MPs return to Westminster on Wednesday amid calls for Boris Johnson to resign after the supreme court ruled in a blistering judgment that he had suspended parliament unlawfully.
Mr Johnson cut short a visit to New York to fly back to London overnight but his immediate response to the ruling was to blame those who want to stop Brexit.
“I don’t think this was the right decision. The prerogative of has been used for centuries without this kind of challenge,” he said.
“There are a lot of people who basically want to stop this country from coming out of the EU and we have a parliament that is unable to be prorogued and doesn’t want to have an election. I think it is time we took things forward.”
In a unanimous decision, the court found that Mr Johnson acted unlawfully in advising Queen Elizabeth to prorogue parliament for five weeks. The 11 justices concluded that the suspension had the effect of preventing MPs from carrying out their constitutional functions in the run-up to Britain's scheduled withdrawal from the EU on October 31st.
Fundamentals of democracy
"Parliament, and in particular the House of Commons as the elected representatives of the people, has a right to a voice in how that change comes about. The effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme," the supreme court's president, Brenda Hale, said.
Tuesday’s defeat in the supreme court is the latest setback for Mr Johnson, whose two months in office have seen him lose his parliamentary majority, expel 21 Conservative MPs and lose every vote he has faced in the House of Commons. If the prime minister has not negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the EU by October 19th, he is obliged under a law passed this month to seek a three-month delay to Brexit rather than leave at the end of October without a deal.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the leaders of all Britain's other opposition parties called on Mr Johnson to resign.
‘Shortest-serving PM’
“That would make him the shortest-serving British prime minister in history and rightly so,” Mr Corbyn told the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
Following a meeting with Mr Johnson in New York on Tuesday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said they had reached "no agreements by any means" but had gone into more detail about Brexit.
“This meeting was a meeting between my team and his. It was a little bit more detailed. We got to talk about some of the detail of the withdrawal agreement and the backstop. It was a good meeting in the sense that we were able to get into more detail this time. However, there is still a very wide gap between the EU and the UK in terms of achieving what we need to achieve before October,” he said.
A Downing Street spokesperson said the two leaders had discussed some of Britain’s proposals “including on the issue of consent” from northern unionists for measures designed to keep the Border open.
