A cobbled-together, unwritten constitution is a major reason why no one knows how to take control and guide us out of this mess
There’s a terrific scene in The Favourite, the film about the last of the Stuart monarchs, when Queen Anne is about to propose a European policy to her parliament. Just before she opens her mouth, the bewigged MPs make plain that they won’t have it. The queen faints with shock and hits the floor with a thump.
I don’t expect Queen Theresa to collapse when she loses in parliament this week, not least because the rejection of her Brexit deal is not going to be a surprise to anyone, herself included. If we still lived by the traditional rules of British politics, defeat ought to be the final curtain for Mrs May. Brexit is the defining task of her premiership and she is about to fail it. We’d ordinarily expect the abdication of the PM to follow such a humiliating rejection. Yet no one, neither friend nor foe, expects her to respond to defeat by submitting her resignation. Brexit has so scrambled our politics that it has normalised dramas that we would once have regarded as extraordinary and made the unthinkable routine. We no longer know which of the rules still apply.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2D7AcNh
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