Dan Snow's History Hit - Boris Johnson: Removing a Prime Minister

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

It's been an extraordinary day in British politics with dozens of Conservative MPs handing in their resignations and expressing a lack of confidence in Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It feels like this could be the end of his premiership. Johnson has clung to power despite scandal after scandal, including allegations of financial misconduct, risking national security and lying to parliament. Anyone else would have resigned or been ousted by now. How has Boris Johnson managed to stay in office?Dan is down at Westminster after an explosive Prime Minister's Questions. With analysis from Labor MP and historian Chris Bryant, former Tory politician and diplomat Rory Stewart and Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University, Tim Bale, Dan looks to history for insight into the parliamentary system, how political conduct has changed over the last century and how we ended up here. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Welcome everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. I'm currently walking along the corridors of power. I'm in the Palace of Westminster in London. Here I'm walking up to the Central Lobby on either side. Bizarre Victorian depictions of great scenes of English and British history. Erasmus hanging out, Thomas More. Weirdly wouldn't have made my top 50, but there we go. And here we are standing in the Central Lobby,

the magnificent gilded ceiling above me. the right the house of commons to the left the upper chamber the house of lords big gladstone statue there he deserves to be here anyway i'm here because britain is in the midst of constitutional crisis we have a prime minister who is not doing what traditionally prime minister done which is fall on their sword when all appeared hopeless. The Prime Minister is continuing in his job, despite unprecedented numbers of the executive branch resigning, returning to the back benches. Dozens, I think, the latest count is.

And yet, as we enter Westminster Hall, which is the biggest, and in my opinion, the best medieval hall from the 11th century anywhere in Europe, we come to the place where Charles I was tried. We come to the place where Barack Obama addressed both chambers of the House of Parliament as I'm coming down steps into Westminster past the very spot on which King Charles was handed down his sentence for treason I'm thinking about Boris Johnson how he's not going in this episode of the podcast I am talking to two senior well politicians slash politicians. I'm talking to Chris Bryant. He's been on the podcast before.

He has written a wonderful book about the 1930s. But he is also chair of the Privileges Committee. You'll have seen him taking the fight to Boris Johnson over corruption. And I'm also talking to Rory Stewart. He was a contender for the Conservative Party leadership. He lost to Boris Johnson in the leadership election last time round. He's been an outspoken critic of him ever since. He's a former cabinet minister.

And on top of it all, I'm talking to a professor of politics, Tim Bale. I'm going to get a sense, talking to all of them, why it's so hard to finish off this premiership of Boris Johnson. Why Johnson is so uncharacteristically tenacious in his grip on power in the UK. How does it compare historically? And what's it mean for our constitution? If you want to watch documentaries

to go with your history programmes, you can do so at History Hit TV. Just follow the link in the description of this pod. We've got a wonderful documentary on the history of Parliament, which I filmed last time I was in this great building you had over there. It's like Netflix for history. you get two weeks free if you

start today but in the meantime folks sit back and listen to this podcast emergency podcast recorded on the day that boris johnson's premiership was almost certainly mortally wounded and by the time you listen to this podcast it might be history as well. Enjoy. Okay, I've now come outside onto College Green. This is where people talk to MPs. I'm talking to Chris Bryant, who's a Labour politician. He's chair of the Privileges Committee. He's historian. He was on the podcast before,

talking about the Glamour Boys, the gay MPs who sounded the warning bells about Hitler in the 1930s. It's going to be awesome, but it is noisy. Chris, good to see you. Hello. Nice to meet you in person. Nice to meet you in person. What a day. First of all, were you in the chamber just now?

I was in the chamber just now, yes. What's it like in the chamber? We've all seen it on TV. What is it like? It's very warm, apart from the girls. It's the only bit that's theoretically air-conditioned, but when it's full, because, as you know, there aren't enough seats in there for all the members,

it just feels too hot and intense. Though, weirdly, there was quite a lot of space on the Tory side, and I remember writing about stuff in the 1930s and the drama of the chamber, because it can turn on a sixpence. One minute, everybody's making a lot of noise, and then the next minute, you could hear a pin drop, and you had a bit of that today.

