Boris Johnson won the Tory leadership in July 2019 on a promise that he would deliver Brexit by October 31, “no ifs, no buts”. If he could not get a deal with Brussels, he said, he would prepare for a no-deal Brexit. But with the anti-Brexit forces in parliament doing their best to frustrate his every move, and time running out, he needed to find a way to break through. He needed a bold plan. And that plan was prorogation.
Prorogation is the formal term given to the period between the end of one session of parliament and the state opening that begins the next. There is nothing controversial about it — it happens every year. But what Johnson and the tiny, secretive team around him were planning was highly controversial, because they were going to prorogue parliament for five weeks.
Prorogation normally lasts less than a week, or two at the most. And the reason they wanted to do this was to stop the Remainers passing legislation blocking a no-deal Brexit. Johnson wanted no-deal to remain a real possibility, so he could use it as a bargaining tool against the European Union.
Proroguing parliament between September 9 and October 14 would keep the threat of no-deal alive, regardless of whether Johnson was actually prepared to go through with it. Everyone in on the plan was sworn to secrecy. The attorney-general had advised the PM that it was lawful.
Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Boris Johnson during an audience where she invited him to become prime minister and form a new government in Buckingham Palace in 2019
VICTORIA JONES/WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Johnson outside Downing Street after the meeting
DOMINIC LIPINSKI/PA
A few days before the plan was put into action, No 10 told Buckingham Palace what [it was] proposing. Prorogation is always formally carried out by the sovereign on the advice of the privy council, and takes effect when a royal proclamation is read to both houses of parliament.
The Palace, according to Sir Anthony Seldon’s account of Johnson’s time at No 10, was very unhappy about it, not least because it came during Queen Elizabeth II’s summer break at Balmoral: “They hadn’t been properly prepared and warned when on holiday in August, and the Palace felt they would have been in a stronger position had they been contacted earlier and had a chance to think it through.”
“There’s no doubt it caused a lot of consternation,” said another close source.
Officials were aware that the Queen was being asked to do something extremely unusual, and her private secretary, Edward Young, took the precaution of taking a few highly informal soundings from lawyers. “There was quite a view,” said one royal insider, “that this may not have been palatable but it was within the government’s right to do it.”
The decision to prorogue parliament was not well-received by anti-Brexit campaigners
DINENDRA HARIA/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
The situation was not helped by the fact that the “golden triangle” — the crucial relationship between the sovereign’s private secretary, the cabinet secretary and the principal private secretary at No 10 — was not functioning properly. Sir Mark Sedwill, who was not trusted by Johnson or Dominic Cummings and did not know how much longer he would be in a job, was hard to get hold of, and No 10 had a new private secretary in the person of Martin Reynolds who was still finding his feet. “It was a very difficult time,” said a palace source.
Boris Johnson and Sir Mark Sedwill in 2020. The latter was not trusted by Johnson or Dominic Cummings
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
On the morning of Wednesday, August 28, Jacob Rees-Mogg, in his capacity as lord president of the privy council, set off from London for Balmoral with two fellow privy counsellors, the chief whip, Mark Spencer, and Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, the leader of the House of Lords. “It was all hush-hush,” recalled Rees-Mogg. Spencer said: “I didn’t even tell my wife that I was going to Balmoral until the night before.” Their hopes of reaching Scotland unnoticed were vanishingly slim, however: the news had started to leak, and a handful of Scottish photographers were on their way to Aberdeen airport.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was lord president of the privy council in 2019
PETER SUMMERS/GETTY IMAGES
Even if there had been no leak, Rees-Mogg is one of the most recognisable figures in British politics. “I get spotted in Heathrow straight away,” he said. “I went through security and the man who just patted me down wanted a selfie.” Then, as they boarded the plane, they noticed that former Black Rod David Leakey was on the same flight. “So at that point, it’s clocked that we are doing something,” said Rees-Mogg. When they arrived at Aberdeen, all their phones went off, because there was an emergency cabinet meeting to get its approval for prorogation.
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“We’re walking off the aeroplane, with a cabinet meeting in one ear, and people coming up to me for selfies in the other ear. I was literally doing selfies as I was on a cabinet meeting call. And then we have the most wonderful trip in a charabanc to Balmoral, with the Queen’s hairdresser, who is the most amusing man. He entertains us the whole way. He was the Queen’s hairdresser for over 20 years, he took over the weekend after Diana, Princess of Wales died. He said the first time he cut the Queen’s hair, he was so nervous that he didn’t dare breathe on her. So he’d hold his breath. And he has very long hair, and he said, ‘The Queen keeps on telling me I must have my hair cut’. So that kept us entertained until we got there.”
