How often has parliament been recalled, and for what reasons?

Parliament has been recalled 32 times since September 1949, when MPs returned to Westminster to debate the devaluation of sterling. It was of course too late to do anything about it, and indeed it was a subject that couldn’t have been debated in public beforehand in any case. Any suggestion that the government was considering devaluation would have forced the chancellor to act under pressure from the markets.

On average, parliament has been recalled every two-and-a-quarter years since then: 15 times to discuss foreign crises, 10 times for domestic crises, four times to commemorate the death of a public person and once, in December last year, for the unique purpose of passing the EU (Future Relationship) Act, to complete Brexit. In three other cases, parliament was recalled in order to be dissolved before a general election, in 1951, 1959 and 1970, but that hasn’t been necessary since.

Parliament has already been recalled three times in the past year. Apart from the Brexit recall, MPs were summoned back in January this year to vote on the regulations imposing the third lockdown, and were then recalled again in April to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, who had died aged 99.

Before the Brexit recall, the last time parliament was recalled was in June 2016, during the EU referendum campaign, to pay tribute to Jo Cox, the MP who was murdered. The other deaths that prompted recalls were those of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 and of the Queen Mother in 2002.

But the commonest reason for recalling parliament has been a crisis abroad. MPs were summoned to discuss the Korean war for a whole week in 1950 – although they did not vote explicitly to authorise the British deployment. Clement Attlee, the prime minister, jealously guarded his right to advise the King on military questions as a matter of the royal prerogative.

Parliament was recalled to debate the Suez crisis in 1956, the Berlin airlift in 1961 and the Soviet crushing of the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. On that occasion the recall was a double bill, as MPs also debated, over two days, the civil war in Nigeria caused by the unsuccessful attempt by Biafra to break away.

The next foreign crisis was the Falklands, which prompted two recalls in 1982, the first of which, on 3 April, was one of only four occasions since the Second World War when the House of Commons met on a Saturday. It featured the full-throated support of Michael Foot, the Labour leader, for Thatcher’s decision to send a task force to reclaim the islands from Argentinian aggression. This was the first time an emergency session of the Commons was broadcast to the nation – radio broadcasting having begun four years earlier.

The next recall, eight years later in 1990, to discuss the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, was broadcast on television, an innovation that had begun in 1989. Thatcher’s willingness to deploy British forces was this time supported by Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock. Two months later, however, Thatcher was gone. Parliament also discussed foreign policy – Yugoslavia, Iraq and Somalia – when it was recalled to discuss the pound’s ejection from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, which was the modern equivalent of a devaluation crisis.

Parliament was recalled for Bosnia in 1995; the attacks on America in 2001, followed by two more recall sessions, including one on 8 October as the intervention in Afghanistan was beginning; the case for action against Iraq in 2002; the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime in 2013; and the case for airstrikes against Isis in Iraq in 2014.

The domestic crises that prompted the return of parliament, apart from the devaluations of 1949 and 1992 (parliament was sitting at the time of the 1967 devaluation and did not have to be recalled), were the public spending cuts of 1968; the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1971 and 1974; the three-day week, earlier in 1974; the Omagh bomb in 1998; the phone-hacking scandal in July 2011; and, shortly afterwards, the riots in August 2011, a decade ago.