for her work on parliament, having published books on the House of Lords, the legislative process and parliament's policy influence.
Lisa James is a Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit, where she focuses on the UK parliament. From 2019-22 she worked on the ESRC-funded 'Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution' project.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit falls, neatly, at the very start of a chapter:Learn more about The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit at the Oxford University Press website.Theresa May had won the Conservative leadership contest in 2016 on a promise to steady the party, and to deploy her considerable political experience to deliver Brexit. She also explicitly pledged that she would do so without calling a potentially destabilizing early general election. However, as the reality of implementing Brexit sank in, and with the new Prime Minister riding high in the polls, she was persuaded to break that pledge. But rather than increasing May’s majority, and strengthening her hand in parliament, the June 2017 election resulted in the loss of the Conservative majority, and she spent the remainder of her premiership as head of a minority government. This was a governing form relatively unfamiliar at Westminster, which required both skills and strategies inaccessible to May.This brief summary paragraph is a fair representation of our aims in writing the book. We sought to blend a narrative account of the Brexit process in parliament with more thematic reflections – both explaining a lengthy and complex story, and asking what it can tell us about bigger political science questions such as the role of legislatures versus executives, the dangers of populism or, as here, how minority governments can operate in majoritarian systems.
However, the page is a little less representative when it comes to subject matter. Brexit is a multi-faceted topic, and other authors have written compelling analyses of public opinion, the negotiations with the EU, and the machinations at the heart of Number 10, among other subjects. We address Brexit as an essentially parliamentary story: from the backbench pressures for a referendum on EU membership, through the painful and extended wrangling in the House of Commons over the form Brexit should take, to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament. But inevitably, in a story driven partly by the major electoral events of one referendum and two general elections, some chapters must focus on events outside Westminster. This is one of them.
Its events are critical to the overall narrative. Theresa May had become Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party shortly after the 2016 referendum, following David Cameron’s resignation. She inherited a slim parliamentary majority, and a divided and bruised party. The task of uniting Conservative MPs around anything more concrete than the general principle of leaving the European Union would have been near-impossible for even the most imaginative and unifying leader; it fell to the tribal and rigid May. So, having triggered Article 50 – i.e. formally notified the EU of the UK’s decision to leave – she called a general election, hoping to win a large enough majority to sideline dissenters in her own party. But the gamble failed, and May’s authority was wrecked. As we describe in the later chapters of the book, this outcome – a minority government, a divided party, and a weakened leader – lay the ground for two years of increasingly bitter wrangling and, ultimately, for the populist premiership of Boris Johnson.
--Marshal Zeringue
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