Well, this is what I want to ask you, because not only are you so involved in today's politics, you're also a historian, does what goes on in that room matter? When you're in there do you sense that things are changing or is it all about what's on the front page of the newspapers, who's going to vote how at the next general election, does it matter now? I mean it matters in lots of different ways, obviously we pass laws in there so the laws have an effect on everybody's lives but also like hearing Gary Sandbrook today a Tory MP who was at the Carlton Club last week when the Chris Pinscher incident happened and is gay himself exposing his

fury with the Prime Minister I mean that has a rawness to it and sometimes when MPs mess up their words a bit it has a rawness to it which makes it more real and therefore has far more impact. And I think even Boris Johnson will have a sense of that. You've written about the 1930s. Chamberlain left between elections. Churchill ended up leaving in the 50s between elections. Macmillan, Eden left.

It's actually quite normal in the British Constitution that prime ministers leave. If anything, it's more normal than losing an election. What's even more normal is to go when a war is on. I mean, I know some people have been saying, oh, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, you can't possibly. But actually, we changed prime minister in the First World War, the Second World War, the Second Opium War, the Second Boer War, four times in the Afghanistan conflict, and in the second Afghan war. So, I mean,

you could argue that it's more normal for us to change prime minister in a time of war than not. That's definitely true. But about changing prime minister between elections, that some people think it should be a sort of electoral thing. What you witnessed in there and what you've witnessed in your time here, you witnessed Tony Blair leave between elections, Cameron leave between elections, May. Why is Boris not going? Historically, what is that process? Boris is not going just because he's a limpet and because he's got an 80 seat majority and that's a big majority and that's not common for prime ministers to depart office in that

set of circumstances. But his problem is that he's surrounded himself with a bunch of numpties in the cabinet and none of them are prepared to resign because they know they wouldn't get a job under any other prime minister. That's part of the equation that's going on at the moment and that's different to what you've witnessed and what you've written about in the past do you think is that something new about today or is this a process that you recognize well quite often what ends up happening is a strange moment in a quiet room somewhere so like you know neville chamberlain won the vote of no confidence or what he termed a vote of no confidence, in 1940, the Norway vote, by quite a large number of votes. But he was gone within three days. First of all, there was a meeting in his office in Parliament

later that night, which everybody basically said, I'm sorry, the game is up. And nobody should underestimate the power of senior figures going to a prime minister and saying, listen mate, I'm sorry about this, but the time is up. And then the strange meeting when you had Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill, two of the senior figures in Chamberlain's government, and lots of different versions of what happened in that meeting. Winston Churchill's version may not be truthful, but he ended up coming out of that meeting as the candidate to be prime minister. We've had a lot of talk recently about a more presidential prime minister here,

the electoral mandate being central to a British prime minister. What you've witnessed in your career here, you've seen May go, Cameron go, Blair go, perhaps now Johnson go in between elections. Do you think that actually that talk of a presidential prime ministership has been overblown? Do you think it's still these conversations matter, your fellow MPs matter? Well, I worry about this presidential argument that's being used by a lot of people. I mean, it's a very kind of high theology of the prime ministerial role, which turns a general election into like a presidential election,

so that it's a personal mandate for the prime minister. I don't buy that at all. We are a parliamentary democracy. And I worry when I hear Jacob Rees-Mogg say, well, you know, the Prime Minister can basically do anything he wants as long as he's still the Prime Minister. The danger is you can change standing orders in the House of Commons, you can pass laws as long as you've still got majority. And that's when you start to worry about kind of Trump-like activities.

