Until now, the leading authorities on the reserve powers were Australian politician, jurist, and scholar H.V. Evatt, and Canadian academic and senator Eugene Forsey. Their separate studies of the reserve powers, first published in 1936 and 1941 respectively, were published together in 1990, uniting ‘Evatt and Forsey’ as a formidable duo.

Now comes Anne Twomey’s The Veiled Sceptre, a study of the reserve powers in Westminster systems. It is, simply, magisterial in scope, study, and learning. For scholars of the reserve powers, there is no single volume to approach it for ambition and achievement. It is a formidable education awaiting a future monarch or vice-regal representative.

Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney, comes to the task well acquainted with explaining the law relating to political debates. She has a wealth of experience that comes from such politically sensitive environments as the New South Wales Cabinet Office, senate committees, and the Parliamentary Library.

In The Veiled Sceptre, Twomey establishes her task as twofold. First, she wants to document the extensive use of the reserve powers in Westminster-style governments – a sweep of history across the British Empire, and its successor, the Commonwealth. In this she succeeds admirably. There cannot be a significant archive or library Twomey has missed in aiding an extensive survey across the United Kingdom, the Pacific, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, or Asia.

John Kerr during a presentation at the Melbourne Cup. (Credit: Wiki Commons)The Lang and Whitlam dismissals, and Canadian events of comparable notoriety (the King–Byng crisis of 1926 and the 2008 prorogation crisis), are obvious tent poles for this volume. Yet there is much more to this study than those controversies. For instance, Twomey sketches a lively portrait of the various manoeuvres in London and Dublin in 1932 as politicians in the Irish Free State sought to effectively abolish the office of governor-general.

Faced with coups, revolutions, crises, and controversies, the British monarchs and their representatives have, by and large, acted (or not acted, employing the policy of ‘masterly inactivity’) with care and acuity. One is left impressed by the instances in the second Elizabethan age where the queen, or her representatives, have intervened adroitly in vexed political circumstances. One example: Twomey relates the queen’s lending her support to Fiji’s governor-general in quite exacting circumstances during the 1987 coup, when the prime minister and his ministers were taken hostage and eventually forced from office. This support continued up to the point when the governor-general recommended endorsing a racially discriminatory constitution. Here the queen terminated her own role as queen of Fiji, against the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who opposed the idea of the queen’s ‘abdicating’.

Twomey’s second, more complex, aim is to shift the analysis of reserve powers away from their being considered anomalies; fitting in neat boxes in isolation from prevailing constitutional arrangements. She argues for their being examined in conjunction with constitutional principles such as responsible government, the rule of law, representative government, and the doctrine of necessity. Appreciating that sometimes these principles may conflict with one another, she illustrates how these dilemmas have been addressed and resolved in the past. In doing so, Twomey broadens her work so that it becomes a virtual manual for a head of state in their dealings with heads of government, while also addressing such issues as giving assent to legislation, the caretaker conventions applied during elections, and the appointment and removal of vice-regal officers.

Anne Twomey (Photo via University of Sydney)Contemplating how the soft power of ‘the veiled sceptre’ has been used over time, one cannot avoid the question of an Australian republic. Are we to accept the simple assurances of some republicans that nothing need change with respect to the reserve powers? How might a head of state, among whose roles, Twomey argues, is that of independent guardian of the constitution, approach that role if possessed of their own status and mandate as a popularly elected figure? While Twomey does not set out to address this debate, her work should certainly influence the discussion.

In his famous study of the British monarchy, Walter Bagehot thought the institutional memory of a long-serving monarch was ‘experience with which few ministers could contend’. In this volume, Twomey has distilled a lively and potent history that easily supplants the experience of any one monarch. As history and persuasive analysis, The Veiled Sceptre has no peer.