The Commissioning: The Contemporary Record
This page reproduces the contemporary record of Monday 11 September 2028, four days after the general election that followed the Loreto Division, when Michelle Lujan Grisham commissioned as Prime Minister a man of twenty-six who had been returned two years earlier to one of the forty seats the hereditary peerage fills by election, had never been elected to anything by the public, and could not be while he sat in the Lords.
Two records were broken in the same afternoon.
He is the first premier to govern from the upper House since before the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859, a distance of a hundred and sixty-nine years, and the argument against that had not changed in the interval. What had changed was that every alternative was worse.
And he is the youngest Prime Minister in the Realm’s history by seventeen years. The previous youngest was John F. Kennedy, commissioned in 1960 at forty-three. No other premier in the Realm’s two hundred and forty-three years has taken the office before his forty-fourth birthday, and the roll of thirty-seven before him contains nobody under forty-three at all.
The transcripts are reproduced as broadcast.
The result
The election was held on Thursday 7 September 2028. It destroyed the government and did not produce another one.
| Party | Seats | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Conservative and Crown Union | 168 | +19 |
| Labour and Social Democratic | 124 | -31 |
| Alternative for the Realm | 62 | +27 |
| Left and Solidarity Bloc | 48 | +25 |
| Liberal Federal Democrats | 32 | -27 |
| Alliance 90 / Green Realm | 25 | -13 |
| Territory of Loreto, interim | 5 | unchanged |
All three parties of the outgoing coalition were punished and the opposition did not win. Labour lost thirty-one seats, the Liberal Federal Democrats lost almost half of theirs, and the Greens lost a third. The Conservative and Crown Union gained nineteen and finished sixty-five short of a majority. The two parties that gained most were the two that had spent the Parliament outside the coalition and outside the cordon respectively: the Left and Solidarity Bloc, which had refused to prop up a ministry it was never invited to join, and Alternative for the Realm, which nearly doubled and is now the third party of the Realm.
Two governments were possible and nobody would form either
With the five Loreto members the House has four hundred and sixty-four voting members, and a majority is two hundred and thirty-three.
The arithmetic that everybody had feared turned out not to matter. The Conservative and Crown Union and Alternative for the Realm together hold two hundred and thirty, which is three short, so the cordon that every party maintains against AfR was not the obstacle it had been in the last Parliament. Breaking it would not have produced a government either.
Exactly two combinations reach two hundred and thirty-three.
The first is Labour, the Bloc, the Liberal Federal Democrats, the Greens and the five members for Loreto, at two hundred and thirty-four. It requires the three parties the country had just punished to resume office on a majority of one, sustained by a party that had declined to join them when they were stronger and by five members whose right to sit is before a court and undecided.
The second is the Conservative and Crown Union with Labour, at two hundred and ninety-two: a grand coalition of the two parties that had spent six weeks telling the country what was wrong with each other.
Neither was arithmetically impossible. Both required somebody to do, within four days of the count, the precise thing the count had punished. That is the deadlock, and it is worth being exact about its nature: the Realm did not lack a majority. It lacked anybody willing to be in one.
The first transcript, 9:12 a.m.
ALCOTT: It is four days since the election and the Realm does not have a government, and this morning that sentence has stopped being a formality.
Ana Valdez remains Prime Minister. She remains Prime Minister because a defeated premier continues until somebody replaces her, which is the rule, and not because anybody including her believes she is going to carry on. She has been at Government House twice since Friday.
Delia, what is actually happening.
MORENO: Stephen, what is happening is that six party leaders are being asked a question none of them want to answer, which is whether they will serve under one of the others.
The honest position this morning is that there are two governments available on the numbers and no leader who will put their name to either. Margaret Renwick will not go into office with Labour four days after fighting them. Labour will not resume office having lost thirty-one seats. The Liberal Federal Democrats have lost almost half their strength and the Greens a third for being in the last coalition and their members will not permit another one.
ALCOTT: And the Bloc.
MORENO: Signe Halvorsen said something on Saturday that has been quoted at her ever since. She said the Bloc had spent three years being told it was not needed and had come back with forty-eight seats and no wish to be needed now.