Let's quickly go back to basics. You are Prime Minister in Britain because you command the confidence of the House of Commons, right? Can you just explain to everyone at home what that might mean? Because it always sounds a bit strange. What's that mean? There are 650 MPs and the government gets to be the government because they've got more than half the votes in their bag,

either because they have more than half of the MPs belong to that one party or because they managed to form a coalition, as happened in 2010. And if there's ever a vote of no confidence, the Prime Minister wins. In other words, the House has confidence in the Prime Minister. That's what guarantees him his place as Prime Minister, the right to go to the Queen or the monarch of the day and be invited to form a government. And a vote of no confidence can turf you out.

Now, the issue at the moment is, if the Labour Party tabled a motion of no confidence in Boris Johnson, it wouldn't be in Boris Johnson, it would be in the government. And of course, the Tories would all unite. They've got a majority of 80. They would unite and vote down the vote of no confidence, which is why the only people who can get rid of him are the Tory party themselves. If they vote, a vote of no confidence in the Conservative Party rather than in the whole House. It's very difficult, this whole Edmund Burke point.

You are here, you're an MP, you have to use your own judgment. Because presumably, lots of Tory grassroots people in the... Because if you still really like Boris, but your MPs in there are voting against him. They're exercising their own judgment now. How do you as an MP find that kind of...

Is there a tension there between your judgment and what you suspect your electors would like you to do yeah well we faced it in the labour party i mean jerry corbyn as leader of the labour party and i profoundly disagreed with a lot of the things that he was doing the way he was running the labour party and his whole political prescription for the nation even though there were parts of the labour manifesto that i loved. And I thought that his position, for instance, on Russia was bad for Britain's security. And, yes, you owe to your constituents and to the nation, in Edmund Burke's words, your conscience.

Of course, he said that in a speech in Bristol and then was turfed out by the voters in Bristol because he'd never gone back to his constituency hardly any of the time that he was MP there. And, incidentally, when the referendum on Brexit happened, my constituency probably voted about 60-40 to leave. I'm a passionate Remainer. And I said in the House that I couldn't vote in all conscience for Brexit, for leaving the European Union and for triggering Article 50. And I said, and if that means I lose my seat, then I lose my seat. I didn't think the general election was

going to be six weeks later. So it was all a bit tense. means I lose my seat, then I lose my seat. I didn't think the general election was going to be six weeks later, so it was all a bit tense. And I think voters respect an MP who will say, look, there are some things that are negotiable, there are some things that are just completely non-negotiable for me. We have Trump in America contesting the peaceful transfer of power. Are there any nerves? Do you and your mates in there have concerns

about Johnson kind of snap elections, worse than that, desperately trying to find any way he can to hold them to power? Snap election, I think that would be profoundly immoral. Snap elections on the whole are bad anyway because it means that people get selected as candidates in seats where they end up winning who have not gone through any kind of due diligence at all. I think in the Labour Party's case of Jared O'Mara, who simply wasn't capable of being an MP, and it was cruel to him to put him in that situation. I think the Queen, under the Lascelles principle,

would be at perfect liberty if Boris Johnson went to the palace today to ask for a general election. I think she would be perfectly at liberty to say, terribly sorry, if you don't want to be prime minister, there are other people in your party and you're only seeking a general election because you don't want to be turfed out by your own party. So let's see who else in your party can form a government.

That would be a conversation, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it just? Yes. The thing that worries me most is Steve Baker, who's a Conservative MP, he and I disagree on nearly everything under the sun, but he is worried that even if the prime minister is found to have misled parliament by the Committee of Privileges, which is a contempt of Parliament later on this year, and even if the House were to suspend him as a member for a day or five days or whatever, he would still refuse to go. This is the problem with that kind of limpid narcissism. What's in the water at the moment?

Why are we seeing that elsewhere? Why are we seeing norm breaking? The kind of behaviours and attitudes that we assumed leaders would have, the political class would have, that meant that people would sort of go when they were meant to go. Why is it coincidence we're seeing that in Western democracy? Is there something going on? What's happening? Every human being kind of fancies a bit the person who isn't always going to play by the rules. But then there comes a point where you want to say, actually, no, you have to abide by those rules.

