text: As president of the CLN Bonomi sought to steer discussion away from suggestions that the monarchy should be deposed or that the King should abdicate. Relations with the royal government, which had taken refuge in the Allied-controlled South, were a major point of friction. Communists, Socialists and Actionists saw Victor Emmanuel III as complicit with Fascism and responsible for the disastrous wartime situation due to his attitude during both Mussolini's rise and the nearly twenty years of dictatorship, and demanded his immediate departure. Christian Democrats and Liberals preferred to delay any discussion on the form of government to the end of the war, seeing the monarchy as a factor of legitimacy and national unity. Bonomi was also particularly concerned with suppressing any revolutionary aspirations on part of the leftist parties and pursuing the restoration of pre-Fascist liberal democracy. These discussions eventually led him to resign from his post on 24 March 1944. He would return as soon as May 5, after Communist Party secretary Palmiro Togliatti, who had just returned from exile, unexpectedly endorsed the moderate position. Around the same time Enrico De Nicola also brokered a compromise solution where Victor Emmanuel would delegate his powers to the more palatable Prince Umberto, which the King accepted reluctantly.
  On June 8, two days after the liberation of Rome, Badoglio and representatives of CLN parties, with Noel Mason-MacFarlane as representative of the Allies, agreed that Bonomi would become Prime Minister. He was sworn in on June 18. The government was seated at first in the Southern city of Salerno and then, from mid-July, in Rome. Bonomi also held the positions of Minister of the Interior and Minister for Italian Africa (at the time under Allied occupation) and, until December 1944, Minister of Foreign Affairs. His appointment was taken without the knowledge of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who considered a Badoglio a safer choice and had Mason-MacFarlane dismissed over this decision. Mason-MacFarlane, on his part, agreed with the American viewpoint that Badoglio was too discredited to continue serving and that his association with Fascism would weaken the Italian monarchy.