With Boris Johnson in intensive care, commentators from the New York Times to Lawyers Guns and Money are having the vapours about a British constitutional crisis. Britain has no constitutional line of succession! In fact, there is no British constitution at all! This cannot be tolerated in the midst of a pandemic!
Britain, with no written constitution, does not have a codified order of succession. That legal lacuna has prompted questions during prior episodes where prime ministers fell ill or underwent surgery, and now looms large at a time when Britain faces its greatest crisis since World War II.This is from the New York Times' London correspondent, but it is also, well, drivel.
Parliamentary government is cabinet government. The British cabinet is the British government, If the prime minister dies, absconds, loses the confidence of cabinet, or is abducted by aliens, there is a political problem but no constitutional problem.
The cabinet continues to meet, continues to function. Whomever the cabinet (with consideration of the party caucus and popular opinion) chooses to defer to as the new first minister is promptly invited by the sovereign to take up the office. Should Boris Johnson be unable to carry on, there will be a brief political contretemps within the Conservative Party, and no constitutional crisis at all.
But power has been centralizing in prime ministers's offices around the world for a long time -- particularly in Canada, but more recently nearly everywhere. With the presidentialization of prime ministers and the increasing legitimization of extra-parliamentary selection processes for party leaders, the assumption grows that there must be a constitutionally identified "vice-president" -- or else crisis looms!.