You can't just tear up the whole of the rule book, which is what Boris Johnson has done so endlessly and repeatedly. And for that matter, Trump did as well. And there was an interesting moment. Boris Johnson said, in apologising, or sort of apologising, for having appointed Christopher Pyncher as the deputy chief whip when he knew that he was a sex pest. He said, I should have known that he was never going to learn and he was never going to change.

Well, that's exactly the same with Boris Johnson. The reason people in his team take liberties is because he takes liberties. Leadership. Fish rocks in the head. Yeah. Thank you very much indeed. That was amazing. Thank you very much to Chris Bryant. Now I've got the head. Yeah. Thank you very much indeed. That was amazing. Thank you very much to Chris Bryant. Now I've got the former cabinet minister.

He's an MP. He's a social media sensation. And he's a smash hit podcaster, Rory Stewart, coming on the pod. Hello, Rory. Well, great, great to see you. Now, you as a scholar and a politician, is there something different

about these death throes of Johnson? I mean, it's perfectly normal for prime ministers to go in between elections. In fact, it's probably more normal than losing an election to change prime ministers. Is there something worrying about Johnson? Is there something limpet-like? Yeah, there's something very strange about it, because the reason that none of us are used to this number of resignations taking place, I mean, nobody's seen it. Somebody's doing a graph, But the Boris Johnson resignations are off the chart. I don't think there's any historical record of a prime minister losing this number of people

within 24 hours. And it's only happening because any normal prime minister would go. Nobody wants to be in this sort of embarrassing, humiliating position of clinging on with your fingernails while all the most talented people in your government resign in disgust. And why is that?

Isn't it weird that for so long we've depended on sort of honour and shame? Can Boris Johnson have been the first person to work out the practice code that actually just refused to acknowledge that? Well, I think he's probably the first to try it in modern times. And I think in the past, historically, there were lots of other strange and formal mechanisms ranging from the monarch themselves intervening in the 18th century, through to probably big grandees throwing their weight around right the way through to the middle of the 20th century that would have got rid of

somebody like this. I mean, he's an odd combination of being personally very, very shameless, determined to keep going, along with living in a modern age where suddenly that becomes more possible, where all the kinds of structures, both the unwritten rules, but also the ways in which power used to work in Parliament are vanishing and eroding. Well, that's what i'd like to know more about because i think that's where the thing i'm interested in is the fact this is not happening isolation is there are some weird parallels between you know american democracy it's travails at the moment and elsewhere what are some of those things that you think you've identified is it the passing of a generation adhered to norms the distance we're getting from maybe

perhaps the calamities of the 20th century what are some of the things that you think are not just Johnson's character, but are making this period a bit more different? So I think one of the things is development in media. So some of this starts happening actually once the chamber starts getting televised. It turns the debating chamber of the House of Commons from somewhere where people are intimately involved trying to persuade each other into a world in which you're trying to generate a soundbite. So you're sort of aiming to be overheard, not heard. The second thing, obviously, that changes much more dramatically in the last decade is the eruption of social media and the way in which that creates a much more strange, polarised world. The 2008 financial crisis, I think a general loss of confidence in the West, the rise of authoritarian models like China, all of which means a loss of confidence in liberal democracy.

And I think in some ways, Twitter, Facebook just accelerate the loss of confidence in our democratic institutions. And Boris Johnson is kind of the perfect product of that. It's interesting. I was looking at some of your tweets this morning and I've noticed it with my tweets. When you craft a very interesting, rather sort of nuanced tweet, when one does that, it doesn't do very well.

