They had a whole elaborate structure (based I think on emergency WW2 planning) of civil commissioners running skeleton regional governments in secret underground bunkers, known as Regional Seats of Government, and there was a huge hooha when CND revealed their existence (nowadays they’re tourist attractions). How much time they expected anyone to have to retire to their bunkers in the event of a nuclear war, I have no idea.
One of the earliest complaints against the Blairs was to do with whether or not Cherie had arranged for the then No.10 cat to go for a holiday on a farm…
a propos of little, but there is a new TV series coming in the fall, starring Kiefer Sutherland, called “Designated Successor”, about a low-level Cabinet Secretary who becomes President when everybody else in the government is taken out during the State of the Union address by a nuclear bomb.
Ok, this isn’t a Brit-US thing, but I’m never sure–and I’m a certified grownup–if that means the cat died (here, put down) or not.
Fascinating.
Something that has not yet been mentioned is the Privy Council. The PC is composed of people who are or have been senior politicians. This includes retired politicians. If things got serious - say the House of Commons got nuked during a Vote of Confidence - the Monarch could form a government from members of the Privy Council until elections were held. I’m sure Tony Blair would be well up for it.
In the early 60s my father was an Army Major In what was then known as The Royal Engineers, although his responsibilities seemed to be pretty wide ranging. He was based in South Wales and I remember him spending some time visiting selected large houses in several counties, to establish which of them would make good places from which to run alternative administrations. His report went to the War Office and it was only some years later that he discovered that bunkers had been built in the grounds of two of them. Of course it was an official secret and I never did find out excatly which.
LBJ was sworn in by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes on Air Force One. There is no requirement that the Chief Justice administer the oath, just that the new president take it.
Calvin Coolidge was sworn in by his father, a Vermont public notary and justice of the peace when he received word President Harding was dead (the Coolidge family homestead did not have electricity or a telephone), When he returned to Washington DC the next day, he was sworn in again by a justice of the Supreme Court of Washington because people weren’t sure if a state notary had the authority.
I wasn’t sure if the earlier post was meant as a joke or not. In 1981 when Reagan got shot and was in surgery Secretary of State Alexander Haig infamously stated this. Even though the press had a field day over it (HBO even made an entire cable movie about it with noted liberal Richard Dreyfuss giving a ridiculously snarky performance as Haig) it was basically a misunderstanding. Haig was not referring to the line of succession if Reagan died, but merely the current state at the White House.
True, though McEwan was leader of the Country Party the junior party in the coalition government. At the time the office of Deputy Prime Minister did not exist, and subsequently McEwan became the first Deputy Prime Minister in Gorton’s government.
GG Casey used the precedent of 1939 (Page was appointed caretaker PM until the UAP elected Menzies as leader and consequently PM) though both Casey and McEwan loathed the Liberal deputy Billy McMahon and they would have used any rationale to thwart him.
In current times, if Turnbull was to leave the scene suddenly then the mantle would pass to (current) Deputy Prime Minister Barbaby Joyce rather than Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop. Whether the LIBs would elect Bishop or Scott Morrison as leader & PM is an interesting hypothetical.
The situation if Labor was in power the succession would be to appoint the deputy as caretaker until the party elected. (In 1945 Forde was PM for 8 days until the Labor caucus elected Chifley). If (hypothetically)PM Shorten was to die then Tanya Plibersek would be caretaker until the Labour party made it’s determination probably that Anthony Albanese would be leader.
In Australia, being Deputy PM is much more a post designated for the PM’s loyalists rather than any aspiring PMs.
Not quite.
Under a Coalition government, the Deputy PM is whoever is leader of the National Party. (Fun fact: there has never been a Liberal deputy PM.) He won’t be a “PM’s loyalist”, if only because the PM is from a different party.
Under an ALP government, the Deputy PM is whoever is deputy leader of the Labor Party. Since the deputy leader of the party tends to be elected at the same time as, and by the same electorate as, and on a ticket with, the party leader, they do tend to be good mates. But they can also be aspiring PMs; Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and Julia Gillard are all deputy party leaders who went on to become PM.
And, as regards the question raised in the OP, and bonzer’s comment on it here:
The BBC is reporting, in the context of Teresa May’s induction as PM, that two of her tasks on day one will be (a) to hand-write letters of instruction to the commanders of the UK’s Trident submarines on what action they are to take if the country suffers a catastrophic nuclear attack, and (b) to nominate two senior cabinet ministers who will take any decision on launching nuclear missiles in the event of her incapacity. The ministers concerned don’t have to be the holders of any particular post; they just have to be senior cabinet ministers who she trusts to make judgments of this kind.
I’m not particularly convinced by that BBC article’s claim. Given the way that the coverage of such matters has evolved over the last few years, I suppose some commentary is in order.
