The british monarchy

Dissolution of Parliament

In 1950 the King's Private Secretary Sir Alan "Tommy" Lascelles, writing pseudonymously to The Times newspaper, asserted a constitutional convention: according to the Lascelles Principles, if a minority government asked to dissolve Parliament to call an early election to strengthen its position, the monarch could refuse, and would do so under three conditions. When Harold Wilson requested a dissolution late in 1974, the Queen granted his request as Heath had already failed to form a coalition. The resulting general election gave Wilson a small majority.^[12] The monarch could in theory unilaterally dismiss the prime minister, but in practice the prime minister's term nowadays comes to an end only by electoral defeat, death, or resignation. The last monarch to remove the prime minister was William IV, who dismissed Lord Melbourne in 1834.^[13] The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 removed the monarch's authority to dissolve Parliament; however the Act specifically retained the monarch's power of prorogation, which is a regular feature of the parliamentary calendar.