18 TheEconomistJune 1st 2019
1A
t some pointin June or July roughly
124,000 people in Britain can expect to
receive a ballot paper in the post. It will of-
fer them the names of two Conservative
mps. The one they select will, shortly there-
after, enter 10 Downing Street as prime
minister. The rest of Britain’s 66m inhabit-
ants will have no say whatsoever.
Britain has changed prime ministers
without elections many times before. But
the coming replacement of Theresa May,
who announced her resignation as Tory
leader on May 24th, is different. Previously
the new leader would have been picked by
elected mps. But since 1998 the role of the
Tory party’s mps has been to whittle the
candidate list down to two. Unless one of
those two then withdraws (as was the case
when Mrs May was elected) the final choice
will be left to the membership. A group of
people more likely to be of pensionable age
than not, more than two-thirds male, just
half the size of Wolverhampton and far less
ethnically diverse has become Britain’s
electoral college. “It is weird, isn’t it,” saysShaun Gunner, one of the party’s younger
members. “My family and friends don’t get
to choose the prime minister. And I do.”
The power that has been given to Mr
Gunner and his colleagues might be less
unnerving if their chosen prime minister
were easy to oust, or if his or her powers
were clearly and formally constrained.
Neither is the case. For Tory mps to turn on
the leader their members had just given
them would be a mixture of fratricide and
suicide; the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of
2011 upturned established conventions on
confidence votes within the Commons,
leaving confusion among mps over both
how to bring a government down and what
happens when one falls. And the quirks of
British parliamentary procedure provide
various ways in which a sufficiently
bloody-minded prime minister might
force a “no-deal” Brexit without a majority
in Parliament. This has all the makings of a
constitutional crisis.
The British constitution is unusually
opaque and poorly grasped even by thosewhose powers it governs: “The British con-
stitution has always been puzzling and al-
ways will be,” as the queen has put it. In
normal times, this does not matter all that
much. In abnormal times it does, and
Brexit has brought abnormal times.
The dominant party in Scotland, the
snp, rejects Brexit, seemingly to no avail;
the dominant party in Northern Ireland,
the dup, refuses the Tories’ vision of Brexit
but props up their minority government
nonetheless. As a result legislation put to-
gether to bring about the Brexit the people
voted for in a referendum has repeatedly
failed to pass the House of Commons. The
two big Westminster parties won less than
a quarter of the vote in the European elec-
tions of May 23rd.
Such times test constitutions. The Brit-
ish one looks woefully hard put to pass its
current test—in part because, over the past
two decades, it has undergone an unprece-
dented spate of often poorly thought-
through changes.Beyond Bagehot
Britain is often said to have an unwritten
constitution, and many Britons have
blithely taken this to be something of a
badge of merit, one “bestowed upon us by
Providence”, as the complacent twit John
Podsnap says in “Our Mutual Friend”, a
novel by Charles Dickens. In fact most of
the constitution is written down, but not
all in the same place or with the sameThe referendums and the damage done
Britain needs a robust constitution now more than ever. Which is a pityBriefing The British constitution