Gawd save the Queen from getting involved.

If you have a long political memory, you may remember that, during the Scottish independence referendum, those who suggested that David Cameron’s government had intervened to get the Queen to make a statement favourable to the Better Together (remain) campaign were dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists and crackpots. 

That’s OUTRAGEOUS!!!! They were told in capital letters with multiple exclamation marks because if you’re going to affect to be outraged you may as well go the whole hog. The Queen is NEUTRAL!!!! That’s what being British is all about and the fact you can even think to the contrary shows that you are vile, untrustworthy people. How DARE you despicable nationalists impugn the neutrality of Her Majesty who has never, never, NEVER had a political thought in her entire life. Or indeed any thought that didn’t involve horses or protecting her second son from accusations of being pally with a paedophile. (OK, that was a cheap shot, I'll admit but I'm inwardly riled about the whole affair).

What Liz did in response was to tell a random royalist punter that people ought to “think very carefully (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)” before casting their vote in the referendum. This was taken in the spirit in which it was intended by the BBC and the rest of the British media. It was the sort of “you need to think very carefully about that” you’d get from your mother if you had just told her you intended to get a facial tattoo and she knew that if she’d said “For god’s sake don’t be such an idiot” that you’d go ahead and do it just to annoy her. This is because, even though the form of the words “think very carefully” are in themselves studiously neutral, no one has ever been told to “think very carefully” by another person who shares their belief that they are doing the right thing.

That’s exactly how the Queen’s words were presented by the media. She knew that is what they’d do. There was no intervention from the palace to clarify that the Queen meant that both sides in the debate needed to think very carefully, or that what she meant was that she hoped that both sides in the debate should carefully consider their positions. She was quite happy that her intervention should be used as an aid to the Better Together campaign. That’s always exactly how it was intended.

And now we’re hearing reports from the palace that the Queen is channelling Victoria and is not amused by David Cameron’s none too surprising revelation. Apparently there is “an amount of displeasure” about the former Prime Minister’s admission. I’ll bet there is, quite a large amount too. But it’s not displeasure at having intervened in a democratic debate, it’s displeasure at having been found out. Coming as it does on top of the crisis provoked by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s decision to abuse the royal prerogative and prorogue Parliament in order to escape democratic scrutiny, it’s a very bad time for anyone to be shining the spotlight on the monarch’s true role in politics.

We have been told this week that LBJ lied to the Queen in order to prorogue Parliament, when in fact she was well aware of what he was doing and why he wanted Parliament to be prorogued. The dogs in the street knew the real reason. All of Parliament knew the real reason. The judges in the highest court of Scotland knew the real reason. Everyone knew the real reason. It is ludicrous to suggest that a monarch who has been dealing with Prime Ministers since the early 1950s didn’t know the real reason too. Indeed there have even been rumours that the Palace planned the entire affair with Downing Street.

This is far bigger than the decision of a deeply conservative member of the British establishment, indeed the very figurehead of the British establishment, to intervene against Scottish independence. That development was always entirely predictable, and she will do exactly the same the next time round. However the next time round, and there will be a next time, the SNP will be able to assert that there has been political intervention citing David Cameron as evidence that opponents of independence had done it before. They will no longer be able to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists for making the allegation.

What this is really about however, is the systematic weakness of the collection of laws, conventions, traditions, and precedent which together comprise the British constitution. An unelected head of state is not, and cannot be, any sort of guarantee against undemocratic actions on the part of the executive. An elected head of state (our president?) would have told LBJ where to get off if he had approached her or him with the proposal to prorogue Parliament for such nakedly political, anti-democratic and self-serving ends. Instead of placing the protection of democracy as its paramount concern, Buckingham Palace had as its priority the minimisation of damage to the Queen’s reputation.

It is one thing when an extremely expensively funded head of state has no political influence and is merely a decorative figurehead. It is quite another when that head of state does have political influence, but those of us who pay for the privileges and luxurious lifestyle of her and her family are not allowed to know what that influence is. Then the monarch shifts from being merely a massive waste of public money, to becoming a massive waste of public money and a danger to democracy. The real scandal here is not that LBJ lied to the Queen, it’s that the entire British constitution rests upon the lie that the head of state has no political influence. The real scandal is that the Queen is a sham head of state. She cannot act as a constitutional president and force rival politicians to look for ways out of a national emergency. She cannot insist that the prime minister obeys the rules, because there are too few rules in Britain and too many fuzzy, unenforceable conventions.  And the trouble with conventions is that they can be twisted by any leader unscrupulous enough to insist that others must obey the conventions they break. Once the Brexit crisis is over, there will be an enormous job of work blocking up the loopholes that have allowed LBJ to abuse his power. Assuming, that is, we ever get out of the Brexit crisis and have the energy left to tackle any job of work again.