ALCOTT: Is there a third answer being discussed.
MORENO: There is, and I want to be careful because it has been put to me as a possibility rather than as a plan. There are people in three of the six parties talking about a Prime Minister who is not in the Commons at all.
ALCOTT: From the Lords.
MORENO: From the Lords.
ALCOTT: Then I will say what I said in July, and I will say it the same way. It is lawful. There is no rule against it. Nobody has done it since before the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859, and the reason nobody has done it is that the confidence that keeps a Prime Minister in office lives in the Commons and a Prime Minister who cannot be questioned there is answerable to nothing.
That was the objection in 1859 and it is the objection now. If it is being got around, I would like to know how before I tell you it has been.
How it was got around
It was got around by writing it down, which is unusual in this Realm and is the most important thing about the arrangement.
The five parties did not agree on a Prime Minister first. They agreed on a programme first and then looked for somebody to administer it, which inverts the ordinary order and was done deliberately, because a programme settled in advance is a programme no premier can depart from and therefore a premier who can be trusted with it need not be trusted with anything else.
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The parties will support the commissioning of a Prime Minister who is not a member of the House of Commons, and will not move or support a motion of no confidence in that ministry before the business set out in paragraph 3 is concluded.
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The Prime Minister shall chair the ministry and shall not lead it. Portfolios are allocated among the parties in the proportions set out in the schedule. The Prime Minister appoints no member of the Cabinet and may dismiss none.
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The business of the ministry is limited to the following and to what is necessarily incidental to it:
(a) a federal enumeration of the Territory of Loreto, to be commenced within ninety days;
(b) a Bill to settle the constitutional form of the Territory, to be laid before Parliament within one year of the enumeration’s return;
(c) supply, and such other business as is necessary for the ordinary administration of the Realm.
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No party is bound to support any provision of the Bill under paragraph 3(b). The undertaking in paragraph 1 is an undertaking to allow the Bill to be brought forward and voted on, and is not an undertaking as to its content.
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The Prime Minister shall answer to the House of Lords weekly and shall attend the bar of the House of Commons monthly to answer questions there, standing, by leave of the Speaker, which leave the parties will move to give.
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On the conclusion of the business in paragraph 3, or on 30 June 2031, whichever is earlier, the Prime Minister shall resign without being asked.
Paragraph 5 is the one constitutional lawyers have written about since. A Prime Minister who is not a member of the Commons cannot be questioned in it, which is the whole objection, and the parties answered the objection by inventing a procedure: he comes to the bar of the House, which is the line a stranger may not cross, and answers standing on the far side of it. The Commons has admitted people to the bar before, to be reprimanded or to give evidence. It has never admitted a Prime Minister, and it has never admitted anybody to be asked questions by the whole House.
Paragraph 6 is the one the parties cared about. The premiership has an end date written into it, and the man who took it agreed to the date before he was offered the office.
The second transcript, 2:40 p.m.
MORENO: Stephen, I can give you the name.
The parties have agreed to recommend Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, who sits on the crossbenches, who took his seat in 2026, and who is twenty-six years old.
ALCOTT: Twenty-six.
MORENO: Twenty-six.
ALCOTT: Then before you tell me anything else about him, I am going to tell the audience something I have had checked twice this afternoon, because it is the kind of number that gets repeated wrongly.
The youngest Prime Minister this Realm has ever had was John F. Kennedy, who was forty-three in 1960. Nobody before him was younger and nobody since has come close. If this happens, the record is not broken by a year or two. It is broken by seventeen years, and there is no second place worth discussing.
Go on.
MORENO: Caleb Whitlock, seventh Baron Whitlock of Wickford. He did not earn the peerage. He inherited it, in 2026, when his father died, and the barony dates from 1791.
And I want to be precise about the next part, because people are going to get it wrong all week. Inheriting the barony did not give him a seat. No hereditary peer has inherited a seat in this Realm since the settlement of 1999. He sat because he was returned to one of the forty places the whole hereditary peerage elects from among themselves, unopposed, at a by-election later that year, at twenty-four.
