Episode Thirty-Seven: Constitutional Reform

Midway through 2025, everyone agrees the British state needs reform (or, if your name is Nigel Farage, you think it needs Reform as well). Starmer and Labour went into office thinking that be-lanyarded civil servants could tell them what to do behind closed doors, only to swiftly realize no such doors exist. Caught way behind the eight ball, they have spent many months since desperately scrambling to put together some kind of real governing agenda. Reform, of course, are almost by definition an anti-status-quo party, except on the (admittedly knotty) question of pensioner benefits. Robert Jenrick, the (for now) unofficial leader of the whatever is left of the Tory party, is rapidly positioning himself as willing and able to do whatever is necessary to turn the country round. Dominic Cummings is touring the country prophesying the end of Whitehall as we know it.

Curiously, however, fundamental constitutional reform remains off the agenda. Everyone mostly seems to imagine that if they just get the right lads and ladies into Downing Street, everything will be alright. Admittedly there are some exceptions. Starmer briefly toyed with the idea of abolishing the Lords, before unceremoniously dropping the idea the second he realized that appointments to the Lords are a convenient way to get some friends and allies into government who did not win seats in the Commons. Even then Starmer was not proposing a shift to unicameralism and merely advocated replacing the Lords with an “elected chamber of nations and regions”. Cummings advocates the partial demise of the apolitical civil service.

Cyber-futuristic constitutional reform.

But more radical solutions could be imagined. What about expanded term limits? Everyone knows that a five-year term of office is in reality a three-year term of office. Every new government spends its first year floundering aimlessly, and the last year being slow-rolled by the civil service, which tends to “wait out” ministers and policies it dislikes as an election approaches. No one proposes the simple solution of allowing governments a maximum six years in office. Or what about seven years? Prime Ministers would of course be entirely free to call elections more frequently, as circumstances call for, and we imagine they usually would.

It is not difficult, however, to imagine how longer term limits might incentivize better policymaking. Starmer’s Labour, for example, has staked its fortunes on reforms to permitting for housebuilding and infrastructure that may very well simply not have time to bear much fruit in terms of falling rents and new railway lines by 2029. Sensing this, and nervously watching over their shoulders at the gaudily painted turquoise monster truck bearing down on them, Labour MPs are already starting to fret and rebel.

One could also re-envisage the role of Prime Minister. Perhaps, like in the days of Diocletian, the job has simply got too big for one man. Diocletian appointed fellow Emperors to rule in the famous Tetrarchy because of the sheer geographic size of the Empire and the necessity of the personal presence of the Emperor to provide military leadership. The situation today is obviously very different. Nonetheless, one could well argue that a small, densely populated country where the state takes 37% of GDP in taxes is not quite as dissimilar as it might seem to a sprawling Empire where the state offers far fewer services and takes just 5-10% of GDP in taxes, especially since the population of the Empire at the time was likely very similar to that of Britain today. The complexity of the task of governing would perhaps seem to be quite comparable.

In theory, of course, modern-day Prime Ministers do not have to offer the same kind of personalistic governance that Diocletian and his fellow Emperors did. In theory, we have a functioning bureaucracy to assist in the task of governance, and of course an independent judiciary and a well-run legal system to provide redress for wrongs. In practice of course, the bureaucracy is notorious for its lack of responsiveness to anything other than exertions of Prime Ministerial will, while the legal system is in a state of semi-collapse and through some combination of bad legislation and internal cultural factors, the judiciary has become entirely unmoored both from popular will and political imperatives. The Prime Minister is simultaneously confronted with the need to to ram through massive domestic reforms to these systems and represent the country internationally and manage a very tricky fiscal situation and manage relations with their own party and sell their wider program to the general public.

Unsurprisingly, most PMs wind up neglecting at least some of these roles, often favouring the seductive allure of high international politics and summits in summery climes. Domestic reforms are left to rot and party management is often ignored, something perhaps now coming back to haunt Starmer. The obvious solution is surely to invest more men with much of the authority of the Prime Minister, although perhaps not going so far as Diocletian and creating a co-Augustus. The role of Deputy Prime Minister has in recent times been something of parking spot for unwelcome coalition partners (Nick Clegg) or enemies who need to be kept inside the tent (Angela Rayner), but there is no particular reason why it has to be this way. In their different ways John Prescott and JD Vance are perhaps good models of a better way of doing things.

One could easily imagine a harmonious tetrarchy made up of the PM and three not-quite-coequals but also not-quite-deputies, all loosely assigned to different policy remits, but all part of the same grand Department of the Tetrarchs. At least some could be appointed from the Lords, provided the intent to appoint them was signposted prior to the election. All four would meet the monarch weekly, who could perhaps play a useful mediating role in the event of any especially crippling internal divisions. The useless rigmarole of Cabinet could perhaps finally be replaced by smaller and more select meetings of the Tetrarchs, the Cabinet Secretary, and Chancellor. It would perhaps also be useful for the monarch to attend on an occasional basis, but the revival of the role of the Crown in active governance will be dealt with more fully later, although we have already outlined some of the basic logic for such a revival. Departments would liaise with the centre of government via the Tetrarch who customarily handle their area, rather than go through the ritual of “stock-takes” with an already wildly overburdened PM.

No doubt all kinds of faults could be found with this particular scheme, and we only offer it as an exercise in sparking discussion rather than a well-worked-out roadmap. The most obvious and compelling objection is that no party actually has the required degree of capacity and trust between its elites to actually make such a plan work. That said, some deep changes are clearly needed. We find the lack of curiosity about fundamental reform to a system that has perhaps produced just a handful of successful Prime Ministers since WW2 rather depressing. Moreover, this system would at least have the merits of dispensing with the pretence that the “Prime Minister” is not already to a great degree a team effort. Men such as Jonathan Powell, Ed Balls, Dominic Cummings, and Morgan McSweeney are well known by the general public to have been far more powerful than most Ministers — to say nothing of the various Cabinet Secretaries.

In that light, the convention that none of these figures has any public media presence seems absurdly antiquated. It feels increasingly unsustainable to continue with the pretence that voters are really just voting for one person and their program (we have thankfully already dispensed with the pretence that voters vote for parties). The complexity of the modern state can and should be diminished through devolution and privatization, but even in a relatively libertarian paradise a state taking 30% of GDP of taxes would still require an awful lot of governing, and the informal authority of advisors is perhaps ultimately not quite a good enough substitute for the formal authority of titled positions, Crown appointments, and at least some degree of democratic consent.