Reflections on the week

The nature of the premiership, elections and the decline of British sea power

Just a few very short observations during a week of attention-grabbing devolved, local and mayoral elections—during which I’ve been extremely unproductive due to mild but enervating illness— before the madness resumes and Parliament returns (you tell me if that’s a tautology) next week.

Your mandate is in your head

As Sir Keir Starmer continues to enjoy the experience of what my father would have called his jaikit being on a shoogly peg, the Prime Minister has come out fighting. (There’s always a particularly heavy sigh when I hear that phraseology, as the adenoidal and ineffective Scrappy-Doo routine shows no-one to their best advantage.) Starmer declared in a BBC interview that he wasn’t “going to walk away and plunge this country into chaos”—some might suggest he has the causal link exactly the wrong way round—then intoned, as premiers do with increasing regularity, “There’s a five-year term I was elected to do”.

There isn’t. Sir Keir was not elected to a five-year term as anything, and he was not elected as Prime Minister at all. He was elected Member of Parliament for Holborn and St Pancras for the duration of this Parliament, which can be no longer than five years from date of assembly to date of Dissolution, but may well be less. Indeed, especially given the repeal of the ill-conceved and ill-starred Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, few Parliaments last the maximum permissible five years.

As for the office of Prime Minister, he holds it at the invitation of the sovereign, by convention because he is the leader of the party which can provide a majority in the House of Commons and therefore deliver confidence and supply. So long as there is a party and a leader offering that, it is now effectively unbreakable convention that the King will invite that leader to form an administration, but it is as recently as 1963 that there was still a degree of uncertainty: when Harold Macmillan resigned due to illness, the Conservative Party still had no mechanism for electing a leader but in effect the Queen was bound by any advice as to his successor that Macmillan might give. Having previously favoured Viscount Hailsham but cooled on his candidacy, Macmillan recommended that the Earl of Home should be invited to form an administration, and so he was. It is interesting to wonder what might have happened if Macmillan, like Sir Anthony Eden had done in 1957, had given no formal advice to the Queen in 1963, as Hailsham, Home, Rab Butler and Reginald Maudling had all been linked with the premiership at one point or another.

The only significant circumstances in which a British government can lean on a “mandate” is in terms of government bills being accepted by the House of Lords. Under the Salisbury-Addison convention, developed in the immediate post-war period, the House of Lords will not oppose at Second Reading bills which deliver commitments contained in the governing party’s election manifesto, nor will it table wrecking amendments or unduly delay their passage through Parliament. This is an unofficial but effective way if ensuring that the unelected House cannot defy the explicit wishes of the electorate.

On the other hand, not a single one of the 28,809,340 people who cast a vote at the general election of 4 July 2024 did so for Sir Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister, much less for him to be Prime Minister for five years. They may have acted in the belief that they were doing so or on that assumption, but beliefs and assumptions may be widely shared yet still incorrect, and politicians on all sides should be careful that misapprehensions do not restrict their freedom of action: if the electorate had somehow given Starmer the “mandate” of which he speaks, there could be no question of his being replaced at this juncture—though I remain sceptical that his end is as nigh as is commonly believed—nor of Boris Johnson’s departure in 2022 or Margaret Thatcher’s in 1990. It would also pose a further question about the status of Prime Ministers who came to office midway through a Parliament, as Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Theresa May, Gordon Brown, John Major, James Callaghan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan and Sir Anthony Eden (to take only those since the Second World War), did: what mandate would they enjoy or be gifted? The only straightforward solution, which I would not support but is the opinion of a considerable number of voters, would be to require a Prime Minister who has just taken office to seek an immediate Dissolution of Parliament and a confirmatory general election.

There may be reasons for Sir Keir to remain in Downing Street. My suspicion that he will is based on the premium which the Labour Party’s leadership rules place on incumbency, added to the fact that the party has not (yet) managed even to attemp to cohere around a single, plausible successor. It is not clear to me, however hapless the Prime Minister’s plight and however incompetent and cack-handed a political operator he may be (and he is), that any replacement on offer would be of significant advantage either to the Labour Party or to the country. Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Darren Jones and Sir Sadiq Khan are all deeply flawed (and Burnham and Khan are not MPs, which at the moment automatically rules them out), John Healey and Al Carns should be non-starters and I doubt that Shabana Mahmood, who seems to have some wit about her, has anything like the required support among the party membership.

The reasons do not, however, in any way include some notion that Sir Keir Starmer has a personal mandate or a “five-year term I was elected to do”, as he so elegantly puts it.