And I'm like, but hang on, that's gold-plated genius, that tweet. And then when one just writes down a kind of a spasm of emotion, just going, you know, this man is a total loser and needs to... And I've noticed that with some of your more recent tweets, you know, this man is a total loser. And I've noticed that with some of your more recent tweets, you're getting more and more passionate. And actually, you're getting 50,000 people liking them. You know, you're doing, you're doing, I mean, I haven't been

carefully monitoring your tweets, but you know, it seems that you're doing, is that something you feel as well? I feel I'm being radical. Are you being sort of pushed into these? You're completely right, Dan. The algorithms drag us in that way. And it's really disturbing. You're completely right. I've tried to make more interesting historical analyses. I've tried to get into the detail of who's resigning. But of course, the things that I will suddenly get one and a half million views on are when I'm saying he's running out of people to appoint and Nadine Doris can't do all the jobs. Ha ha. And then suddenly, you know, one and a half million people get really excited. No, you're completely right. And what it does is it encourages us to make angrier, more extreme, more monochrome statements and takes away all the nuance. One of the other sad things is it creates tribes.

It creates an atmosphere in which it feels difficult to call out your allies when they get things wrong. So I sometimes notice that people I broadly support will put out something that's complete fake news. You know, somebody I admire put out a tweet saying MPs were earning £400,000 a year on their take-home pay, which is five times what they're earning. And it took me a second to summon up the courage to call it out because, of course, it's so binary. Everybody's from one tribe or another. And if you suddenly cross and start calling out people in your own tribe, you're sort of breaking a Twitter rule. So you see this, it's Boris Johnson's character, but it's also these erosions

and new developments in media, for example. Because I look back on Thatcher leaving when she won a decent majority of her MPs, right? Thatcher walked out. And you think, would she do that today? Something has changed. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Any normal prime minister, I think, would have probably resigned

over seven or eight of the incidents that have happened. Because they've been extraordinary humiliations. I mean, there have been financial improprieties to do with his wallpaper and his tree houses. There have been national security improprieties, not taking his security guards to meet KGB officers and parties in Lake Cuomo. There have been sexual scandals. There have been extraordinary conflicts of interest. There have been lobbying conflicts of interest, there have been lobbying scandals, and there have been all the lies. They're breaking the ministerial code repeatedly. All of that would normally drive someone to resign. But we've gone into a world where,

as you say, if you're genuinely shameless, you can push it to an absurd limit. But I think it's getting to a tipping point. I mean, the rhythm of resignations now is so extreme. And if you look into the details of who's going, it's often the most thoughtful, talented sort of minister of state level people. So not the cabinet who've kind of made a deal with the devil, but the sort of level below. And despite all these changes that you and I have talked about, is there still the deeper truth of the British constitution which is you still need to command a majority in parliament if the Tory backbenchers and enough people on the payroll find a backbone it doesn't matter who Boris Johnson is how brazen he is is that comforting? I think it's true of course in the end if he lost so many of his backbenchers that he couldn't win a majority in parliament. But that's difficult

to do because even people who hate Boris Johnson, very few of them are going to be prepared to vote with a Labour government. So with Theresa May, for example, when she had a no confidence vote, which over 100 people voted against her. But immediately after that, Jeremy Corbyn triggered a no confidence vote and all those people then voted with Theresa May. So I think that mechanism doesn't work very well. I think one thing that is beginning to happen is that he's going to run out of people to appoint. I mean, it's really going to begin dragging the bucket now

to try to find anyone who's going to go into these positions. By the way, that's almost historically... I mean, you have to go back a pretty long way to find examples of that happening, wouldn't you? That's remarkable. You cannot fill the executive office positions. It's pretty unprecedented. Oh, it's unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable. I mean, even Theresa May at her weakest never had that problem. This is a really weird problem. I mean, this is a problem where people are genuinely thinking, I'm being offered the chance to be a minister with all that

that brings, all the power that could bring a minister with all that that brings, all the power that could bring, all the influence that could bring, all the status that could bring. Remember, many MPs have been sitting on the back benches for years waiting for this opportunity. The fact that they're now beginning to think, this guy is so blighted, so horrible, that I'm not prepared to take that risk, tells you an enormous amount.

