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Articles
Boris Resigns, Churchill Reminds: Constitutional Duty of Representatives
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | June 15, 2023
- Category: Churchill for Today Explore
The duty of representatives
On June 9th, Boris Johnson resigned as a Member of Parliament. It was not yet a year since Johnson resigned as prime minister, after having swept into office with the largest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1987. On April 5th, 1955, Sir Winston Churchill resigned the premiership (but not his seat in Parliament). Ten days earlier he spoke to his constituency for the last time as prime minister—an eloquent testimonial to the duty of elected representatives in a constitutional democracy. Little known until now, it is worthy of attention:
The first duty of a Member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgment is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative but not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that his duty to the party organization or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.1
Following Johnson’s resignation, Churchill’s speech resurfaced and went viral on the Internet. This was remarkable because it was obscure.2 The original appearance was found and republished. It first ran in the distinguished journal Parliamentary Affairs, then edited by Stephen King-Hall.
Duty, judgment, Burke
Followers of Churchill will recognize that his sentiments in 1955 are no different from those at any other time in his life.
For him, the safety and honor of the nation always came first. He pursued that tenaciously, often at risk to his career. Second came the constituents who elected him. He makes a fine distinction between a “representative” (the duty of the Member) and a “delegate.” There is a world of constitutional contrast between them. Third among his priorities was “duty to the party organization or programme.” All too often, representatives today place that duty above the other two.
Churchill draws guidance from Edmund Burke’s famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 November 1774. It is “the happiness and glory of a representative,” Burke said, “to live in the strictest union” with constituents. Yet the representative’s duty is not to sacrifice judgment or conscience, because “they are a trust from Providence”:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion…. But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey…these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.
Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests…. [It] is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole…. You choose a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament.3
Churchill’s words…
…were quoted recently by Jack Peat in London Economic. They make, he writes, “pretty unpleasant reading for his biographer!” (Boris Johnson published a Churchill biography in 2014.) In his resignation remarks, Mr. Johnson accused the Privileges Committee of producing a biased report on Downing Street parties during the Covid lockdowns his own government had imposed. It was “riddled with inaccuracies,” he said, and provided him with “no formal ability to challenge anything they say…. I corrected the record as soon as possible…. I and every other senior official and minister…believed that we were working lawfully together.”
It is not for this writer but for the electors of Britain to pass judgment on these arguments. Churchill too had his frustrations with the Privileges Committee. In 1934, he accused Samuel Hoare and Lord Derby of a breach of Privilege by influencing testimony to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Indian reform.4 I will only refer to Lord Roberts’ observation, that as Churchill learned, the Privileges Committee is not like a court of law. But Churchill’s words endure. It would be useful to reproduce them on placards, to be hung round the necks of certain representatives, here and there, who seem often to forget them.
Endnotes
1 Churchill’s speech is absent in his own volumes, the Official Biography, the Complete Speeches, the Cohen Bibliography, and Hillsdale College’s The Churchill Documents. As far as we can determine, it was quoted only once before, in part (absent the Burke reference), in the first biography of Clementine Churchill. There, the words were ascribed to Lady Churchill, but they were clearly Sir Winston’s. See Jack Fishman, My Darling Clementine (London: W.H. Allen, 1963), 371.
2 Winston S. Churchill, “The Duties of a Member of Parliament,” Hawkey Hall, Woodford, Essex. 26 March 1955, in Parliamentary Affairs, second quarter 1955, 302. The entire speech is quoted. The Churchill Archives contain the original typescript in WSC’s “speech form”: Churchill Papers, CHUR 3/17, folios 69-70.
3 Edmund Burke, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” 3 November 1774, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854-56), I: 446-48.
4 Carl Bridge, “Churchill, Hoare, Derby, and the Committee of Privileges, April to June 1934,” in The Historical Journal 22:1, March 1979), 215-27. Jstor.org, accessed 14 June 2023.
Grateful thanks
The author appreciates the kind assistance of Dave Turrell and Andrew Roberts (Lord Roberts of Belgravia) in researching this article.
Further reading
Andrew Roberts:
“Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke: An Appreciation of Kindred Souls,” 2019