The King's Question: The Contemporary Record

ALCOTT: It is twelve minutes past ten. The Royal American Supreme Court has given judgment in the case of the Loreto seats, and Delia Moreno was in court. Delia.

MORENO: Stephen, the Court has upheld the seats. All seven Justices. The Chief Justice, Nathaniel Brooks, read a summary from the bench for about eleven minutes, and the judgment itself runs to something over a hundred pages, which nobody outside has read yet, including me.

I will give you the summary as he gave it, because the words matter and I would rather not paraphrase them.

The Treaty of La Paz was received into the law of the Realm by Act of Parliament. That Act gave the Territory five members of the House of Commons, apportioned on the census the Treaty named. Parliament chose that census. The Court said Parliament may choose another, and that the enumeration now ordered may give it one, but that until Parliament does so the members sit on the census it chose, and the enumeration does not by itself unseat anybody.

And then he went further than the case strictly needed, and I think deliberately. The members sit, vote and are counted like any others, as the Act says, and every vote they have cast, in this Parliament and in the last, was lawfully cast and lawfully counted, including the votes of the twenty-sixth of July.

ALCOTT: Including the division that brought down the Valdez ministry.

MORENO: Including that, by name. He said one sentence I wrote down twice to be sure of it. “A seat is not less a seat because the vote cast from it was decisive.”

ALCOTT: Were the five in court?

MORENO: All five, Stephen, on the second bench from the back, together, as they sit in the House. They stood when the Court rose, and they left together by the side door, and they did not stop. We asked. Nobody from their offices has said anything, and I am told nobody is going to.

ALCOTT: And Alternative for the Realm?

MORENO: Dale Ambrister was at the front, at counsel’s table, which a party leader who is also the named claimant is entitled to do. He did not move while the summary was read. He has said he will speak at a quarter past twelve.

ALCOTT: I want to put on the record what this settles and what it does not. It settles that the five members for the Territory sit lawfully, and that what they voted for is the law. It does not settle anything about the Territory’s future, which is the business of the enumeration and of the Bill that follows it, and it does not change the arithmetic of the present House, where the ministry rests on three hundred and ninety-seven seats without them.

MORENO: That is right, Stephen. The case was always about July. It has been answered about July.

ALCOTT: Dale Ambrister has spoken outside the Court. Delia, I will be honest with the audience: this is not what we expected.

MORENO: Nor did anybody here, Stephen. He came down the steps on his own, without the party’s people round him, and spoke for perhaps a minute. I will read it as I have it.

He said: “The Court has said what Parliament did, and Parliament did it. We accept that. We have always said that the courts should not take Parliament’s place, and today the Court has said that it will not. If those seats are to change, Parliament is the place to ask, and we will ask it there.”

He took two questions. Asked whether the party still regarded the division of the twenty-sixth of July as illegitimate, he said that the Court had answered that and that he did not argue with a court that had told him to argue with Parliament.

ALCOTT: Alternative for the Realm has spent fifteen months saying those seats were no seats at all.

MORENO: And has just said, in effect, that it lost fairly. One of his own members said to me afterwards, not for attribution, that the party had always said it was Parliament’s to decide and could hardly complain when the Court agreed with it. Whether the rest of the party sees it that way we will find out.

ALCOTT: Ximena Alcazar is in Tijuana, where it is twenty past nine in the morning. Ximena.

ALCAZAR: Stephen. I have spent the morning trying to get a word from any of the five, and from their offices here, and I have to tell you there is not one. The office of the member for Tijuana North had the radio on when I went in, and a member of her staff turned it down and said, very politely, that there would be no statement today.

I asked whether that meant no statement yet, or no statement at all. She said it meant what she had said.

ALCOTT: They said nothing after the division either.

ALCAZAR: They did not, Stephen, and people here remember that. Outside the Territory’s government offices this morning there were perhaps two hundred people, which is a great many fewer than in July, and they were reading the judgment’s summary off their telephones to each other. Nobody was celebrating. A woman told me in Spanish that it was nice to be told you were real.

ALCOTT: It is four minutes past two. The Prince of Columbia has made a statement at Columbia Palace, and we are going to play it to you in full, because it was short and because it was his. Grace Ebanks was in the room.

EBANKS: Stephen, he came in alone. There was a table with nothing on it, and he did not sit at it. He stood beside it with a single sheet of paper and read from it, and then he looked up for the last part and did not look at the paper again. It took about a minute. He took no questions, and nobody tried to ask one.

ALCOTT: This is the Prince.

PRINCE FREDERICK: My father has asked his Private Secretary to find out, in each of his fourteen realms, what it would require for him to abdicate.

He has not decided anything. He wants to know before he decides.

He asked me to tell you, because he cannot tell you himself the way he used to. He said to me, “I cannot speak for them now.”

My mother is with him at the hospital. We wanted you to hear this from us, and not from anybody else.

Thank you.

ALCOTT: That was the Prince of Columbia. Grace.

EBANKS: Stephen, two documents were given to us at the door as we came out, and I will read them both exactly.

The first is from the King’s physicians. “His Majesty’s physicians have advised that the King understands the question he has asked and is able to give this instruction. Their advice concerns this instruction only, and does not alter the declaration under the Regency Act 1811.”

The second is one line from the Royal Household. “The Queen is at the King’s bedside at New Westminster General.”

ALCOTT: So I want to be very careful, and I am going to say this once and then again on the hour, and as often as I need to. The King has asked a question. He has not decided anything. The Prince said so, and the physicians’ note is drawn so that it cannot be read as anything more.