Does it, that the iron rule of the British system still survives, does it, Rory? Which is that if you cannot control the confidence of the House, or more importantly in the modern day, control the confidence of your own MPs, they can still bring you down, no matter who you are. Absolutely. If the majority of his MPs in the end is against him, he's finished and they'll find some way to take him out. You can't survive with the majority of your MPs against you. Does it need structural reform, Roy? Do we need to harden this up in case this happens again? Is this a warning or do we just have to assume that we won't get people as awful as this?

No, it's a terrible warning and we can't assume we won't get people as awful and we need to change our constitution. We've relied, sadly, too long on unwritten rules, on gentlemanly codes, which are no longer working. And the time has come for a written constitution. Boom. There you go. Rory, tell everyone what your wonderful podcast is, smashing all the records. So thank you very much. And anybody who would like to listen, along with listening to Dan, it's called The Rest is Politics. And it's a podcast with me and Alistair Campbell, who's Tony Blair's former communications director. Brilliant. Rory, thank you very much indeed. Thanks, Sam. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More coming up.

Calling all ancient history fans this is the ancients the podcast dedicated to all things ancient history from tours of stunning archaeological sites you will not see a fountain in a roman fort you might see a well or a tank but not a fountain like this so this is something really unique to the great depth of knowledge surrounding Indigenous Australian astronomy. Everything's sort of related, everything's connected. And to understand them all is vital to continuing your culture and continuing your survival. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. To be continued... Okay, I've got someone else to talk to now. We've heard from a Labour politician,

former Conservative politician. Now let's hear from a professor. Let's get an academic involved. Professor Tim Bale, legend, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. He knows all about the Conservative Party. Tim, thank you so much for coming on the pod. I've been looking forward to it. Tim, the Conservative Party, it's more common for

their leaders to get so quietly shown the door rather than lose eye-catching elections like John Major. That's not how most of them go, do they, in the last hundred years? No, to be honest, the Conservative Party is normally so good at moving and morphing in order to, you know, meet the demands of the electorate that if it has a leader it feels isn't going to do the job, it gets rid of them and moves on to someone who it thinks stands a better chance of winning an election. So to call the Conservative Party ruthless is, I think, probably correct. Because if we just go through it over the last 80 years or so, I mean, Chamberlain, even Churchill, Churchill in his second term, Eden, I mean, I guess health is probably more, some of these men were pretty unhealthy compared

to the more recent copper politicians. Well, that might be true. But certainly in Churchill's case, that didn't mean he wanted to go by any stretch of the imagination. He really hung on far longer than most of those around him wanted to. But they felt that, you know, he was such the grand old man of British politics that they couldn't really force him out until he was ready to go himself. And it was eventually, I think, ill health that persuaded him he had to go. But he wasn't very pleased about it. And he certainly, I think, had lost confidence in Eden's ability to take over. Right at the end, he expressed a lot of doubts about whether his anointed successor was really the man for the job. And then, of course, Eden didn't last very long in that job himself because he made the terrible error over Suez. But in fact, even before Suez, he'd begun to

alienate his colleagues. He was no good at delegating. He interfered all the time. And they were glad, to be honest, to see the back of him in that respect. He actually went fairly quietly. I think it was obvious because of Suez that the game was up. And as you say, he certainly had some serious health problems. And then you just go through the list. Macmillan also quietly

shoved off. I mean, what's the process here? I'm a great lover of the 18th century. In that period, the king or the monarch would play a big role. You had to look both ways. You had to both look at control of parliament and also managing the court, the king. In the 20th century, so fairly recently, what's the kind of mechanism by which these prime ministers, supposedly the most powerful people in the country, are being told that their time's up? How has that worked, Tim? Well, I think when it comes to the 1950s and 1960s, certainly, the Conservative Party then, of course, didn't have a formal mechanism for electing its leader. It had this rather kind of opaque so-called magic circle process by which members

