Myths of the palace plot to sack Whitlam debunked

The Dismissal
Published in the Australian Financial Review
16/7/20

Myths of the palace plot to sack Whitlam debunked
The release of the Kerr Palace letters this week, which promised to reveal evidence of interference from Buckingham Palace in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, proved the very opposite, writes Anne Twomey.

Anne Twomey
Constitutional expert
Jul 16, 2020 – 12.53pm

When you don’t know the precedents, everything appears to be unprecedented. More surprising for me than anything in the letters between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace was how a lack of familiarity with such material caused people to turn standard utterances into something extraordinary and conspiratorial.

It shows how we all see things differently through the prism of our own experience.

So let me share a view of these letters from someone who has spent decades analysing primary documents about exercises of reserve powers by vice-regal officers in Australia and other countries that share the same Queen.

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