EBANKS: That is exactly right, Stephen. And the physicians’ note does a second thing, which is to say that the regency stands. The Queen remains Regent here, under the declaration of the thirtieth of September. The King’s physicians have said that he can ask this, not that he can act as King again.

ALCOTT: And the words the Prince quoted.

EBANKS: “I cannot speak for them now.” Stephen, the physicians warned yesterday that his speech and parts of his memory might not recover fully. I think the Prince chose to give us those six words because they are the whole of the reason, and because they are his father’s.

ALCOTT: Grace Ebanks, at Columbia Palace.

ALCOTT: The Prime Minister has made a statement in the House of Lords. Delia.

MORENO: Stephen, it was the shortest statement I have heard in that House. He stood up at the despatch box and said this, and nothing else.

“The question is the King’s, and if it is answered it will be answered in fourteen realms together. This ministry will do what the law asks of it, and nothing else.”

ALCOTT: Was he pressed?

MORENO: Twice, in the questions the House allows on a statement. A Labour peer asked whether the government had been told before two o’clock. He said that the House would understand why he would not answer that. A crossbencher asked whether the government had a view. He said that it did not, and that if it ever had one it would give it to this House and at the bar of the other before it gave it to anybody else. Then he sat down, and the House went on to its business, and he stayed in his place for the rest of the afternoon.

ALCOTT: He chairs a ministry he does not lead.

MORENO: And I think that is what the House heard, Stephen. The Heads of Agreement give him no power to appoint a minister. Nobody in the Lords this afternoon thought he was going to tell them what the Realm would do about the King, because there is nobody in the Realm who can tell them yet, and he said exactly that, in two sentences.

ALCOTT: The British Prime Minister has spoken in Downing Street. Jonah Feld of the BBC is there.

FELD: Stephen, Alistair Rennie came out at about a quarter past nine our time, which is a quarter past four yours, and spoke for less than a minute. He said that Britain would act with the other realms under the Interrealm Succession Compact, and not ahead of them. He said that no British bill would be laid until each of the fourteen knew what it would do. And he said that the King’s question deserved an answer, and that it would get one, from all of them together.

ALCOTT: That is a very deliberate thing for London to say.

FELD: It is, and it is the opposite of what a good many people here expected. The draft bill that would let the heir act or reign at sixteen is still sitting in committee, and there was talk in Westminster this evening that London might simply move. Mr Rennie has said that it will not move first. The phrase his people were using afterwards was “together, not first.”

ALCOTT: Jonah, thank you.

BARROW: Good evening. The King has asked what an abdication would require. Grace, what would it require?

EBANKS: Naomi, the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and that the King has asked his Private Secretary to find out, which is the right order of things. I can tell you what the law already says, and where it stops.

The King holds fourteen Crowns. Thirteen of them descend together under the Interrealm Succession Compact, which is an agreement that none of the realms will change its succession without the others. Malaya follows Britain under its own constitution. So an abdication cannot be done in one realm. Each would have to make it law for itself, and under the Compact they would have to do it together.

BARROW: And here?

EBANKS: Here there are two things. The first is that no sovereign of the Realm has ever abdicated, so there is no statute and no precedent. Parliament would have to make one. The second is Article II.8 of the Charter, which says that the American succession follows the British for as long as the two are the same, and that if they ever differ, the Parliament of the Union decides the American succession. If London moved alone, that clause would wake up. That is why what Mr Rennie said in Downing Street this evening matters so much.

BARROW: A Regent acts for the King. Can he do this at all?

EBANKS: That is the question his physicians answered this afternoon, Naomi, for this one thing. They say he understands the question and can give the instruction to ask it. They do not say he can act as King, and the regency stands. Whether a King for whom a Regent acts can make an abdication, or whether the Regent would have to accept it for him, is one of the questions the inquiry was asked to answer. The Crown in Right doctrine says a representative cannot accept an abdication, only the King or a Regent can. It has never had to say which.

BARROW: And if he did abdicate, the Prince is fifteen.

EBANKS: He is, and that is the other thing nobody has an answer to tonight. Here the Regency Act of 1811 fixes full age at eighteen. The Prince would be King at fifteen and a Regent would act for him. The Act was written for a King who could not act, not for a King who was a child, and I have spoken this evening to three constitutional lawyers who gave me three answers about whether it reaches him. Britain’s draft bill would make it sixteen there. Three of the realms have said they will not move from eighteen. And the Prince is also heir to Sweden through his mother, which is not one of the fourteen and is not in the Compact at all.

BARROW: Delia, Alternative for the Realm surprised everybody this morning. Did it say anything about the King?

MORENO: It did, Naomi, and it surprised people a second time. Dale Ambrister was asked this afternoon whether the party, which has always said the Crown should act, would urge the King not to go. He said: “His Majesty asked a question. A loyal subject answers a King’s question. He does not argue with it.” He said that whatever the King decided, the party would accept it, and he would not be drawn further.

BARROW: And the five members for Loreto?

MORENO: Nothing, Naomi. Not on the judgment and not on the King. They have said nothing all day.

BARROW: Grace, a last word. What happens tomorrow?

EBANKS: The Private Secretary’s office starts writing to fourteen governments, Naomi. The King stays in hospital, with the Queen. The Prince goes back to school, I am told, in the morning. And the Realm waits for an answer to a question it has never been asked.