There’s nothing wrong with Jacob Rees-Mogg lying down in the Commons

If you are a journalist covering politics this year, every moment is a bad moment to take a holiday. I took a short one last week in search of grouse and arrived at Hunthill, the proud Scottish fastness of our host Henry Keswick, to find that Boris Johnson had promised to prorogue parliament. Since the party included a cabinet minister, another Member of Parliament etc, it all felt a bit like a John Buchan novel. As I watched the beaters approach us across the moor, I imagined it as the sort of scene Buchan describes so well in which the appearance of seemingly innocent sport on the hill is in fact the approach of something dangerous to the safety of the realm. The MP who, though of impeccable lineage, has unsound views on Brexit, had quietly slipped away. Was foul play afoot?

It was. Each faction in this contest daily accuses the other of ‘constitutional outrage’. Most of the time, in our flexible system, these claims are false. But when one important person breaks the deepest conventions, it is a case of ‘untune that string and hark what discord follows’. The great untuner in all this is not Boris Johnson by proroguing to a timetable to suit his political convenience (as other prime ministers have done in tight spots). It is Mr Speaker Bercow — in general because the Speaker must be impartial, and he isn’t; in particular because he keeps trashing the rule by which the government controls the business of the House. This really has upset the balance of the system. The British tradition, eloquently expounded by Jacob Rees-Mogg in his speech in parliament on Tuesday night, is that we are governed through the House of Commons, not that the House of Commons is the government. Once the Commons tries to become the government, no one can function as prime minister, so a general election becomes necessary.