Dartington Hall is a glorious medieval estate in Devon: deer-filled meadows, trout, otters and kingfishers on the River Dart. Two summers ago, I sat in sunshine outside the great hall going through notes for a talk I was about to give, when I was approached by an elderly woman. She had a cut-glass accent reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth II.
“May I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“So …” she hesitated. “Why are things so … so shit?”
I laughed. She laughed, then despaired at the country she loved. British politicians lied occasionally in the past; now lying was frequent and shameless. Nothing worked. The “bad eggs” used to resign; now they were promoted. They created problems but rarely solved them.
We’ve all experienced similar conversations, but behind our culture of complaining there’s a series of puzzling events in our supposedly mature democracy. How, for instance, do you get to be Liz Truss? Or Chris Grayling, repeatedly failing upwards? Or Grant Shapps, the political shapeshifter and so-called Minister for the Today programme? There’s also a British paradox. Our beautiful country is full of talented, inventive people. One university – Cambridge – has more Nobel laureates than any university except Harvard, and indeed any entire country except the UK and the US. The creative contribution of our citizens is admired everywhere, from discovering DNA and the world wide web to our universities, musicians, film-makers and those endless Hollywood franchises based on the works of Ian Fleming, JK Rowling and Tolkien. So, at this time of unease, public discord – and as we mark today one year of the Rishi Sunak era, which promised to bring order and coherence to public and political life but has yet to do any such thing – it’s worth asking, why this sense of national failure? Why our dreadful public services, polluted waterways, declining health outcomes and the self-harm of Brexit?
The answer, I realised while researching a new book, is not Them. It’s not the five failed prime ministers since 2016 and their incompetent sidekicks. It’s Us. We tolerate a sclerotic, antiquated democratic system allowing people you wouldn’t trust with your wallet or to babysit your children to rise through deceit and thrive through failure. We boast of “British exceptionalism”, yet tolerate weaponised nostalgia, the supposed glories of a misremembered past used as a distraction from an uncertain future.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is one example. He has twice risen to ministerial office, which itself says much about a devalued currency. Rees-Mogg witters about returning to the imperial system of weights and measures to secure a few tabloid headlines, but no other country uses British imperial measures. America has the same words, but a US gallon is 3.785 litres; an imperial gallon is 4.546 litres. American Armalite rifles fire ammunition calibrated in millimetres (5.56×45mm), although Americans spell it “millimeters”. No country in Europe uses the UK’s fossilised first-past-the-post voting system in its general elections – except Belarus, the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. No country in the world has members of the state religion sitting by right in its legislature, except Church of England bishops in the House of Lords … and Iran’s mullahs.
The UK is the only complex democracy in the 21st century that has failed to codify its constitution – despite British experts writing constitutions for dozens of other nations. A written constitution cannot guarantee good behaviour (see Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin) but any American can proudly quote what their constitution says about any matter of importance, while the British are taught that constitutional matters are boring and best left to “experts”. That’s our guilty secret. The genius of the British unwritten (more accurately, uncodified) constitution is deliberate obscurantism. Constitutional smoke, mirrors and glorious verbiage are our patriotic hocus pocus, a con trick that suits those in power, who make up rules to suit themselves based on dubious “precedents”.
The House of Commons library is embarrassingly incomprehensible on all this. What it says makes no sense – but that’s the point: “The Crown is one of the oldest institutions in the United Kingdom and remains a significant part of its constitution. It has, however, no single accepted definition.” Ah. If we had “no single accepted” definition of death, gravity, taxation or a red traffic light, we’d be in trouble, but this nonsense is normal because the British constitution is not an instruction manual. It’s a metaphor, “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable”.
Here’s more pseudo-clarity from the House of Commons library: “The term [the Crown] has been used to describe a physical object, or as an alternative way of referring to the monarch in their personal or official capacity. At its most expansive, the Crown has been taken as a proxy for ‘the government’ – or what in other countries would be known as ‘the State’ … There are, as a result, many distinct Crowns – of Canada, Australia and other countries where the Queen [then Elizabeth II] is head of state – all connected via the ‘personal union’ of the current monarch. The terms ‘the sovereign’ or ‘monarch’ and ‘the Crown’ are related – but have separate meanings. The Crown encompasses both the monarch and the government. It is vested in the Queen, but in general its functions are exercised by ministers of the Crown accountable to the UK parliament or the three devolved legislatures.”
Eh? Hello? Our constitutional word salad follows the tradition of Walter Bagehot’s advice to Victorians not to shine light on magic. But constitutional magic is a British delusion. Magicians are, by definition, tricksters. And reading our British constitution is experiencing a whiff of flatulence marketed as “flexibility”. That which is flexible can also be bent, as Boris Johnson discovered. The solution? In brief – recognise the problem. It’s not useless individuals, but the useless sclerotic system in which they thrive. Demand systemic change – and persuade the Labour party this is as big a legacy moment as 1945. Things can change: why not now?
Gavin Esler is a journalist, TV presenter and author. His new book is Britain Is Better Than This
