards negotiating a peace settlement between Serbia and Kosovo. Red roses reflect the fact that Upholland, which forms part of Baroness Ashton’s title, is in Lancashire.

On Lord Patten’s banner the pearls allude to the crest of Hong Kong where he was Governor from 1992 to 1997. The blue field and crowns replicate the arms of Oxford University where Lord Patten has been Chancellor since 2003.

It is not clear precisely where Bruce found this information, as the message includes the web address of St George’s Chapel but does not specify an exact page. I have looked through the site to find a recent update about Patten and Ashton but found nothing. I hope this will be resolved soon.

As for the heraldic designs themselves: Patten’s arms are perfectly dignified if a little unoriginal. Having the shield resemble that of his university could make for a confusing sight should he try to impale them. Ashton’s banner is an overloaded mess redolent of the worst excesses of the early nineteenth century.

That the reveal of these arms took only nine months instead of eighteen is a positive sign. I hope that future grants of arms will become public even faster.

UPDATE (15th January)

Baz Manning informs me that the images and quoted text are from The Dragon, the community newsletter of St George’s Chapel.

A Note on the Honours Given to Prime Ministers

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Cameron’s ennoblement got me thinking about the general trend of honours given to former prime ministers. Combing through Wikipedia, I have produced a list of them. To keep it from becoming overly long (and to avoid ambiguities about who counts as a prime minister), I have restricted it to honours conferred after the end of Victoria’s reign.

Although their legal status is much the same, British orders of chivalry can be politically divided into two categories: The Baronetage, Knights Bachelor, the Orders of the Bath, St Michael & St George, the Companions of Honour and the British Empire are appointed on the advice of government ministers, while the Royal Victorian Order, the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem and the Order of Merit are conferred at the monarch’s personal whim. The Orders of the Garter and Thistle fell into the former category in the early eighteenth century but were changed to the latter in 1946. Peerages both life and hereditary are presumed to be in the former category.

Here is a simplified list of who received which kind of honour and when. Honours which a person held before ascending to the premiership are not included:

HONOURS IN THE MONARCH’S GIFT

Garter (post-’46)

  • Churchill in 1953 (while still prime minister, in advance of the coronation)
  • Attlee in 1956 (resigned as Labour leader the previous year)
  • Wilson in 1976 (three weeks after leaving office)
  • Callaghan in 1987 (three weeks before stepping down from the Commons)
  • Thatcher in 1995
  • Major in 2005
  • Blair in 2021 (New Year’s Eve)

Merit

  • Balfour in 1916
  • Lloyd George in 1919 (while still prime minister)
  • Churchill in 1946 (while opposition leader)
  • Attlee in 1951 (while opposition leader, ten days after premiership’s end)
  • Macmillan in 1976
  • Thatcher in 1990 (nine days after premiership’s end)

St John

  • Thatcher in 1991 (Dame of Justice)

HONOURS ON MINISTERS’ ADVICE

Garter (pre-’46)

  • Balfour in 1922 (backbench MP) (adv. Lloyd George)
  • Asquith in 1925 (adv. Baldwin)
  • Baldwin in 1937 (adv. Chamberlain) (immediately after resignation)

Companion of Honour

  • Attlee in 1945 (adv. Churchill) (shortly after resigning as Deputy PM)
  • Major in 1998 (adv. Blair)

Hereditary peerage

  • Balfour in 1922 (adv. Lloyd George)
  • Asquith in 1925 (adv. Baldwin)
  • Baldwin in 1937 (adv. Chamberlain)
  • Lloyd George in 1945 (adv. Churchill)
  • Attlee in 1955 (adv. Churchill)
  • Eden in 1961 (adv. Macmillan)
  • Macmillan in (adv. Thatcher)

Life peerage

  • Douglas-Home in 1974 (adv. Wilson)
  • Wilson in 1983 (adv. Thatcher) (dissolution honours)
  • Callaghan in 1987 (adv. Thatcher) (dissolution honours)
  • Thatcher in 1992 (adv. Major) (dissolution honours)
  • Cameron in 2023 (adv. Sunak)

It may also be worth considering honours given to the spouses of prime ministers, whether for achievements in their own right or by right of marriage.