ALCOTT: Why would they elect a man of twenty-four.
MORENO: Because the forty have been accused of being a museum for as long as there have been forty of them, and the argument for reforming them out of existence is that they are old men sitting on a right nobody gave them. When it became known that the youngest candidate available was twenty-four, the others withdrew, and an electorate of a few hundred peers never had to vote. Everybody involved understood what the gesture was for.
He has served on the Lords select committee on the Territory of Loreto, which is the only committee he has sat on and which nobody with a career wanted. He has spoken in the chamber thirty-one times and all thirty-one were about the territory.
ALCOTT: And outside the chamber.
MORENO: Nothing. Never a member of a party, never stood for anything, never held office, never done any job that would be described in a newspaper. He is twenty-six.
ALCOTT: I want to put the obvious thing to you, because the argument for a premier from the Lords has always been that the man is finished with ambition, and a man of twenty-six has not started.
MORENO: I have put it to three of them today and had the same answer in almost the same words, and it is the opposite of what you would expect.
A peer who sits in the Lords cannot sit in the Commons and cannot stand for it. He can be Prime Minister and he cannot be a candidate. He cannot build a following in the chamber that makes and unmakes governments, because he cannot enter it except by leave and standing at the bar. His age is not the risk they took. It is the guarantee they extracted. A man of sixty with a career behind him has friends, debts and a view. This one has a committee, thirty-one speeches and a dead father.
ALCOTT: Delia, I have to put the other thing to you and I would rather do it now than have somebody else do it on Thursday.
A peerage in this Realm can be disclaimed. It is a formal instrument, it is lodged with the College of Heralds, it lasts for the holder’s life, and the reason the device exists at all is so that a peer who wants to stand for the Commons can. It has been used.
So it is not true that this man can never be a candidate. It is true that he is not one today.
MORENO: No, that is right, and it has been said to me twice this afternoon by people who signed the agreement, both times unprompted and both times in a lowered voice.
He is twenty-six. If he does this for three years and does it adequately, he can lodge one piece of paper, stand at a by-election as a former Prime Minister, and be in the Commons before he is thirty with a career in front of him that nobody else in this building can match.
ALCOTT: And they chose him anyway.
MORENO: They chose him anyway, because the alternative was no government at all, and because a risk three years away is not a risk you feel on a Monday.
ALCOTT: [Pause. Four seconds.]
I am going to leave that where it is rather than characterise it.
The third transcript, 4:55 p.m.
MORENO: Ana Valdez left about forty minutes ago. She resigned formally and she said nothing at all on the step, which she has not done before and which people are reading as being in the manner of Gore in 2006, although she has not said so and nobody has asked her in terms.
Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, arrived at twenty past four and has been inside since.
ALCOTT: And the Governor-General.
MORENO: Michelle Lujan Grisham, who commissioned Ana Valdez on a death in office three years ago and is commissioning her successor this afternoon. She has now done it twice without a general election producing either of them, which nobody can remember happening before and which I would rather put that way than claim it has not.
I want to make one point about what she is doing in there, because it is being described today as a choice and it is not one. The Governor-General commissions the person who can command the confidence of the Commons, and that is a determination of fact and not a preference. She has in front of her a written agreement signed by five parties holding three hundred and ninety-seven seats undertaking not to remove this ministry. That is the fact. She has no discretion to prefer somebody she likes better and she has not got anybody else to prefer.
ALCOTT: He is coming out.
The fourth transcript, 5:20 p.m.
WHITLOCK: I have accepted the Governor-General’s commission.
I am going to say three things and then go in and start, because the thing I have been asked to do has a date on it and the date is not generous.
The first is that I know exactly what I am. I am twenty-six. I have never been elected to anything by the public and I cannot be while I sit where I sit. I sit in Parliament because my father died, and because a few hundred peers wanted to make a point, and I have done nothing in my life that would qualify me to run a department, let alone all of them.
