To kiss hands is a constitutional term used in the United Kingdom to refer to the formal installation of Crown-appointed British government ministers to their office.
In the past, it referred to the requirement that the office-holder actually kiss the hands of the Sovereign as a symbol of personal fealty and loyalty to the Sovereign, that fealty and loyalty being a requirement to serve in the King's or Queen's government.
In modern times, office-holders are not expected physically to kiss the hands of the Sovereign before assuming the role. Simply being received by the Queen is taken to validate the selection, with this meeting being described in the Court Circular as "kissing hands". The invitation issued to a party leader to form a government is sometimes still described as "an invitation to kiss hands". The actual kissing of hands does not take place until the subsequent meeting of the Privy Council, when the new minister is formally appointed as a member of the Council.
When appointing a Secretary of State (top rank in the UK Government), the protocol also involves the delivery by the Sovereign of the seals of office into the hands of the appointee. This is also valid for other officers who are keepers of seals, such as the Lord Privy Seal or the Lord Chancellor, who is also keeper of the Great Seal of the United Kingdom.
Famous quotes containing the words kissing and/or hands:
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all. None can say deliberately that he inhabits the same sphere, or is contemporary, with the flower which his hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it, inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there is no danger that he will hurt it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)