:eek:
I sure as hell hope not.
But maybe I’m getting too 1776-y.
Yes, as a last resort Her Majesty could to that, but the UK would have suffered a truly devastating decapitation strike & Parliament would be completely unable to function. Something on the level of a nuclear strike on London during the State Opening of Parliament (in which the Queen would also die, but she’d instantly be succeeded by one of her relatives). IIRC here are approximately *3,000 * people in the line of succession to the British throne, most of whom don’t live in the UK (the Norwegian royal family is in the top 100 places I think).
Yep, and the succession line of the monarch is very deep. After an asteroid strike or whatever there’s a chance that there’s someone alive who suddenly has that power.
Which was taken so seriously that pictures of Humphrey in his retirement included this one in which he is sitting on current newspapers liker a kidnap victim 
#/media/File:Humphrey_mouser.jpg){kind=link}
There are the odd fanatics who’ve published online lists of everyone in the presumed line, down to about 2000. In practice, I’d imagine surviving Privy Councillors and Palace officials would get together to decide on someone.
CM Larry has a quite a long Wiki entry–encyclopedic, one might say, for a cat–with 89 citations, broken down into years of his life: Larry (cat) - Wikipedia
The office of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office and its holders since 1929–although Wiki tells me the position unofficially dates from Henry VII–is surveyed here: Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office - Wikipedia
The department in Australia is called Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and as far as I can tell is similar to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in Canada. If so, then despite the name it doesn’t actually include Cabinet ministers but is a coordinating body for some of the PM’s executive powers.
But in addition to the PM&C or the PMO, however limited it might be, the Prime Minister also controls the executive functions of government in exactly the same way the US president does, namely through the fact that his cabinet ministers are all executive heads of their respective departments, and the senior career civil servant in each department, called the deputy minister in Canada, permanent secretary in the UK, and I believe department secretary in Australia, report to and are accountable to their cabinet minister.
In addition, the Prime Minister may exercise even greater power than the US president because he also sits in the legislature, and this is especially so if he has won a majority government. So the PM has executive powers and the party he leads may also have virtually unstoppable legislative powers if his MPs vote the party line, except for nominal checks and balances in the Senate.
The real reason there isn’t excessive concern about a succession is that, unlike the US president, the PM isn’t directly elected but holds the position by virtue of being leader of the party that won a majority or plurality in the election. If anything happens to him, the most senior Cabinet minister, often called the deputy prime minister, would step in, but the right to elect a permanent replacement is entirely in the hands of the party. Usually the process takes a while but as we saw just now in the UK, it can also be very quick and Britain has a new prime minister based on choices made by Conservative Party members and without any general election being held.
To be precise, there is no vote for the office of Prime Minister. It is merely an appointment by the Queen. Of course, by constitutional convention the Queen will appoint the leader of whichever party controls a majority in the House of Commons; the leadership election that brought Theresa May into the office was, strictly speaking, not a vote for Prime Minister (there is no such thing), it was a vote for the leadership of the Conservative Party. That was a purely internal procedure of the party, following rules defined by the party itself. Afterwards, when it was clear that Theresa May was elected leader of the Conservative Party, she was appointed Prime Minister by the Queen, but there is no process for electing a Prime Minister as such.
On top of that, in the last coalition government (2010-2015), the Deputy Prime Minister was Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. If Cameron had died in office, sure as hell Nick Clegg would not have succeeded to the office of Prime Minister in the way an American Vice President would have succeeded to the office of President. Clegg would have been a caretaker until the designation of a new leader of the Conservatives, who then would have been appointed Prime Minister by the Queen.
Yes, but she wouldn’t be completely free about that choice.By constitutional convention, she would have to pick somebody able to control a majority of the House of Commons. That would mean:
[ul]
[li]The new Prime Minister would have to be a member of the House of Commons (House of Lords is not sufficient!).[/li][li]If one party controls an absolute majority of the House of Commons, the new Prime Minister must be an MP of that party.[/li][li]The new Prime Minister must be a senior MP of that party, not some backbencher nobody has ever heard of.[/li][li]If the party has a defined process of selecting its own leader (which, histprically, has not always been the case), then the Queen would have to appoint the leader selected through that party-internal process.[/li][/ul]
But in the event of a decapitation strike, just what any of those conditions mean might not be clear.
And if we’re talking about deep succession in TV shows, that was also a plot point in Battlestar Galactica, where the Secretary of Education ends up as President, by virtue of being the only cabinet member to survive the Cylon attack (she wasn’t even a Designated Successor: Her duties just happened to put her on the Galactica at the time, which was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum).
That only applies if there remains a House of Commons. If the members of the House of Commons were all killed, then she could not choose a member. She could turn to the House of Lords or the Privy Council. Or anyone suitable. Until new elections were held, of course.
FWIW, there’s an account today that has her starting the Cabinet reshuffle as her first order of business on entering No.10.
It’s not as if there would have been any practical reason for her to sign new letters of last resort immediately. After all, the new one couldn’t be delivered to the Trident sub currently on patrol until it returns to port. Until then the protocol is presumably that letter from the former PM is still valid. That might make a difference if it was Corbyn who was taking over. But I don’t suppose that May will have had a problem with the idea of Cameron’s instructions remaining in place for the next few weeks or months.
This is old news, but apropos, and unique as far as I know for Brits and US: **Jeremy Corbyn row after ‘I’d not fire nuclear weapons’ comment**
30 September 2015
Now that would one more headache, after all the fuss discussed in this thread got sorted out.
Nuclear war is hard.
ETA: Corbyn is referenced immediately above; I didn’t understand it till just now.