I have not been chosen because anybody wanted me. I have been chosen because I am the only person in either House who has no friends to reward, no enemies to punish, no faction to feed and no seat to save, and because I cannot become a difficulty for any of the five people who signed that paper. That is the whole of my qualification. I would rather say it myself, today, than have it said about me for the next three years by people who think they are telling me something.
I know what the newspapers will call this and they will be right to.
One more thing on that, because it will be asked and I would rather answer it before it is. A peerage in this Realm can be disclaimed, and a man who disclaims one may stand for the Commons. I am aware of that. So is everybody who signed the agreement. I am not going to give you an undertaking about it today, because an undertaking given on a step on the first afternoon is worth nothing, and because I would rather be judged on what I do in the three years than on what I promised in the first ten minutes of them.
The second is about the bar of the House. I will be at it every month. I did not ask for that provision and I would not have thought of it, and I have come round to thinking it is the best thing in the agreement. A Prime Minister who cannot be questioned by the chamber that can remove him is answerable to nothing, and that has been the objection to a premier from the Lords since before the Act of 1859, and it is a good objection. I am not going to pretend the arrangement answers it completely. I am going to stand there once a month and let the House do what it can with me, and if that turns out not to be enough then the House should not agree to this again.
The third is about the Territory of Loreto. Four million people have been told for fifteen months that their position is temporary by a Realm that wrote into its own statute that it must not be treated as permanent. A government fell over that in July and the country has just had an election about it, and I am not going to add to the quantity of things that have been said about it. There will be an enumeration within ninety days. There will be a Bill. Parliament will decide what is in it, and Parliament may decide against everything I put in front of it, and that is what paragraph 4 is for and I agreed to it willingly.
I have sat on one committee in two years and it was about that territory, and I did not choose it, it was what was left. I have thought about very little else since, which is not a qualification either, but it is the only thing I can offer that is true.
I am here until that is finished or until the thirtieth of June 2031, and then I am going, and I will not need to be asked.
Thank you.
What the broadcast could not know
Nothing yet. The ministry was a week old when this record was compiled, the enumeration had not begun, the Bill did not exist, and the first appearance at the bar of the House had not happened.
What can be said is what the arrangement is and is not. It is not a national government, because Alternative for the Realm, the third party of the Realm with sixty-two seats, was not a party to the agreement and was not invited to be, and an arrangement that excludes the third largest party is a cordon with a ministry attached. It is not a coalition, because the Prime Minister leads none of the parties in it and appoints none of its members. And it is not obviously a precedent, because every party that signed the agreement has said publicly that it is not one.
The Register’s view is that a thing done once for good reasons, written down, and given an end date, is the most likely kind of precedent there is.
✎ Editor's Note · The qualification is the disability
The brief was a peer the parties could agree on, and the obvious version is an elderly figure of unimpeachable standing who wants nothing because he is nearly finished. That version is dull and it is also wrong about how politicians choose people.
Twenty-six is better, and the reason is structural rather than characterful. A peer who sits in the Lords cannot sit in the Commons and cannot stand for it, and a seat among the forty cannot be resigned, so the chamber that makes and unmakes governments is closed to him unless he gives up the peerage itself. A man of sixty has friends, debts and a view. A man of twenty-six who was handed his seat unopposed has a committee nobody wanted, thirty-one speeches and a dead father, and no possible route to power that does not run through the goodwill of the people who put him there. His youth is not the risk the parties took. It is the guarantee they extracted.
It also matters that he did not earn the peerage. A distinguished appointee would have a constituency of admirers and a reputation to protect; an heir has neither. And the corpus made this better than the first draft of it: no hereditary peer inherits a seat any more, so he had to be one of the forty the hereditary peerage elects from among itself, which meant a few hundred people had to put a twenty-four-year-old in to answer the charge that the forty are a museum. The class that reform has spent two centuries reducing has just supplied a Prime Minister, by way of a gesture it made to look modern.
The loaded gun is the disclaimer, and it should stay loaded. A peerage here may be given up for the holder’s life, and the device exists precisely so that a peer who wants the Commons can have it. So the guarantee the parties extracted is not permanent and they know it: he is twenty-six, and three adequate years would leave him able to lodge one instrument, stand at a by-election as a former Prime Minister, and enter the elected chamber before he is thirty. They took that risk because the alternative was no government, and because a danger three years out is not one anybody feels on a Monday.
