Sir John Kerr, the Australian governor general who dismissed the former prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, first canvassed the possibility with Prince Charles as early as August of that year – two months before the constitutional crisis began, according to a new book.

Kerr was worried that Whitlam was going to replace him as governor general – an act which would require Whitlam to advise the Queen.



When Kerr raised his plans with Prince Charles, the next in line to the throne confirmed his knowledge of Kerr’s plans to dismiss an elected prime minister.



“But surely Sir John, the Queen should not have to accept advice that you should be recalled at the very time should this happen when you were considering having to dismiss the government,” Charles reportedly told Kerr.

In her latest book, The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975, Jenny Hocking says Kerr’s private papers show that the palace knew much more than was originally acknowledged in the years after Whitlam’s sacking.

Hocking also discusses the close relationship between Kerr and the palace, including a claim that he suggested Prince Charles could be Australia’s governor general in the future.

Kerr wrote “regular and extended” letters to the Queen and her private secretary Sir Martin Charteris during the period leading up to the dismissal.

Kerr was assured that every one of his letters were read by Charteris and the Queen “and she herself told me that if I found the need to write to her direct to feel entirely at liberty to do so”.

One week before the dismissal Charteris informed the governor general of the Queen’s intentions if Whitlam moved against Kerr.



“Charteris told him that should this ‘contingency’ occur, the Queen would ‘try to delay things’ for as long as possible although Charteris acknowledged ‘in the end the Queen would have to act on the advice of her prime minister’,” Hocking writes.

Hocking said according to Kerr’s journals and interview records with WA Liberal senator Reg Withers, Kerr had discussed the dismissal with the palace, justice of the high court of Australia Sir Garfield Barwick, high court justice Sir Anthony Mason and the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser.

Withers gave an interview, the transcript of which was only released after his death, confirming that Fraser and Kerr had been in contact in the week before the dismissal over their private telephone lines.



The revelations overturn the view that Kerr acted alone to sack the Labor government on 11 November 1975.

The palace has refused to release the letters between Kerr and the palace, including the Queen and Prince Charles. Their contents remain the “great gap” says Hocking, whose request for the letters was again declined by the palace in the last few months through the office of the governor general.

“At Her Majesty The Queen’s instructions, the files are under strict embargo for fifty years, from the end of the term of office of the then governorgeneral, ie until 2027 in this case,” Stephen Murtagh, deputy official secretary to the governor-general, informed Hocking.

“Thereafter the documents are subject to a further caveat that their release after fifty years is subject to consultation with the sovereign’s private secretary of the day and with the governor general’s official secretary of the day.”

As late as 2011, the Queen’s assistant private secretary at the time of the dismissal, Sir William Heseltine said categorically, “the governor-general gave no clue to any of us at the palace what was in his mind”.

But Hocking suggests not only did the palace know the nature of his plans but the lack of adverse comment constituted “an unqualified royal green light” to Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam.

“Kerr’s journal, and his direct quotations in it from his correspondence with the Queen and with Charteris, show that the palace was kept informed of his consideration of the dismissal of the Whitlam government months before there was even any ‘political crisis’ to report,” writes Hocking.

She comes to the conclusion that the palace’s “failure to inform” Whitlam “could only have given Kerr tacit comfort and confidence that the dismissal of the prime minister would not meet any royal resistance”.

Hocking also details Kerr’s obsequiousness when it came to Prince Charles as well as a surprising conversation during the prince’s 1974 tour of Australia.

According to the journals, the prince discussed his frustration in waiting to ascend to the throne – “his royal ennui”, as Hocking puts it.

Kerr, who at that stage had only recently been appointed himself, was eager to help and discussed a suggestion that Charles might come to Australia one day as governor general.

“Having failed in his efforts to mediate Prince Charles’s interest in taking up the mantle of governor-general, Kerr later suggested to Whitlam that the Australian government purchase a large rural holding with appropriate homestead, servants, upkeep and furnishings, to encourage the Prince of Wales to make more regular and longer trips to Australia,” Hocking writes.

“An astonished Whitlam declined, suggesting that the purchase of an Australian property for the use of the Prince of Wales was not a priority for national expenditure.”