  • Margaret Lloyd George: GBE in 1918 (adv. her husband)
  • Lucy Baldwin: GBE and DStJ in 1937 (former adv. Chamberlain)
  • Clementine Churchill: GBE in 1946 (adv. Attlee), life peer in 1965 (adv. Wilson)
  • Dorothy Macmillan: GBE in 1964 (adv. Douglas-Home)
  • Denis Thatcher: TD in 1982, baronet in 1990 (adv. Major), CStJ in 1991.
  • Norma Major: DBE in 1999 (adv. Blair)
  • Cherie Booth/Blair: CBE in 2013 (adv. Cameron)
  • Philip May: Knight bachelor in 2020 (adv. Johnson)

Unless I’ve missed any, no current or former prime minister (or their spouse) has, from 1901 onward, been appointed to the Order of the Bath, the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of the Thistle or the Royal Victorian Order.

UPDATE (August 2024)

Theresa May has received a life peerage, for which she was nominated by Rishi Sunak in the dissolution honours last month.

FURTHER READING

Chipping off the old block

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One week after the announcement of his appointment, David Cameron took his seat in the House of Lords today. Although there is still no update on the London Gazette (their website tends to be quite slow in these matters), he was shown Parliament.UK as a member of the house from Friday and today the reading clerk confirmed he had been created Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, of Chipping Norton in the County of Oxfordshire on 17th November.

Cameron is the fifth former prime minister to be ennobled in pursuance of the Life Peerages Act 1958 – the others being the Lord Home of the Hirsel (1974), the Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (1983), the Lord Callaghan of Cardiff (1987) and the Baroness Thatcher (1992).

Of those, only Thatcher had her introduction ceremony recorded for television. Hers was the older style featuring bicorne hats, bowing, and the reading of the writ of summons after the letters patent, all of which were omitted from 1997 onwards. Cameron’s is the post-2020 version which retains some changes to the choreography meant to comply with COVID-era social distancing requirements. His supporters, the Lord True and the Baroness Williams of Trafford, are both incumbent ministers (Leader of the House and Chief Whip respectively) and both were appointed to the upper house during Cameron’s premiership. Thatcher, in her maiden speech, remarked that some 214 then-members of the house were her own appointments. I don’t know quite what the present figure is for Cameron (though I do remember the late Lady Boothroyd complaining in 2015 about it being too high).

Cameron’s choice of territorial designation is slightly surprising – most would likely have expected him to choose Witney, his old constituency, rather than Chipping Norton, a fairly small town within it. Simply being “The Lord Cameron” without further specification would not have been allowed as there are already several other life peers and a Scottish clan by that surname. The prior example of a two-word location which comes most prominently to mind (at least as far as senior ministers are concerned) is the Lord Butler of Saffron Walden – though that had been Rab’s constituency name as well.

Curiously, it is not clear yet if Cameron has been properly appointed to the office of Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs as the latest Privy Council minutes do not mention him.

UPDATE (23rd November)

Cameron’s peerage was Gazetted on Tuesday, and his ministerial appointment was formalised on Wednesday. He also made his maiden speech on Tuesday.

Sir David’s Day

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Just over two years have passed since the murder of Sir David Amess, MP for the town (now city) of Southend-on-Sea. It was announced at an intermediate point that he would have his shield of arms fixed to the wall of the Commons chamber, in the manner of other murdered MPs – the most recent example being Jo Cox.

Now, at long last, the shield has been revealed.

Sir David was presumably non-armigerous during his lifetime, with this being a posthumous grant arranged through his widow Julia. So far no news source that I can find (and certainly not the College of Arms) has published the blazon, which I would guess is something like Azure on a chief conjoined to a pale between two talbots rampant Or five roses Gules barbed and seeded Proper. According to press releases the roses represent his five children as well as his gardening hobbies while the talbots represent his animal welfare campaigns and his time at Bournemouth University.

