A near-identical struggle for legitimacy played out in parliament 236 years ago – Boris Johnson should learn from it

Boris Johnson makes an unlikely Pitt the Younger, but the parallels between 236 years ago and today are striking. My holiday reading this year included William Hague’s brilliant biography of William Pitt, published in 2005.

The king, George III (this was before he went mad), dismissed the government of Lord North and Charles James Fox, who had the support of a majority of MPs, and appointed Pitt, aged 24, as First Lord of the Treasury at the end of 1783.

Pitt formed a government but could not get his legislation through parliament. He refused to ask for an election, fearing that it wouldn’t make much difference to the makeup of the House of Commons.

Hague writes: “With the House of Commons now in a stalemate, Fox argued that the refusal of Pitt to leave office in defiance of the votes of the Commons would lead to ‘universal anarchy’. Pitt’s response was that ‘he considered himself as performing an act of necessary duty to his king and country, and so long as that continued to be the case he should persevere’.

“That Pitt would simply stay in office despite all the defeats heaped upon his head never seems to have occurred to his opponents until this point. There was no precedent for this situation. For six weeks now the country had had a government with no power to govern, and a House of Commons which did not seem to have the power to turn it out.”

I got to this part of the book while journalists were in a state of high excitement over Dominic Cummings, the new prime minister’s henchperson, who said Boris Johnson would refuse to stand down if a vote of no confidence were carried against him in the Commons.

Just as in Pitt’s time, there is a clash of legitimacy. Johnson has no majority in the Commons for a no-deal Brexit, but appeals to the supposedly superior mandate of the referendum. Pitt had no majority in the Commons, which represented the “interests” of the nation, rather than “the people” (democracy was a dangerously subversive idea), but appealed to his superior mandate from the king.

In the 1780s, modern parties were forming, as were the rules for votes of no confidence, and the role of the prime minister. Today, the crisis of Brexit has put the constitution under strain again.

Does a prime minister have to resign immediately, if they lose a vote of confidence and there is an alternative who is “likely” to command a majority of the Commons? That is what is implied by constitutional convention, as described in The Cabinet Manual, but it has never been tested. Not since the 18th century has an MP had the support of a majority in the Commons while the incumbent prime minister refused to give way.

So, if a majority of MPs declared that Kenneth Clarke should be prime minister for long enough to stop a no-deal Brexit, and if Johnson refused to accept the opinion of constitutional experts that he should stand down from the position he has recently attained, no one knows what would happen.

In early 1784, Pitt waited, mobilising public opinion for the first time in a recognisably modern way. Petitions and “loyal addresses” flooded into London, swearing allegiance to the king and praising Pitt. He was much admired for his personal probity, his incorruptibility and his thriftiness with public money.

So the parallels with Johnson are not exact, but some of them are still uncanny. “In two years there had now been five governments. Ministries had come and gone, alliances had been formed and broken, plots had been hatched and insults hurled with seemingly very little reference to the people outside the walls of Westminster,” Hague writes. “Many of those people had now had enough, and they were finally moved to do something about it.” One petition was carried from Wakefield to London with a flag declaring: “The King! The Constitution! The People! And Pitt Forever!”

By March 1784, the combination of public pressure and peerages doled out to Foxite MPs (Hague explains that they had a different definition of “corruption” in the 18th century) had eroded the opposition in the Commons. Fox finally let a government bill pass, “lacking the votes to obstruct it”.

Pitt, at last, asked the king to dissolve parliament and hold a general election. With a fair wind of public opinion behind him, and a vast expense of the exchequer in simply buying seats for supporters of the government (as I said, corruption was different then), Pitt secured an overwhelming majority in the Commons. He was the dominant “first minister” for the next 17 years.

I wonder if Johnson knows his 18th century British history as well as he knows his Pericles of Athens.