Only a few weeks ago, at the height of the expenses scandal, you could almost hear the sound of tumbrils rolling through the streets of Westminster. The entire political class seemed in danger of being dispatched to the scaffold. But now, as I write, all eyes have turned to Iran. A kind of normality has returned here. A prime minister who seemed in imminent danger of being evicted from Downing Street is once more back in control.
Was it all just a passing tremor? Were the people really about to take up their pitchforks, or were we merely seeing the frustrations generated by the recession and the payouts made to unelected bankers spilling over into ill-focused rage at Honorable Members? To read some of the more vitriolic attacks on MPs and members of the House of Lords was like watching the audience heckle and barrack the judges on that all-conquering TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.” Authority figures, whether they are Cabinet ministers or reality show adjudicators, are having a hard time of it at the moment.
If Vernon Bogdanor, arguably the country’s leading constitutional analyst, is correct, the storm has not passed just yet. In his latest book, “The New British Constitution,” the Oxford academic examines how, over the past decade or so, EU law, the Human Rights Act and similar measures have forced the UK’s lawmakers to abandon the old piecemeal, unwritten constitution in favor of shifting a codified set of arrangements. In the 19th century, the eminent jurist A.V. Dicey could proclaim: “There is no law which Parliament cannot change. There is no fundamental or so-called constitutional law.” Dicey — and Tocqueville too — would find themselves in a very different landscape today.
What’s striking about Mr. Bogdanor’s response to the latest Westminster upheavals, though, is that he believes reform still has a long way to go. The changes introduced so far, he argues, have brought about a shift of the balance of power among the elites only. Devolution has given politicians in Edinburgh and elsewhere a much greater role in the running of their affairs, but Mr. Bogdanor is skeptical as to how far the people themselves have been allowed to take charge of the machinery.
One solution, he argues, would be to introduce a much greater dose of direct democracy in the form of directly elected mayors and the like. The model will be familiar to American readers. And, in a newspaper article, Mr. Bogdanor joined the ranks of campaigners who want the so-called “first-past-the-post” electoral system replaced by proportional representation. As he wrote:
“Britain remains the only democracy in Europe in which a government can enjoy the full plenitude of power on just 36% of the vote, with nearly two-thirds of the voters opposed to it. Many of the worst abuses of expenses have been perpetrated by MPs in safe seats, MPs with little to fear from the voters. Under proportional representation, however, there are no safe seats. If the case for the first-past-the-post system is so strong, why not put it to the voters? A reform package that does not include proportional representation is like Hamlet without the prince.”
Skeptics respond, of course, that PR will lead to more unrepresentative horse-trading behind closed doors and will simply allow extremist parties to enter the mainstream. Ironically, enough one of the loudest counterblasts came from an American, Christopher Caldwell, who, besides writing for the Weekly Standard and the New York Times, also happens to be a columnist at the Financial Times. He fears that, in the rush to respond to the unsavory headlines generated by the expenses affair, Parliament will make matters even worse:
“Much of what passes for ’abuse’ can be ended with a few simple regulatory changes, the simpler the better,” he wrote. “Why not raise parliamentary salaries and scrap the second-home deduction? (In Washington, some congressmen live on pizza in crowded group houses.) … There is a suspicious inclination to seek remedies that are wide-ranging, Utopian and (even if it is not the business of foreigners to say so) un-British.”
The British, of course, take great pride in their ability to “muddle through” with a mixture of pragmatism and pageantry. This is a country, after all, that has spent the best part of the last three decades wondering what exactly the Prince of Wales’ role should be. Is he merely a monarch-in-waiting, a mere walking and hand-shaking symbol of the hereditary principle? Or has he the right to play an active role in the great issues of the day? The argument has flared again after he became embroiled in a planning dispute with Britain’s most fashionable — and powerful — architect, Richard (now Lord) Rogers.
Lord Rogers, an arch-Modernist whose most famous (or infamous depending on your view) landmark is the Pompidou Centre, had been commissioned to build a sleek complex of glass-and-steel residential blocks in a prime location on the site of Chelsea Barracks, opposite Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital. The fact that the dwellings were destined to be occupied by the wealthy had led to the development being dubbed “the Gucci Ghetto.”
Alarmed by the uncompromising design, Prince Charles — a champion of traditionalist architecture — used his influence to lobby for an alternative design by the country’s leading neo-Classicist Quinlan Terry. The fact that the company developing the site is owned by the Qatari royal family naturally gave HRH certain advantages. And so it came to pass, a few days ago, that Lord Rogers’ scheme was unceremoniously dropped. At which his Lordship began muttering about an unconstitutional use of princely powers. Lord Rogers himself is one of the great and the good although much of the public has never taken him to its heart. (I thought his design was ugly and intrusive. Mr. Terry’s is slightly more attractive, though not exactly a thing of beauty.)
Lord Rogers was so incensed that he called for a constitutional panel to examine Prince Charles’ political influence. I couldn’t help noticing that Vernon Bogdanor was one of the first experts to be consulted by the press. He declared that the prince was well within his rights to act as he did since the planning dispute was not a party political issue. A verdict that would have been greeted with cheers by those of us who think fashionable architects have had too easy a ride over the past half-century. I am lukewarm about monarchy in general, but in this case I am inclined to be a royalist.
• Clive Davis writes for The Times and Sunday Times, and writes a blog at The Spectator. His e-mail address is www.spectator. co.uk/clivedavis.
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