Whitlock says all of this himself on the step, including the part about the disclaimer, because a man who has understood the arrangement completely is more interesting than one flattered by it, and because the Register’s premiers are working chiefs rather than father-figures. He declines to promise anything about it, on the ground that an undertaking given in the first ten minutes is worth nothing, which is either honest or the first move of a career.
Trivia
- In-Universe Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, is the first Prime Minister to govern from the upper House since Thomas Jefferson, who governed the last months of his premiership from it in 1804. He is also the first premier in the chamber's present name, since the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859, by whose era the migration of the premiership to the Commons was complete, is the same Act that struck the adjective out of the House of Lords American.
- In-Universe Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, is the youngest Prime Minister in the Realm's history by seventeen years. The previous youngest was John F. Kennedy, commissioned in 1960 at forty-three, and the roll of thirty-seven premiers before Whitlock contains nobody under forty-three at all.
- In-Universe No official portrait of him existed when he took office and one had been commissioned and not sat for, so the only photograph of the Prime Minister was one a relative had taken of him in his flat before any of it: a young man in a jumper and socks with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He has never said whether he minds it being used.
- In-Universe He is Caleb Whitlock, seventh Baron Whitlock of Wickford, and he did not earn the peerage. He inherited it in 2026 on his father's death, the barony dating from 1791. He was twenty-six at the commissioning, had never been a member of a party, never stood for anything, never held office and never done any job that would be described in a newspaper.
- In-Universe Inheriting the barony did not give him a seat: no hereditary peer inherits one, and a peer who wishes to sit must win one of the forty places the whole hereditary peerage elects from among themselves. He won a by-election to the forty at twenty-four, and an electorate of a few hundred peers elected the youngest person available to answer the long-standing charge that the forty are a museum.
- In-Universe In two years he sat on one committee, the Lords select committee on the Territory of Loreto, which nobody with a career wanted, and spoke in the chamber thirty-one times. All thirty-one were about the territory.
- In-Universe Three of the five parties gave the same answer when asked why a man of twenty-six rather than an elderly figure with no ambition left: a peer who sits in the Lords cannot sit in the Commons and cannot stand for it, so he can be Prime Minister and cannot be a candidate. His age was not the risk they took but the guarantee they extracted. A man of sixty has friends, debts and a view; this one had a committee, thirty-one speeches and a dead father.
- In-Universe The guarantee is not permanent and everybody knew it. A peerage in the Realm may be disclaimed for the holder's life, and the device exists precisely so that a peer who wants to stand for the Commons can. Three adequate years would leave Whitlock able to lodge one instrument, stand at a by-election as a former Prime Minister, and enter the elected chamber before he is thirty.
- In-Universe Two signatories raised the disclaimer with the ABC that afternoon, unprompted and both times in a lowered voice. They chose him anyway, because the alternative was no government at all and because a risk three years away is not one anybody feels on a Monday.
- In-Universe Whitlock raised it himself on the step before he could be asked, said he was aware of it and so was everybody who signed, and declined to give an undertaking, on the ground that a promise made on a step in the first ten minutes is worth nothing and that he would rather be judged on the three years.
- In-Universe Whitlock said so himself on the step at Government House: that he had not been chosen because anybody wanted him, that his whole qualification was that he could not become a difficulty for the people who signed the agreement, and that he would rather say it himself than have it said about him for three years.
- In-Universe The election of 7 September 2028 punished all three parties of the outgoing coalition and did not produce a winner. Labour lost thirty-one seats, the Liberal Federal Democrats almost half of theirs and the Greens a third, while the Conservative and Crown Union gained nineteen and finished sixty-five short.
- In-Universe The cordon around Alternative for the Realm turned out not to be the obstacle. AfR nearly doubled to sixty-two seats and became the third party of the Realm, and the Conservative and Crown Union with AfR would still have been three short of a majority. Breaking the cordon would not have produced a government either.
