A pompous and highly codified event, the Speech from the Throne, which marks the start of the British parliamentary session, takes place on Tuesday. This year, Queen Elizabeth II will not attend the ceremony. An (almost) unprecedented fact.
The monarch, who recently celebrated her 96th birthday, had so far only missed the official opening of Parliament twice. It was in 1959 and 1963, when she was pregnant with Andrew and Edward respectively. But since her brief hospitalization in October, appearances by the Queen of England have become very rare.
At the end of April, the one who is to celebrate her 70th anniversary of reign in June and who suffers from a mobility problem, appeared all smiles and without a cane in a photo. But a few days later, her services announced that she would not take part in the summer receptions given in her palace.
Prince Charles replacing
“The Queen continues to have episodic mobility issues and, after consultation with her doctors, has reluctantly decided not to take part in the Speech from the Throne,” Buckingham Palace said on Monday evening. For a few years now, Elizabeth II no longer wore her crown – too heavy – during the Speech from the Throne and went to the Palace of Westminster by car rather than by horse-drawn carriage.
In his absence, it is his eldest son, Prince Charles, who will deliver the speech on Tuesday setting out the government’s priorities for the coming year. A first. In the United Kingdom, the Speech from the Throne is one of the most important tasks incumbent on the sovereign from a constitutional point of view.
BoJo expected at the turn
The text which will be read this Tuesday before the deputies of the House of Lords and the House of Commons was not written by Elizabeth II, but by the government in place. It details the bills that the executive intends to propose during the new parliamentary session.
And this year, Boris Johnson and his ministers are expected to turn in an inflationary context and rising energy prices. The Prime Minister, still undermined by “partygate” but also by a recent setback in the local elections, will have to convince the deputies of his own camp that he can offer “a real plan of action”, estimates Simon Usherwood, political scientist of the ‘Open University.
Because some conservatives, worried about the 2024 legislative elections, are wondering about the advisability of continuing to support it. Boris Johnson will also have to find a solution to the political paralysis that is looming in Northern Ireland, after the historic victory of the Sinn Fein Republicans.
Risk of political paralysis in Northern Ireland
The latter will soon have to form a government with the unionists of the DUP, under the terms of the 1998 peace agreement. But the talks promise to be difficult, the DUP having conditioned its participation on the resolution of the thorny question of the special status post -Brexit.
The Northern Irish protocol negotiated between London and Brussels, which introduces controls on goods from Great Britain, is denounced by the Unionists as a threat to the place of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the DUP, reiterated on Monday that his party would not appoint a minister “until the UK government takes action on protocol”.
Sent to Belfast, British Minister for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis on Monday called on the province’s political parties to “fulfill their responsibilities” and form a government “as soon as possible”. In vain. London has been seeking for months to renegotiate the protocol with Brussels, without significant progress for the moment, and has threatened on several occasions to unilaterally suspend certain provisions for lack of agreement.