How Cameron could become embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Queen – or his party

By James Gray

You didn’t have David Cameron down as a radical constitutional reformer, did you?

Don’t let the stubborn opposition to electoral reform or support of hereditary peers fool you. According to senior Tory sources, Cameron wants to tear the constitution up — not a fitting metaphor for something that for the most part isn’t written down, I know. Whatever the actual number of seats, if there is a hung parliament on Friday Gordon Brown will have first dibs on forming a government.

And he’ll be given considerable time to do so. Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell has issued detailed proposals (based on memos used by No 10 and the Palace as they dealt with the hung parliament of 1974) which would give Brown an extra week to hold coalition talks. If he can’t do it in that time it’s up to Brown to advise the Queen to appoint Cameron as Prime Minister. That’s the convention — and conventions are all we have.

But senior Tories have been briefing that if the Conservatives win the popular vote but are short of an outright majority, Cameron will “ignore the rules†and declare himself Prime Minister anyway.

According to the Guardian the Conservatives would call on their steadfast supporters within the media to shore up this position until it’s no longer tenable for Brown (or, perhaps, another prospective Labour leader) to stay on.

Few Labour supporters would question Cameron’s appetite for power, or the pliancy of the Tory press. But there’s a huge barrier standing in the way of Cameron’s coup — not the progressive majority, but Cameron’s fifth cousin twice removed: the Queen.

Many commentators believe that the extra time allowed for in O’Donnell’s guidelines is designed to stave off the need for the Queen’s intervention. The longer Labour and the Liberal Democrats are given to come to an agreement, the less chance there is of the monarch having to hand pick the next Prime Minister.

However, as Next Left points out, the Tory plot would pull the Queen into party politics in a way that she has largely avoided for six decades on the throne.

A new Prime Minister can only be appointed on the advice of the outgoing one — if the Tory party and press demand that Cameron be given the premiership they will effectively be calling on the Queen to act independently and summon Brown to resign.

In such a situation Cameron could well find that the public supports him, especially if he has Murdoch’s backing. That would put our feudal constitution under the spotlight like never before — the public would see that the Queen is constitutionally pointless. The Tories would be on a collision course with the monarchy.

But Cameron would also be taking the risk of causing deep divisions within his own party. Would the Telegraph really support Cameron if it meant undermining the impartiality of the monarchy, for example? Would the legions of royalists over at ConservativeHome support such dangerous subversion of the constitution?

The period following the election of a hung parliament will be one of unprecedented political tension, heightened by the glare of 24 hour news and scrutiny of the Twitterverse. Cameron would have little time and few options open to him if he did want to derail coalition talks between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. So maybe he really would risk incurring the wrath of the Palace and monarchists in a desperate attempt to seize power.

Cameron has previously said that said the monarchy is “a vital part of what it means to be British†but has been “consistently been undermined by this government.†It is hard to think of a more effective way of undermining the monarchy than by pulling it into party politics in this way.

Cameron is right in one respect, of course: our alleged constitution is not fit for purpose. It’s a rag bag of habits and conventions that is not simply undemocratic but anti-democratic. The answer is a new constitution based on popular sovereignty — the power of the people rather than the Crown. The monarchy should be stripped entirely of its functions and in its place we need a head of state who is elected and accountable, empowered to act both as a neutral mediator and a guardian of the constitution.