- In-Universe Exactly two combinations reached the 233 needed. The old coalition with the Bloc and the five Loreto members at 234, and a grand coalition of the two largest parties at 292. Neither was impossible; both required somebody to do, within four days of the count, the precise thing the count had punished. The Realm did not lack a majority. It lacked anybody willing to be in one.
- In-Universe The parties agreed the programme before they agreed the person, which inverts the ordinary order and was deliberate: a programme settled in advance is one no premier can depart from, so a premier who can be trusted with it need not be trusted with anything else.
- In-Universe Under the Heads of Agreement the Prime Minister chairs the ministry and does not lead it. He appoints no member of the Cabinet and may dismiss none, and the portfolios are allocated among the parties by a schedule.
- In-Universe The ministry's permitted business is three things: a federal enumeration of Loreto within ninety days, a Bill to settle the territory's constitutional form within a year of the enumeration's return, and supply. No party is bound to support any provision of the Bill; the undertaking is to let it be brought forward and voted on, not as to its content.
- In-Universe Paragraph 5 answered the 1859 objection by invention. A premier who is not a member of the Commons cannot be questioned in it, so the parties provided that he attend the bar of the House monthly and answer standing, by leave of the Speaker. The Commons has admitted people to the bar before, to be reprimanded or to give evidence, but never a Prime Minister and never anybody to be questioned by the whole House.
- In-Universe Whitlock said he had not asked for the bar provision and would not have thought of it, that he had come round to thinking it the best thing in the agreement, that the 1859 objection is a good objection which the arrangement does not completely answer, and that if a monthly hour proved insufficient the House should not agree to such a thing again.
- In-Universe Paragraph 6 puts an end date in the commission: on the conclusion of the Loreto business or on 30 June 2031, whichever is earlier, the Prime Minister resigns without being asked. He agreed to the date before he was offered the office.
- In-Universe Ana Valdez resigned formally and said nothing at all on the step, which she had not done before. The comparison with Gore in 2006 was made immediately and she has never confirmed it and has never been asked in terms.
- In-Universe Michelle Lujan Grisham commissioned Ana Valdez on Markham's death in 2025 and Valdez's successor three years later, neither of them produced by a general election. The Register notes that the second was not a choice: the Governor-General commissions the person who can command the confidence of the Commons, which is a determination of fact, and she had before her a written agreement signed by five parties holding 397 seats undertaking not to remove the ministry.
- In-Universe The arrangement is not a national government, because AfR with sixty-two seats was not a party to it and was not invited, so it is a cordon with a ministry attached. It is not a coalition, because the Prime Minister leads none of the parties and appoints none of the Cabinet. Every party that signed it has said publicly that it is not a precedent.
- Design The obvious peer for this job is an elderly figure of unimpeachable standing who wants nothing because he is nearly finished. That version is dull and it misunderstands how politicians choose people. Twenty-six is safer, not riskier: a peer cannot sit in the Commons or stand for it, so he is young enough to be dangerous everywhere except the one place that decides who governs.
- Real-World Our last Prime Minister to govern from the Lords was Salisbury, who left office in 1902, and the case is usually taken to have been settled in 1923 when Curzon was passed over for Baldwin on the ground that a premier in the Lords could not answer to a Commons containing the whole opposition. What is invented here is the answer: a written agreement, a fixed programme, a resignation date, and a Prime Minister who comes to the bar of the House to be questioned standing.
See also
- Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, the Prime Minister commissioned that day
- The Loreto Division, the confidence division seven weeks and one election earlier
- The Territory of Loreto, whose constitutional form this ministry exists to settle
- The Prime Minister, the office with no statute behind it and no rule requiring a seat in the Commons
- Parliament, for the bar of the House and the composition of the Lords
- The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859, by whose era the old practice had ended, and which renamed the chamber
- The Governor-General, who commissions on a determination of fact and not a preference
- Alternative for the Realm, the third party of the Realm and not a party to the agreement
- May Day 2006: The Contemporary Record, for the resignation Valdez’s silence was compared to
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