If the British Prime Minister suddenly dies/resigns who runs the country until the Queen appoints a new one? According to Wikipedia the Deputy PM doesn’t have any special powers and doesn’t succed the PM. What happens if there is some crisis before the Queen meets with the cabinet members? Who gets the British nuclear codes?
The Prime Minister is the leader of the incumbent party. In the event of death or resignation a “caretaker” leader would be in charge until the party voted (by its usual methods) for a new leader. Deputy PMs are a fairly recent innovation but I would think they would be very likely to be chosen to be the caretaker leader. If not – say the deputy was also dead/incapacitated/resigned – the party would quickly choose someone as a safe pair of hands, ie competent and well liked but not, in fact, a front runner for the leadership. The closest they have come to this in recent times was the sudden death of Labour leader John Smith when the party was in opposition. Margaret Becket served as leader until Tony Blair was elected by the party. NB the parties choose their leaders without reference to the electorate and by their own, several, methods.
On recent occasions when the PM is having an operation under general anaesthetic then the Deputy PM has been in charge.
The Queen doesn’t really come into it outside of a General Election when the leader of the winning party gets her ratification of the new government. Otherwise she just gets a visit by the new leader once they have been elected, it’s a done deal.
It is perfectly possible that no caretaker PM would be appointed. After all, it is not as if the normal functions of government would grind to a halt during the month or two it would take for the party to hold a leadership contest. Any major policy decisions would be put on hold anyway. The Queen would simply rely on the judgment of the Cabinet as to whether an interim appointment was appropriate.
And what the Cabinet decided would probably depend on the personalities involved. Immediate appointment might be thought to give the person appointed a headstart in the leadership contest. His or her rivals might therefore prefer that no interim appointment be made. Alternatively, they might recommend that the Deputy PM be appointed, but only on condition that they first rule themselves out as a candidate in the forthcoming contest. Another factor would be the circumstances in which the PM died. If it was in a 9/11 type attack, there would be an argument for a strong leader to be appointed immediately. Which might cause problems if his/her colleagues did not have much confidence in the Deputy. Or, if the death was especially tragic, there would be the issue as to whether the rush to find a replacement was indecent. Being seen not to grab the glittering prize immediately could be a smart move. And so on.
There is no real precedent as the last PM to die in office, Palmerston in 1865, did so before any of the parties had formal rules for leadership elections. Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman almost qualifies, but he resigned several days before he died and the point about there being no formal rules for leadership elections still applies.
The issue of who had/has authority to launch the UK’s nuclear weapons is discussed at length in Peter Hennessy’s The Secret State (Penguin, 2002).
During the Cold War the original assumption was that there’d be enough warning of any crisis for Her Majesty to be safely at sea on HMS Britannia and the PM and a War Cabinet to be in a bunker in the Cotswolds. In the event of the PM being killed, the Queen would simply have designed a replacement as appropriate given the circumstances. As ICBMs became the threat, a 1962 Cabinet Office report on the subject recommended that, in the event of an approaching crisis, the PM appoint two deputies to be able to take launch decisions should he be unavailable. While this seems to have become Whitehall’s standard advice, there’s no evidence that any such deputies were ever named. Hennessy suspects that Macmillan planned to do so at a Cabinet meeting on 28th October during the Cuban Missile Crisis, had events not changed earlier that same day.
Based on unnamed sources - but Hennessy’s Whitehall ones are usually reliable - he states that Blair received similar advice from his contigency planners in the autumn of 2001 after 9/11: that several ministers should be appointed as deputies with authority to act in the event of the PM being killed in a terrorist attack. Whether Blair has done so is not known; there’s no reason to expect such a decision to have been made public.
Such contingency planning for immediate responses in emergencies has never been intended to replace the considerations described by APB.
Australia, which follows the Westminster system, had a Prime Minister who disappeared, probably drowned, while in office (Harold Holt in 1967). There was no constitutional crisis: the Governor-General (representing Her Majesty) appointed the Deputy Prime-Minister John McEwen as PM until the Liberal Party elected a new leader. (The Deputy PM was leader of the Country Party, the junior partner in the governing coalition).
Something to bear in mind is that, despite some recent changes in style, the post of Prime Minister is not really analogous to that of President, being traditionally more of a “first among equals” role. The policies and actions of the government are decided by the Cabinet, with the Prime Minister acting as spokesman as much as anything. As such, there would really be much less of a power vacuum than you might imagine if the PM were to suddenly pop his clogs.
From a purely practical point of view, though, I suppose that a caretaker PM would be appointed pretty quickly, if only to maintain public confidence and the day-to-day routine of government. After all, there must be dozens of pieces of paper every day that need the PM’s signature – if there’s no PM, would have that responsibility?
No-one becomes Prime Minister until formally appointed to office by the Queen, whether after a general election or as a replacement for the outgoing Prime Minsiter of the same party. So if Blair were to die in office tomorrow and the Labour caucus in an impressive show of party unity unanimously (ha!) agreed on his replacement, that person wouldn’t automatically be PM. He/she would have to be appointed Prime Minister by HM. Of course, since HM is a good constitutional monarch, she would of course appoint the person designated by the Labour cacaus, since having support of the Labour caucus means that he/she could command a majority in the Commons.
(I know that the Labour party constitution probably is more complicated than just the caucus selecting the new leader, but I’m using that example to illustrate the general principles of succession.)
Not necessarily. There are very few pieces of paper that can only be signed by the Prime Minister and, unless there was a crisis, those could probably wait. In most cases, actual orders are signed at a departmental level. Individual Cabinet ministers, as Secretaries of State, could easily continue those formal functions of their departments without a Prime Minister. This reflects the way in which the present system has evolved from one in which there was no formal office of Prime Minister, no single administration and ministers were individually answerable to the monarch.
Of course, under normal circumstances, departments have to coordinate the bigger decisions etc. and the PM can, if required, bang heads together. But that is exactly the type of policy-making which would be suspended anyway following the death of the PM. Even if there was a caretaker PM.
No doubt you’re right, from a purely procedural point of view, but surely it would be political suicide for any majority party to go as much as a month without someone (anyone!) in the big chair? The opposition parties may be counted on to lay off for a period of mourning and “a true statesman, an outstanding parliamentarian… and a close, personal friend” soundbites, but the press would slaughter them.