A British Trump tribute act could snatch power in the UK – and wreak similar chaos .....
How hard would it be?
Coups generally start with capturing the media. Quite a large chunk of ours wouldn’t need much capturing: they’re practically there already. The BBC wouldn’t be a hard nut to crack. Sack the chair (there’s precedent) and get them to sack the director general (ditto). Abolish the licence fee and say the organisation must in future stand on its own two feet. It’d soon fall into line.
You’d need your own version of Fox News: welcome GB News! Do we still need Ofcom to regulate fairness and impartiality? Thought not.
But don’t stop there. Ask every regulator to resign and replace them with loyalists. This would require dealing with the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Happily this office, set up by the Nolan Committee to straighten out public life in 1995, has never been on a statutory footing. So abolishing it would be the work of a moment – done by an order in council.
An order in council, if you haven’t been paying attention, is a form of legislation supposedly made by the monarch on the advice of the privy council. They are similar to the Henry VIII clauses, which allow ministers to change primary legislation without the bother of parliamentary scrutiny.
You mocked as you saw Donald Trump sign all those executive orders without bothering Congress? Same idea. God bless Henry VIII.
Assuming there’s a comfortable majority in the Commons, and that MPs would be as loyal/intimidated as Maga representatives seem to be, there would be little problem with parliament nodding anything through. And anyway, there is a modern trend to pass so-called skeleton bills, which merely set out broad principles of a new policy without providing detailed specifics. Those are fleshed out by Henry VIII’s clauses.
In 1929, Lord Hewart, the lord chief justice, published a book called The New Despotism, which he defined as "to subordinate parliament, to evade the Courts, and to render the will, or the caprice, of the Executive unfettered and supreme”. And here we are, nearly 100 years later.
The House of Lords as a restraint? Again, perhaps you haven’t been paying attention. Time to scrap the feeble House of Lords appointments system. Permanent secretaries? Did you not notice how easily Truss sacked the redoubtable Tom Scholar (payoff £335k); or how the Home Office top bod Sir Philip Rutnam walked out after suffering a “vicious and orchestrated campaign” against him once Priti Patel showed up (payoff £340k)?
But we have apolitical judges, don’t we? They would surely be our last bastion. Well, yes and no. Perhaps you’ve noticed the campaign to undermine the Supreme Court? Or the nagging obsession among figures on the right with scrapping the Human Rights Act, curbing judicial review, and quitting the European Convention on Human Rights?
Right-wing academics writing for right-wing think tanks have begun to roll the pitch to legislate to increase ministerial involvement in judicial appointments. Richard Ekins, an Oxford professor who heads Policy Exchange’s “Judicial Power Project”, wants ministers to be able to reject candidates “where there are doubts about their suitability”. Just imagine where that leads!
But surely we have a system involving the Judicial Appointments Commission, created in 2006, which just appoints judges on merit – and that’s better than the American system under which a president can effectively pack the Supreme Court with people who see the world the same way he does? Well, what makes you think our UK Trump tribute act wouldn’t propose legislation to scrap our system and replace it with a more malleable one?
Perhaps a new broom would restore the power to create judges to the lord chancellor? And then you remember that our recent lord chancellors included Truss and Chris Grayling.
One constitutional expert I consulted admitted all this could happen, while reflecting that, in the past, “embarrassment was an important factor”. But that’s when the Good Chaps theory reigned. Does Nigel Farage strike you as easily embarrassed?
