Déjà vu

From END Info 34 DOWNLOAD

In issue 33, we reported on the immanent change of government in the United Kingdom and the peculiar arrangements embodied in the ‘letters of last resort’ which are written by each incoming British Prime Minister (‘Letters of last resort’, page 8, END Info 33, August/September 2022). We commented that:

One of the first acts of Prime Minister Sunak or Truss will be to write four identical letters. They will write these letters in their own hand and will do so having been ‘indoctrinated’ by the Chief of the Defence Staff, who is tasked with explaining the damage that will be done by the detonation of a nuclear warhead.

These letters will be transported from No 10 Downing Street to the four nuclear-armed submarines in the Royal Navy. The letters will be locked in a safe to be opened in one circumstance only: loss of all contact and communication following a devastating attack on the United Kingdom. A ‘letter of last resort’ leaves instructions to the Captain and Commander of each submarine on how to respond in such a situation. By the time the letters are opened, it can be assumed that the person who wrote them will be dead. The Captain and Commander will have to decide whether or not to follow the instructions of a corpse.

Liz Truss won the internal party contest and became Prime Minister on 6 September 2022. On Tuesday 25 October 2022, Prime Minister Truss went back to Buckingham Palace and informed the King of her intention to resign. A few minutes later, Rishi Sunak was asked by the King to form a new government. Liz Truss was the shortest-lived Prime Minister in British parliamentary history. Her ‘letters of last resort’ - her instructions to nuclear-armed submarine captains and commanders - will now be incinerated, to be replaced by those of Rishi Sunak.

What will the new Prime Minister write? Will it be any different in substance from those letters written some sixty-odd days before? How different will they be from all the previous letters over all the previous years? How much longer will this grim farce be allowed to continue?