I love it when a plan comes together

Those of you with longer memories will recall that Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who was Defence Secretary in Sir Tony Blair’s first government and afterwards a admirable Secretary General of NATO—and who was the lead author of last year’s Strategic Defence Review—was Shadow Scottish Secretary from 1993 to 1997. He was, therefore, responsible for policy on Scotland leading up to the 1997 general election, one outcome of which was, following the referendum in September 1997, the Scotland Act 1998, which paved the way for the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and what was initially called the devolved Scottish Executive (now Scottish Government).

Scottish Labour had not always been united behind the idea of devolution for Scotland, though there had never been quite as much opposition as in the Welsh arm of the party; Tam Dalyell was opposed to it, called it a “motorway without exit to a separate state”, and formulated the “West Lothian question”, named after his constituency of the time, which has never been answered, merely set aside; Helen Liddell refused to campaign for a Scottish assembly in the 1979 referendum; Harold Wilson’s long-serving Secretary of State for Scotland (1964-70, 1974-76), Willie Ross, was against a devolved legislature; Brian Wilson, who founded The West Highland Free Press and was a Minister of State at the Scottish Office, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office between 1997 and 2003, was so vociferous a campaigners against an assembly in 1979 that he was dubbed “the abominable ‘No’ man”.

Robertson, as a Labour victory and the prospect of devolution became more and more likely in the mid-1990s, reassured colleagues that a Scottish legislature and administration would not merely fulfil the aspirations of a good number of the Scottish people but would also “kill the Scottish National Party stone dead”. Devolution, Labour bigwigs said confidently, would shoot the nationalist fox (this was before the Hunting Act 2004, of course).

On Thursday, the Scottish electorate went to the polls and elected 58 MSPs out of 129, just seven shy of a majority, from the Scottish National Party, which will remain in government. The SNP, rather than being stone dead, have controlled Scotland’s government, with a majority (2011-16), with a minority (2007-11, 2016-21, 2024-) or in coalition (2021-24) for the past 19 years, since Alex Salmond became First Minister in May 2007, and will now most likely do so for another four years. Scottish Labour, by contrast, governed for only eight years, 1999 to 2007, in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, cycling through three First Ministers, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell, of whom only Dewar had any significant ability or standing.

At the 2015 general election, the SNP won 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies, leaving only one each for the other three parties.

Whoever aimed to shoot the fox missed.

You and whose army navy?

Earlier this week, The Times reported that the Royal Navy was effectively withdrawing one of its Type 23 frigates, HMS Iron Duke, from service. The ship, it said, “has been stripped of its weapons and sensors and not been to sea since October” after a £103 million refit which had taken almost five years. That refit was to have extended the frigate’s service life from 2023 to 2028 but it is now believed to be unlikely she will put to sea again before she is retired the year after next. Another Type 23, HMS Richmond, will be decommissioned this year, which leaves the Royal Navy with just five frigates: HMS Somerset, HMS Sutherland, HMS Kent, HMS Portland and HMS St Albans. The youngest of them, HMS St Albans, was commissioned nearly 25 years ago; the initial intended lifespan of the Type 23 was 18 years.

The Type 23 will be replaced in some roles by the Type 26 City-class frigate, variants of which are also being purchased by the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Norwegian Navy. The first two ships, HMS Glasgow and HMS Cardiff, are being fitted out by BAE Systems Maritime in Scotstoun in Glasgow, but are not expected to be commissioned until 2027/28 and 2028/29 respectively. To compound matters, the third ship, which is under construction and has been named HMS Belfast, may not go to the Royal Navy at all: the government last summer proudly announced a £10 billion partnership with Norway to supply Type 26 frigates, but with the first vessel required to be delivered by 2030, HMS Belfast may have to be diverted to fulfilling that order, leaving the Royal Navy to wait for the fourth ship in class.

The Royal Navy will also receive five Type 31 Inspiration-class general purpose frigates, which will be less capable but cheaper and simpler than the Type 26. Two of these, HMS Venturer and HMS Active, are currently fitting out at Babcock in Rosyth, but the only public commitment from the government is that they are “scheduled to be ready for operations by the end of the decade”.

By the end of this year, then, the Royal Navy’s surface fleet will consist of five ageing Type 23 frigates, six Type 45 destroyers, of which only three (at a push) are available for operations, two aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, which are designed to deploy simultaneously only in extreme circumstances, and a number of smaller patrol and mine clearance vessels.

2 (1) aircraft carriers
6 (3) destroyers
5 frigates

It’s not “ruling the waves”, is it?