of the cabinet would take soundings and reveal who the new leader was. Now, that also, I think, impacted on the departure of particular leaders. They were just, I think, given to understand by their colleagues that it was time for them to go. The slight problem with that is that occasionally it did involve the palace. And there was some doubt, for example, when Macmillan finally decided that he couldn't go on. He thought he had a much more serious prostate problem than he turned out to have. But I think he was getting tired anyway. There were some doubts in the Conservative Party about whether Alec Hume should actually do the job. And it was basically understood that the palace had sort of told him to go away and check that

he did have the confidence of the parliamentary party before the Queen would appoint him as Prime Minister. So there were occasionally some kind of constitutional aspects to the process. But generally speaking, it was colleagues having a quiet word, making it very clear that the person's time was up and they needed to do the decent thing. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned Hume there. He got pounded in an election. Heath also got beaten. So there are two Tories who did actually get defeated at the ballot box, albeit in the case of Heath, he didn't stop as party leader. But then Thatcher and Cameron and May all go despite, well, winning, if perhaps in some cases just winning, but winning elections. So again, is it that same process? It's just managing your Conservative Party colleagues. Is that the tricky thing? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Thatcher was given a warning really in 1989 because there was a stalking horse candidate who stood against a guy called Anthony Meyer, who nobody remembers anymore. And in that contest, she'd beaten quite

easily. But she was warned by her colleagues that she couldn't really afford to ignore either public opinion or her colleagues' concerns if she was to stay on. And the fact was, because she was so wedded to the poll tax and so wedded to perhaps a certain idea of Europe as well, that she didn't take their advice. And when Michael Heseltine came to stand against her, she narrowly, quote unquote, won the first round of the leadership contest. But she was told again by her cabinet, really, in a series of one-to-one meetings that it was time for her to go. And I think this is the difference in some ways between her and Boris Johnson, that she, I think, had a very strong sense of what was good for the country and what was good for the party. And when so many of her colleagues were telling her that the thing

to do would be to stand down, she accepted that, albeit, you know, obviously very unhappily. Theresa May, in some senses, is the same. Although she clearly wanted to cling on, she was desperate to get her Brexit deal through. She'd spent a couple of years trying to get the withdrawal agreement with the EU passed to a parliamentary party. themselves and then by her colleagues that it was time for her to step down. You know, she just couldn't get that withdrawal agreement past the parliamentary party as it was configured at the time because there were so many hardline Eurosceptics. So she hung around. But in the end, she did do the decent thing. And if we look at Cameron, I mean, just before May, in a way, he really did do the decent thing. I mean, he'd gone into the referendum quite clearly backing the Remain side. It was his policy. He felt that as the person who had been the figurehead of that campaign, that he had to do the honourable thing and step down. There's also an element, of course, to Cameron stepping down where, as he said, he didn't want to do the getting the UK out of the EU and would rather have left that to someone else. You talked about Boris Johnson being different. Why has it been so hard to get rid of Boris Johnson? What has changed in terms of our unwritten and weird constitution? Has something changed?

Is it more presidential? Or is it about media and about his relationship with grassroots or is there something weird and mystical there? Or is it about system change? Or is it about media or about his relationship with grassroots toys? Is there something weird and mystical there? Or is it about system change? Or is it about just him being, in my opinion, very narcissistic and just utterly, utterly refusing to go take the gentlemanly opportunity to go that his predecessors might have done? I think it's a bit of both. I think over time, we have become a rather more presidentialised system. And I think Boris Johnson has taken that

on board, perhaps more than any other prime minister we've ever had. He referred all the time to his election, both as Conservative Party leader and then as prime minister when he won that general election in 2019, as a mandate. And I think saw it in some ways as a personal mandate, even though, of course, we don't directly elect our prime ministers. So I think that sort of creeping presidentialisation has something to do with it. I also think actually that when we're talking about Boris Johnson, we are talking about someone who I think tended to see rules as for the little people rather than for himself, especially if those rules weren't really rules, but were conventions. Boris Johnson is all about, in some senses, you know, breaking with convention,

