A staged resignation process intended to leave the UK in a three month suspensioni, full of unknowns and whose strength remains to be verified. But at least it seems to remove the shadow of fears of an institutional crisis with the 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth. This is the scenario that is outlined today in London after the announcement of her resignation by Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party, a largely majority force in the House of Commons, with the commitment to automatically leave the office of prime minister only after the election of a successor to the head of the Tories: waiting for October, accomplice the withdrawal of Parliament for the summer break which starts in two weeks.
The process chosen by Downing Street, after BoJo’s obtorto-neck surrender to the consequences of the latest scandals and the flurry of resignations from his team, provides for the immediate resignation – today – from the party leadership. But with a phase of permanence in the premier’s chair for the time necessary for the Tories to elect, with the ordinary procedure, a new or a new leader under the auspices of the 1922 Committee, an internal body of the parliamentary group: a procedure that provides for the collection of the nominations of the suitors in Parliament and then a series of successive votes among the conservative deputies for the skimming of the list – through the exclusion from time to time of the least supported – until leaving two residual candidates (if no one has in the meantime obtained the consent of a qualified majority of parliamentarians) to be entrusted to the final postal ballot among an audience of members. A challenge which, taking into account the withdrawal, is destined to last until the beginning of October, that is, the eve of the party’s annual conference (congress).
An interregnum that, however, some members of the same Tory parish deem unsustainable. All the more so since Johnson has seen about fifty members of the executive resign out of about 150 (between senior and junior positions), and that replacing the exiles – or bringing them back in part – will not be easy. From here the alternative idea of a more hasty process for Johnson, which should also include replacing him in Downing Street with an acting – on paper, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, one of his loyalists, if he were willing to accept – well before October: an idea that, however, should be made to digest Johnson, with no one really knows what pressures since no one can legally force him to resign as prime minister as the winner of the political elections at the end of 2019.
For now, however, the nightmare of a third scenario appears to have been dispelled: the one evoked until this morning of the possibility that Johnson, barricaded in Downing Street despite the revolt in the party, could play the card of dissolving the House of Commons and calling a national kamikaze early vote by authority. A prerogative that British law assigns to the premier, with the sole obligation of the sovereign countersigning, after the revocation in 2019 of a 2011 reform that had instead delegated it to the approval of two thirds of the Chamber; but that would have embarrassed Elizabeth II (14 prime ministers so far in her long reign), forcing her to choose whether to indulge as practice dictates the wishes of a head of government no longer supported by the bulk of his majority or block his way with a denial and a political act foreign to the tradition of the British constitutional monarchy.
Source: Ansa
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