The British constitution is, as we know, a strange beast. It is uncodified but it is also largely unwritten, operating on nods, winks and half-remembering how we did this last time. Evidently, the incumbent Speaker has been re-elected for 175 years; what, then, has changed with Mr Speaker Bercow? In short, it isn’t anything to [...]

While Jan Moir has been issuing her homophobic drivel and being roundly castigated by the internet, another story in the news of quite astounding bigotry caught my eye. In Tangipahoa Country, Louisiana, a justice of the peace, Keith Bardwell, refuses to give marriage licenses for mixed-race couples. Yes, you read that correctly. The story first [...]

The London Evening Standard is to become a freesheet, the BBC report. thelondonpaper was pulled by News International last month. We are now down to three, non-specialist, London-wide newspapers, the ES, London Lite and Metro. I’m excluding things like Sport, Shortlist and City AM. This is not good. We will shortly only have two newspapers [...]

On the 6th April [1780], Mr. Dunning moved … ‘that the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ – Erskine May, The Constitutional History of England since the Accession of George III, Ch. 1, available free online here. If the constitutional settlement that comes down to us from the [...]

Pity the Hansard scribes who had to record and commit John McDonnell’s mace-laden protest against the lack of a substantive vote on the Heathrow expansion. Unable to bring themselves to actually describe what happened, they’ve plumped for Mr Hoon: [...] Necessarily, when judgments have to be made about the interests of the country, those decisions [...]

Seeing as everyone’s talking about the monarchy in general and Prince Harry in particular, it’s worth pointing out that history only gives William slightly better than even odds of ascending the throne and acquiring all sorts of other fun titles. Queen Anne succeeded William III (who sort of succeeded himself, as he’d previously been coregnant [...]

I can only guess that those who are spitting with rage about the lack of a warrant in the search of Damian Green’s Parliamentary offices haven’t watched enough CSI. Trying to say the police acted improperly by not having a warrant is a bit daft; they have the written consent of the Serjeant-at-Arms. Had they [...]

I wrote here about the limits of the Wilson Doctrine and said It’s not clear, equally, whether the Wilson doctrine would apply to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness, Michelle Gildernew, Conor Murphy and Pat Doherty (the Sinn Féin MPs who have not taken an oath of allegiance and so are barred from sitting at Westminster). Imagine [...]

Following on from last week’s PMQs, which I talked about here, I’ve come up with a rebuttal to all the (cheap, IMHO) points made by Cameron and, today, Hague about paralysis during Labour’s leadership election and calls for a leadership election. The formal arrangements are that the Queen asks a member of the Commons (or, [...]