When a prime minister who hasn’t faced a general election gains the assent of an unelected monarch to prorogue parliament, it is inevitable that some parallels will be found with Charles I’s dismissal of MPs in the mid-17th century.
Only yesterday, Labour’s Margaret Beckett made exactly the comparison, noting that it didn’t end well. But are there really any similarities, or is this just lazy history and easy rhetoric?
Certainly, in the most famous case of Charles I’s decision to dismiss parliament in 1629, the result was an 11-year dictatorship, decoratively known to history as the “personal rule” – and the imprisonment in the Tower of London of those who opposed him. Presumably not even Dominic Cummings is planning that fate for Jeremy Corbyn.
But while we might not be on the verge of an absolutist King Boris dictatorship, some deeper parallels are worth investigating. » | John Rees | Thursday, August 29, 2019