Hairdresser to the Queen, John Carmichael is made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 2021
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Meanwhile, the Queen had already given her approval to the plan, having spoken on the phone to Johnson. The privy counsellors were welcomed with coffee and sandwiches, then Rees-Mogg was ushered into the Queen’s study for a brief audience before the privy council meeting: just the two of them, plus one elderly corgi. The Queen, however, didn’t want the dog at the privy council meeting. “So then there was the Queen, aged 93, trying to get this corgi out, and the corgi is deaf and elderly and won’t go. Eventually she does heave the corgi out, and we get on to the privy council.”
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Even though the Queen hated having her holidays in Balmoral interrupted, she was, said Rees-Mogg, “amazingly graceful”. He said: “We’d been warned that it might be frosty. But the Queen couldn’t have been more friendly. She was saying, ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to come such a long way’.” Five minutes later, it was all done. The privy counsellors got back into their vehicle for the journey back to the airport. Prorogation had been set in train, and the political fireworks were about to begin.
The Queen “took it all in her stride”, according to a royal source. There was, however, deep uneasiness within the Palace that she had been put in such an awkward situation. But could she have done anything about it? Probably not. Some senior Whitehall sources wonder why the Palace did not opt for some kind of delaying tactic when Rees-Mogg et al arrived at Balmoral, even if only to say, “I’m afraid the Queen is indisposed for a few hours, please have a cup of tea”, while they found out what the hell was going on. But even if they had, all the cabinet secretary could have said was that the attorney-general thought it was lawful.
The historian Peter Hennessy believes that the “No 1 rule” of what he calls the “good chaps” theory of government — that the constitution relies on a shared understanding of what constitutes good behaviour in public and political life — is “that you do nothing to embarrass the monarch”. The prorogation, he said, “was bound to embarrass the Queen because it was going to split the parties and the nation and everybody. The Palace was deeply upset by this.”
Peter Hennessy
AKIRA SUEMORI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
It all turned out to be irrelevant anyway. Amid the furious reaction to Johnson’s prorogation coup, pro-EU MPs introduced legislation to stop the prime minister pursuing a no-deal Brexit. Johnson’s hands were tied.
On September 24, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the advice to prorogue parliament was unlawful. Johnson was in New York when he heard the news. Furious, he railed at his closest aides: “You f***ed me! You told me it would be fine. This is a disaster. I’m completely f***ed. It’s over. Now, what am I going to do?”
There was one thing he could do: apologise to the Queen. Former prime minister Sir John Major called on Johnson to make an “unreserved apology”, saying: “No prime minister must ever treat the monarch or parliament in this way again.” The Queen’s reaction was said to be more “sanguine”. She reportedly regarded Johnson as a roguish and comic figure, and a month after the judgment remarked of him: “I think he was perhaps better suited to the stage.”
Sir John Major called on Johnson to apologise unreservedly to the Queen
TERRY MURDEN / ALAMY LIVE NEWS
Five days after the Supreme Court ruling, The Sunday Times reported that the prime minister had personally apologised to the Queen for requiring her to approve the unlawful suspension of the House of Commons. The paper quoted a No 10 source as saying: “He got on to the Queen as quickly as possible to say how sorry he was.”
A Whitehall source told me: “He was very scared about going to see her immediately after prorogation to apologise. He really minded about the Queen. He does not like to apologise, ever. The guy does not say sorry. It would have been so humiliating for him to have to apologise to her.”
Another Downing Street source said Johnson “certainly would have felt uncomfortable” about embarrassing the Queen. “He had enormous respect and affection for the Queen. He won’t have liked it.” But did he actually apologise? Buckingham Palace insiders cannot say, because they were not in the room at the time.
Johnson never told them that he was about to apologise to the Queen, and certainly never apologised to anyone else at the Palace. Downing Street insiders say that the expectation and understanding was that he was going to apologise, but they do not know whether he actually followed through. “It is perfectly possible that once he got in the room he just bottled it and never did,” said one.
