Democracy and the Freedom of the press.

It's technically legal, but it is extraordinary and would signal a significant breach of unwritten rules. The legality is an interesting technicality, but is irrelevant to how a system really works.

In a constitutional democracy, what stops the army taking over?

And as far as I can see almost everyone has agreed with you as regards legality. So we all agree what the legal position is so there is no need to keep on repeating it. We all have to move on to what is likely to happen if the legal position of withholding RA is undertaken by the monarch. The legal position will not be the end of events, you may not care, you may not consider them but events surrounding a Constitutional crisis are very important as they have all changed our democracy in the past which of course is the way democracies develop and progress. We have to ask then is it in the Monarch's best interests to allow the people to have the power that he as head of state can legally wield. If the answer is a resounding yes, and there is little doubt it is, then the legal position you indicate is at best very unlikely to arise and in all probability will never arise. We are what we are in reality not what we are in legal title.

Unwritten Rules are not worth the paper they are written on - they mean absolutely nothing.

The legal technicality is not irrelevant, because it is precisely how and why a system works.


All The Best

Up to 1998 teh death penalty was still on the statute book for specific crimes so legally a judge could pass that sentence. If he had done so we have to consider what would have happened and it is unlikely that even if it was upheld on appeal it would have survived a challenge by the people's representatives and if necessary new law made. So having the legal ability to act in a certain way does not mean that one can without consequence which is what makes democracy work, it is not the legality that binds it is the consensus. 

Does it matter? I can change it to 2004 if you like or follow some other blurb that says "In January 1999, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw signed the Sixth Protocol of the ECHR, formally abolishing the death penalty in peacetime and in December that year, the Government ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This was followed by ratification of Protocol 13 in 2002, thereby totally abolishing capital punishment in the UK, including during times of war."
The point stands.

Of course they matter but they are not, and I repeat not, like a written constitution and effectively inviolate. Our Constitution has arisen through many Constitutional upsets and crises and it is upon such upsets etc that it is predicated. Our laws have not appeared as referenced to the word written down several hundred years ago they are flexible and ever changing  and realistically in the hands of the electorate to direct if they so wish. It is riven with flaws and imperfections but it is not the mess that oversees some written Constitutions such as the US and the EU.