My original 2005 post was explicitly citing the original 2002 edition of Peter Hennessy’s The Secret State. Much of the well-known information about the UK’s nuclear launch proceedures – the “letters of last resort” and the (surely entirely understandable) notion that the failure of the BBC to broadcast The Today Programme on Radio 4 would be the final signal that Western civilisation had ceased to exist – had been commonplace before he published the book (much of it thanks to him). But The Secret State was instantly the reliable academic account of some of the finer details. Which was why I cited it back in 2005.
A certain amount has shifted since then, but not enough to invalidate that post. In terms of the journalistic coverage, the key watershed appears to have been this short Richard Norton-Taylor piece in the Guardian in 2007, tied to Gordon Brown entering No.10. It explicitly cites Hennessy.
Hennessy then published a heavily expanded and revised edition of The Secret State in 2010. When Cameron entered No.10 the same year, there was much wider Fleet Street commentary on the notion – but still all derived from Hennessy – that the key initiation as PM was getting the “Trident briefing”. (I’m not entirely sure on the exact sequence of Cameron entering No.10, the revised edition being published and Hennessy being enobled as a member of the House of Lords, all in 2010. I do presume that the three events are unrelated.)
Then you had the theatrical success of David Grieg’s The Letter of Last Resort, which premiered in 2012 at the Tricycle in London. (A production I saw; it’s a well written piece, but not especially convincing. Though the best bit of The Bomb: A Partial History.) That highlighed the issue of the letters.
Based (unfairly) on Hennessy, a sort of journalistic myth appears to have emerged. The new PM addresses the world’s press in Downing Street and then turns and walks through the black door. The head of the civil service greets them and introduces them to the staff. Then it’s “That’s the coffee machine and the toilets are back there. Now the Chief of the Defence Staff is waiting,” Who proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of the new PM by describing how much misery a single Trident submarine can unleash. With great power … You then must now handwrite the “letters of last resort”, which instantly become the deepest, darkest secret on the planet. The secret(s) only Teresa May now knows.
Except that timing all seems a bit unlikely in the light of May’s first evening. She may be brisk, but could she really wrap all that up and then launch a cabinet reshuffle in less than two hours? The “Trident briefing” surely happens, but possibly not in the way hitherto imagined.
In summary, given the weak journalist parroting of Hennessy over the years, that BBC claim possibly seems a case of someone sort of going back to the source, then mangling it, One can well imagine that the incoming PM is advised, as part of the “Trident briefing”, that they may be advised at some point to nominate two deputies, but, on the available evidence, it seems unlikely that they have to do so merely on the assumption of the office of First Lord of the Treasury.
I take your point, and in particular the notion of an instant Trident briefing and the immediate composition of letters of instruction seems more dramatic than plausible.
But nominating the deputies? That’s more plausible. The protocol for appointing deputies is of limited use unless it is structured to ensure that there always is at least one deputy, and preferably two. A new PM doesn’t necessarily have to appoint deputies immediately; she may be quite happy for the deputies appointed by her predecessor to continue to fill the deputy role until she has time to think about the matter at leisure - provided, of course, they are continuing in Cabinet.
So if, say, George Osborne was one of Cameron’s deputies, when May told the Cabinet Secretary that she was dismissing Osborne and appointing Hammond, it’s not improbable to think that the Cabinet Secretary will have pointed out that Osborne was a nuclear deputy, and asked May if, for the time being, she wanted Hammond to fill that role, or she wanted to nominate a different Cabinet member.
Similarly, if May herself had been one of Cameron’s deputies, the protocol is likely to call for the early appointment of another deputy to replace her.
In *Yes Prime Minister *the Trident (then Polaris) briefing is shown. It takes place in the MoD shortly after Jim Hacker is appointed. Which then forms the basis of a long running plot in the first season.
As it is the whole Newsnight bit has been hyped up. IIRC it was checking whether civilian broadcasting was on not specifically Newsnight.
It would depend on the technology applied, perhaps. If the internet hadn’t been knocked out, then it could be anything. But if someone was relying on old-fashioned steam radio broadcasting, then it might well not even be the absence of a particular news programme that signals Armageddon (not even the Today Programme) - but The Archers.
I take it that all of the above is more than a little tongue in cheek. Communications have advanced rapidly in recent years and it seems highly unlikely that the captain of a trident submarine would be relying on the presence or absence of a BBC (or any other) broadcast programme to initiate a nuclear strike. We could speculate about what actually would be the trigger, but that’s all it would be - speculation.
Three parts. Head of state, head of executive, head of legislature.
And the prime minister is only executive head of (what is called in Australia) “the prime ministers department”. Which might make up (pulling numbers out of A) only about 20% of the government. The rest of the executive branch is run indpendantly by other people who only politically answer to the prime minister and cabinet and legislature.
The order of emergancy political succession can and may be different to the ordier of executive succession. The “outgoing” Prime Minister will have probably put in place arrangements for different parts of the job to be handled by different people when he/she is sick/ out of the country. Because all the senior people already have full time jobs.
Isn’t the ultimate succession plan in the UK is that if need be and there is no PM the monarch can point to someone and say “You’re the Prime Minister.”