Queen Elizabeth II’s approval of the suspension of Parliament next month is an important step in protecting Britain’s decision to leave Europe. It is crucial to a plan of Prime Minister Johnson that is being set down by furious opponents as, in the words of one, “profoundly undemocratic.” What a hypocritical jibe. For Mr. Johnson seeks to redeem a Brexit referendum that is one of the great acts of direct democracy in modern history.

The request to prorogue Parliament was set in motion Wednesday, the British state broadcasting agency reports. Mr. Johnson sent three members of the Privy Council — among them the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the Chief Whip, Mark Spencer — racing by flying machine to the Queen’s castle at Balmoral, where they delivered Mr. Johnson’s letter.

Elizabeth II’s power to prorogue Parliament is astonishing to us Yanks, in that it is sharply greater than that of our own head of state. Adjournment is the one vote a Congress can make that doesn’t require the president’s signature. A president may, on extraordinary occasions, convene a Congress, but the only time he can force an adjournment is when the two houses can’t agree when to adjourn.

Then again, too, Elizabeth II’s power to prorogue Parliament can’t really be exercised out of the blue. We gather it’s normally done on the advice of her prime minister. What makes Mr. Johnson’s move so controversial is just that it’s being used to enforce Brexit, which some members of Parliament want to foil as the deadline — on Halloween — approaches. Prorogation cuts into their time for anti-Brexit mischief.

So the result is, in effect, that Europe knows it has to stop the dillydallying and offer, like yesterday, acceptable terms for Brexit. If Europe takes its time, the EU will wake up to discover that the Queen has suspended Parliament. And Her Majesty, Mr. Johnson & Co. may have delivered the kind of straightforward no-deal Brexit that Britons asked for in the referendum of June 2016.

We don’t mind saying that we’re not big fans of direct democracy. The Sun’s sentiments are more republican, with a lowercase r. Neither, though, do we mind saying that we prefer direct democracy to no democracy at all. Which is what Britain was getting out of the European Union. In any event, once the people have spoken, as they did three years ago, who now has standing to brook them?

We understand that those who want to remain in Europe may try to defeat the voters in court. The BBC reports that it is “not possible to mount a legal challenge” to Elizabeth’s exercise of her “personal prerogative powers.” The Beeb’s legal affairs correspondent, Clive Coleman, though, reckons the courts might review “the advice given to her by the prime minister.” We wish Mr. Johnson luck.

And ardently. Our own journalistic investment in respect of Brexit goes back more than 30 years, to the era of Prime Minister Thatcher’s speech at Bruges, Belgium. That’s where, in 1988, the Iron Lady warned that Britons had not “successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

Mrs. Thatcher came to view as “the greatest issue before our country” the question of whether Britain would “remain a free, independent, nation state. Or whether we are to be dissolved in a federal Europe. There are no half measures, no third ways — and no second choices.” She wanted to look westward to America and to the freedom countries imbued with such values as the English and Scottish enlightenments.

No wonder Mr. Johnson turned to the British sovereign. He campaigned for office on the vow, as the BBC reminded, to do whatever it takes to secure Brexit. So, in seeking the prorogation of Parliament, he is doing just what he promised. President Trump was smart to signal his support for Mr. Johnson. He’s one of the few non-British leaders to have expressed confidence that Britain will get over any rough spots and go on to greater glory.

________

N.B. — This editorial has been updated to include Elizabeth II’s assent to the plan to prorogue Parliament.