doing unorthodox things, doing politics in a very different way. And I think that has something to do with it as well. I think also, to be honest, he doesn't really have any friends as such in the Conservative Party. He has colleagues or underlings or stooges, if you like, but no one I think that he really respects enough for them to be able to tell him that it's time to go. The only way he would be forced out, and perhaps as we speak is being forced out, is by sufficient numbers of those former stooges, those former underlings, those colleagues telling him the time is up. It won't be just one or two of them. It will have to be a whole delegation of them, plus lots of people resigning, plus lots of people

writing letters, a kind of overwhelming both public and private attempt to dislodge him. And that's very, very different from previous leaders. Most previous leaders would have taken private soundings and a few senior colleagues who might also have been friends telling them they had to go would have been enough. It seems likely as we're talking on the afternoon of the 6th of July, there is going to be a huge effort. But in this kind of slightly moral fashioned way, there's people saying you cannot go on, eventually you will listen and go. There has been suggestions, though, that he might reach for more unusual, constitutionally unprecedented, for example, try and force the Queen to call a snap general election

and reach over the heads of his parliamentary colleagues to the people. It's all very worrying language. Where are we on that? Is that possible? Is that likely? I think he's used that threat to convince some naive Conservative MPs to carry on backing him because clearly, given the opinion polls, they don't want an early election. But actually, I think during his appearance before the liaison committee this afternoon, on the 6th of July, it was put to him, would he do that? He actually began to back away from it. And I think for very good reason. I honestly don't think, given what we know about the constitution such as it is, and the conventions around dissolution, that the

palace would grant him one. They would look and say, the Conservative Party has a majority of 70 plus. It might not be that this leader has the confidence of that majority, but there will be someone else within the Conservative Party who could command the confidence of that majority, but there will be someone else within the Conservative Party who could command the confidence of their party and therefore could prime minister and therefore there is absolutely no need for a general election. So I think that was always rather unlikely. It was always rather a kind of desperate gambit on his part and a fairly unconvincing one. There was a possibility, of course, that he could have been no confidence by his party and simply refused to go, squatted in Downing Street and told them, well, what are

you going to do about it? And at that point, it would be possible for the Queen literally to appoint someone else. And once the Queen appoints someone else as Prime Minister, well, Boris Johnson has no standing. He would literally be, I guess, a squatter in Downing Street who could be legally evicted by the authorities. Absolute scenes not seen since George III managed to bullet the Fox coalition in the early 19th century. But, I mean, Dick Pallis can't have been over the moon about any of those scenarios.

I mean, when was the last time a monarch refused a proper request for an election? Oh, I mean, I can't remember. When was the last time a monarch refused a proper request for an election? Oh, I mean, I can't remember. The big controversy was, of course, when the Queen's representative in Australia, Governor General in the mid-70s, actually helped get rid of a prime minister. But I can't think of a time, certainly in my lifetime or the Queen's lifetime, where she has got involved in politics. And I think actually ordinary members of the Conservative Party, let alone voters, would really resent the Queen being, you know,

quote unquote, dragged into politics by a politician like Boris Johnson. And I think even Boris Johnson had to think about his reputation after being Prime Minister. I mean, clearly he can go back to writing, you know, very well paid articles for the Daily Telegraph. But I mean, for someone to drag a 90 plus year old woman with mobility difficulties into a kind of political constitutional crisis, I think would just never have been forgiven by the general public. Well, Professor Tim Bale, that was great. Thank you so much, bringing some sanity to everything. I've kept you from the Twitter and the TV and the radio for too long. I mean, you must be jonesing to catch up.

I mean, it's been at least 12 minutes. So I'll let you get back there now. Thank you very much for taking part. Thanks, Dan. Really enjoyed it. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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