Most intriguing is the motto of His Life Remains, which Julia chose because “wherever I go, I am reminded of him in some way: someone he has helped, a charity he has supported and people whose lives he has touched”. It is unusual for a heraldic motto (unless referring to God, of course) to use third-person language and this decision wouldn’t really make sense except in the concept of a memorial for the deceased.

On an aesthetic level I would rate this achievement higher than Cox’s, due to the superior tincture contrast, although the arrangement of elements is a little unsatisfactory and requires a slightly more rectangular shield shape.

The details of his crest remain unknown.

Everyone on the Same Page

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Minutes of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council usually make for quite dry reading. Despite the speculations of conspiracy theorists, and apart from grand occasions such as the accession of a new king, plenary sessions are mainly filled by the appointments of new officeholders (especially in recent years, as ministerial churn as grown), amendments to charters of public bodies, closures of overcrowded graveyards, and the designs of commemorative coin series.

The formatting is similarly dull, being little but a list of links to PDFs, in which each order in council has its own A4 page with the main text in what I presume is Times New Roman with St Edward’s Crown (surrounded by the national floral badges) in the header. Beginning each document is a contents list typed in a sans serif font (most likely Arial).

Last month, though, a small change was seen – the individual orders in council now have page numbers in their footers (in the sans serif font, and clearly not actually part of the order) while the contents pages now have hyperlinks in their right margins. A new front page has also been added, with the Privy Council Office prominently featured. The PCO’s logo is slightly different to that used by most other government departments – it features the royal shield encircled by the Garter and ensigned by the crown, but without supporters or motto. An interesting thing to note here is that although this stylistic modernisation debuted more than a year into the New Carolean era, the depiction used on the front page and in the orders themselves is still St Edward’s Crown and not the Tudor Crown as the current monarch apparently prefers.

EXTERNAL LINK

Some News At Last!

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Long-time readers will be familiar with my frustrations in discovering the heraldic achievements of former ministers and recent Garter companions Lady Amos and Sir Tony Blair. Now, at last, some progress is being made.

My guess at Amos’s lozenge.

Almost a month ago the Right Reverend Graham Usher, Bishop of Norwich, Tweeted a photograph of the inside of St George’s Chapel. Among the familiar Garter banners I noticed one I had not seen before – per saltire Gules and Or, two of the sections charged with counterchanged circular devices. Presumably the other two sections had them as well, but Sir Thomas Dunne’s banner obscured them. I wasn’t entirely sure what the symbols were – Jukudlick, another Wikipedian, reckoned they were gyroscopes. Without any specific, reliable matching of the arms to the person I was not prepared to add the graphic to her page.

Today’s update comes from the website of Ian G. Brennan, the man who actually constructs the wooden models of knights’ crests to go above their stalls. He includes a photographic gallery of all the crests he has made… and now Blair’s is among them. I had not been paying much attention to his website as it did not look to be frequently updated – indeed the overall design looks to be stuck around the middle of Blair’s premiership. Judging by what I saw when checking the Wayback Machine, this update happened within the last ten days.

No blazon is given, but my best guess for Blair’s crest is a mute swan’s head erased Proper holding in the beak a rose Gules seeded Or barbed slipped and leaved Vert.

The torse is depicted as Azure, Or and Gules, which gives some hints as to the principal tinctures of the shield. The red rose is almost certainly a reference to his thirteen-year leadership of the Labour Party.

 

The website also has a photograph of Amos’s crest. Whether this actually is a crest or just a badge is yet to be seen – I note that the photograph is framed so as not to reveal the presence or absence of a torse. Here the round object looks more clearly like a gyroscope, while the beast holding it is, I would say, a panther sejant guardant Proper. As always with heraldry, you can’t be sure until you’ve read the blazon.

This year’s Garter ceremony was held on Monday. Blair and Amos attended for the second time, as did first-timers Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes. Ashton is already King of Arms for the Order of St Michael and St George (even attending the coronation in that capacity), yet her own bearings are not recorded in any issue of Debrett’s I’ve seen. Patten has no record either. Based on this, I don’t expect any revelation until 2025.