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But all is not over yet. A Member of the House of Commons who accepts an office of profit under the Crown thereby vacates his seat, and must seek re-election. This applies to the heads of all the great Departments. Minor Ministerial posts, such as the Secretary to the Treasury, the Under-Secretaries of State, the Parliamentary and Financial Secretaries of various Departments, are exempted from this parliamentary law, as they are regarded as holding office not by appointment of the Crown, but by appointment of the Ministers in charge of the different offices. The object of compelling a Minister to submit his acceptance of office to the judgment of his constituents, which was first established by an Act of the reign of Queen Anne—Succession to the Crown Act, 1707—was to restrain the corrupt influence of the Crown over Parliament by its power of conferring place on servile and obsequious Members. The danger the statute was designed to avert has, happily, past long since and gone for ever. The Act of Anne, however, continues in operation despite the fact that, owing to the complete revolution which has since been effected in the Constitution, it is entirely remote from the realities of these democratic times. The only modification of the original Act is a provision in the Reform Act of 1867, by which a Minister who is transferred to another office “in lieu of and in immediate succession the one to the other” need not submit himself to his constituents. A constitutional difficulty arose on the taking over of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer by Gladstone on the resignation of Lowe in 1873, during a parliamentary recess, Gladstone at the time being First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister. Did the right hon. gentleman come under the provision of the Act of 1867, and therefore not obliged to seek re-election? The law officers of the Crown—Coleridge, Attorney-General, and Jessel, Solicitor-General—came to the conclusion that the seat was not vacated; and their opinion was supported by Sir Erskine May, Clerk of the House of Commons. On the other hand, Lord Chancellor Selborne advanced the opposite view, holding that, as Gladstone had taken the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, not in lieu of and in immediate succession to, but in addition to, the office of First Lord of the Treasury, he must submit himself to his constituents. But this Gladstone was reluctant to do, as his seat for Greenwich was believed to be unsafe.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition sought to make the situation more embarrassing for the Government. The Speaker is not empowered to issue his warrant for a new election during the Recess in the room of any Member who since the Prorogation has accepted any office whereby he has vacated his seat, unless on receipt of a certificate from two Members and a notification from the Member himself of the fact of such acceptance of office. What happened in this particular case is thus described by John Morley in his Life of Gladstone: “The unslumbering instinct of Party had quickly got upon a scent, and two keen-nosed sleuth-hounds of the Opposition, four or five weeks after Mr. Gladstone had taken the seals of the Exchequer, sent to the Speaker a certificate in the usual form, stating a vacancy at Greenwich, and requesting him to issue a writ for a new election. The Speaker reminded them, in reply, that the issue of writs during the recess in cases of acceptance of office required notification to him from the Member accepting, and he had received no such notification.” In the midst of the controversy Parliament was dissolved, and with it the difficulty.
Governments have tried to repeal the statute of Queen Anne. Arthur Balfour, who thought the law not only antiquated, but inimical to good government, once, when Prime Minister, brought in a Bill to abolish it. “I remember in my early days,” said he, in the session of 1905, “the Party to which I belong—it was in 1880—derived infinite enjoyment from the satisfaction of turning the late Sir William Harcourt out of his seat at Oxford on his taking office as Home Secretary. He found a seat after considerable inconvenience to Mr. Gladstone’s Government; and in my opinion, although it gave us great satisfaction as a good practical joke, it was a severe condemnation of the system on which we now carry on business, and which no practical assembly in the world but our own would tolerate for an instant.” Balfour failed, however, to get the House of Commons to agree to his Bill. I have heard several debates on the subject. The chief argument of the Treasury Bench for the repeal of the Act was that by reason of it no Prime Minister has ever been able to exercise a really free choice in the selection of his colleagues in the Administration; for often he has had to put a square man into a round hole, because the round man that would fit the round hole admirably held an unsafe seat, and therefore might not be re-elected. But the view of the back benches always has been that the Act supports the control of the House over the Government, and gives to the constituency the opportunity of expressing its opinion as to the action of its representative in accepting office under the Crown. This view has always prevailed. During the Great War the principle was twice suspended by emergency Acts. Members who accepted office in the two Coalition Governments of the War—one under Asquith in May and June 1915, and the other under Lloyd George in December 1916 and January 1917—were expressly absolved from the necessity of seeking re-election. But when the second Coalition Government, after the General Election of December 1918, submitted to the new Parliament, as their first measure, a Bill to repeal the statute of Queen Anne, feeling against it was very strong, and all that the House of Commons would assent to was to suspend for nine months the obligation on Members to go to their constituencies on the acceptance of office.