In his memoirs Johnson said nothing about an apology, which is perhaps hardly surprising, but this was certainly not due to any scruples he may have had about revealing the details of his conversations with the Queen. He was quite happy to recount what happened in their last audience, and to disclose that she was allegedly suffering from bone cancer. The Palace privately expressed “considerable concern” about such indiscretions, which for courtiers is strong language indeed. Questioned by this author about it via email, Johnson said two things. The first was: “For all I could tell from the Palace they thought the Supreme Court judgment was as peculiar as I did.”
That is not entirely true, but not entirely false, either. The Palace certainly was not expecting the judgment to go the way it did, but that is not to say it regarded the judgment as “peculiar”.
The second thing that Johnson said was: “I cannot comment on the view of the late Queen but the idea of some sort of apology is total fiction.” In other words, ever since September 2019 the world has believed that Boris Johnson said sorry to the Queen for embarrassing her over prorogation, and it turns out he did no such thing.
Boris and Charles feel the strain
While Johnson did his best — not always successfully — to foster a good relationship with Queen Elizabeth, his dealings with the heir to the throne were all too often less than harmonious. At the end of the summer of 2019, after visiting the Queen at Balmoral, Johnson and Carrie Symonds, his then girlfriend, were invited to visit the Prince of Wales at Birkhall, his home on the estate. Johnson was said to have been in a “shambolic state” and “not focused on the meeting with the Prince of Wales in a way one might expect”. Charles did not make a fuss, but courtiers felt it smacked of a lack of respect.
Three years later they got a chance to find out what disrespect really looked like. In April 2022, Johnson launched his plan to tackle the problem of illegal migration by sending those who arrived in the UK illegally to Rwanda, from where they could apply for asylum. It was greeted immediately with widespread opposition.
On the afternoon of June 10, The Times was about to publish a story that the Prince of Wales had privately described the Rwanda plan as “appalling”. The story, which was due to go on the front page the next morning, said that Charles was particularly frustrated as he was due to represent the Queen at the Commonwealth summit in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, later that month. The Times had already approached Clarence House for comment, and it had in turn warned No 10 what was happening. Then, before The Times had put the story up on its website, a half-baked version of the story appeared on the Mail Online website. Simon Enright, Charles’s communications secretary, was furious that the Mail had been tipped off. He wanted to kill the story, not spread it all over the internet.
Simon Enright, who was the Prince of Wales’s communication secretary
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Peter Wilson, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, was mortified that there should be tensions between the Palace and No 10. On the other hand, the Downing Street director of communications, Guto Harri, was not one to be intimidated by the Palace, and was more relaxed because he could see that it might play well politically for No 10. The Prince of Wales moaning about a dynamic policy that promised to solve the migration crisis was not necessarily a bad look. In the Palace there was a lot of anxiety and a desire to patch things up and stop the story getting worse.
The Home Office did its best to stop a row developing between the government and the Prince of Wales. As for Johnson, he was plotting his revenge on Charles. As the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali approached, Clarence House was keen to arrange a photograph of the prince shaking hands with the prime minister. However, on the plane to Rwanda, Boris had other things on his mind, telling journalists he hoped to help others “shed some of their condescending attitudes towards Rwanda”. It was, said Harri, “a dig at Charles, without mentioning Charles”.
Guto Harri, the former Downing Street director of communications
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He added: “Charles had slagged off a key and difficult policy decision. Boris is not a man to let that go. He does not get angry or upset, but he gets even. I remember Boris telling me once, ‘I fear no man’. But it was slightly playful as well: I think he was enjoying [Charles’s] discomfort.”
The prince’s officials knew exactly what was going on. Johnson, they believe, deliberately kept the story going with his briefing on the plane. In Kigali, the Prince of Wales and the prime minister had their photo opportunity, shaking hands, smiling, seemingly getting on pretty well.
Johnson and Prince Charles in Kigali, Rwanda, in June 2022
CHRIS JACKSON/PA
In private, Johnson confronted the prince about whether he had criticised government policy, and Charles conceded that inadvertently he may have said something. Then they discussed their forthcoming speeches, and Charles said he wanted to talk about slavery. “The prime minister just couldn’t help himself. He basically told the future King, ‘I wouldn’t talk about slavery if I [were] you, or you’ll end up having to sell the Duchy of Cornwall to pay reparations’. Imagine the prime minister telling the future King that. I don’t think relations ever fully recovered.”
Power and the Palace: the Inside Story of the Monarchy and 10 Downing Street by Valentine Low (Headline Press, £25) is published on September 11. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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