The current paralysis in Parliament, brought about by MPs, tests the patience of the electorate
SIR – This Parliament doesn’t want a no-deal Brexit; it doesn’t want the only deal on offer (Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement), and it doesn’t want a general election to break the deadlock. It seems a majority of MPs would prefer to waste the electorate’s time, money and patience with months or years of paralysis rather than face their verdict.
Croydon, Surrey
SIR – I was excited at the election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, who seemed resolved to implement Brexit.
However, as the last few weeks have shown, Theresa May was faced with a monumental task – not in getting us out of the EU, but in dealing with treacherous, arrogant, conniving, bullying members of her own party.
Burton Overy, Leicestershire
SIR – As former chairmen of the Tory Reform Group, which has for 44 years represented the One Nation tradition in the Conservative Party, we support the swift return of the whip to the 21 MPs who had it removed last week. One vote is not cause for expulsion. Ken Clarke and Rory Stewart are two of the most popular Conservatives, who appeal far beyond the Conservative Party’s traditional base.
A Conservative Party that is not broad enough to include Sir Nicholas Soames and Alistair Burt is unlikely to be capable of winning a general election. With this purge, our party risks being perceived again as the “nasty party”. This is the quickest route the Conservatives can offer Jeremy Corbyn in his quest to reach Downing Street.
The key issue is not Britain’s membership of the EU. That was settled in the 2016 referendum, and almost all of the 21 voted for the Withdrawal Agreement. It is about culture, ethics and political priorities. Our party and the Government cannot remain narrowly focused on this single issue to define what does and does not make a Conservative. Arguably, this obsession has already led to us losing sight of what most affects the daily lives of so many, including problems in social care and education. In part this led to the loss in 2017 of the majority David Cameron secured for the Conservatives.
We support Sir John Major, Damian Green and the One Nation Conservative Caucus in urging the Prime Minister to resolve this issue without delay. Victoria Roberts TRG Chairman, 2013-14 Timothy Crockford TRG Chairman, 2009-13 Timothy Barnes TRG Chairman, 2006-9 Giles Marshall TRG Chairman, 2000-02 SIR – Robert Tombs (Sunday Comment, September 1) is wrong to suppose that the current “inflated notion” of parliamentary sovereignty dates “from the Victorian age”.
It was the Victorian jurist AV Dicey who developed the distinction between the legal sovereign (the Queen in Parliament) and the political sovereign (the electorate). His Law of the Constitution (1885) holds: “the legislature, which ( ex hypothesi) cannot be governed by laws, should be regulated by understandings, the object of which is to secure the conformity of Parliament to the will of the nation”.
The current “Establishment rage” is “infantile” because it is either ignorant of Dicey’s distinction or, more plausibly, simply chooses to ignore it. Parliamentarians now repudiate not just the 2016 referendum, but also the 2017 general election, in which a majority of elected MPs pledged to uphold the result of the former.
Our current constitutional crisis thus derives not from Victorian ideas, but from modern or even postmodern ones; specifically the wholesale refusal to acknowledge a distinction wellknown to Gladstone, and widely respected until rather recently.
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk