Our admirable, adaptable constitution has been used and abused by a shameless PM

For all its many flaws, our system has always had the considerable benefit of empowering our democratically elected legislature to respond to our needs and reflect our views

After three years of post-referendum tumult, and as the Conservative non-government proves every day the transcendent folly of David Cameron, I was beginning to feel a certain apathy: a feeling that nothing in this dismal chapter in our history was remotely interesting.

But on Wednesday, a day of so many insults, I felt something stirring in me for the first time in years, like a dim and distant memory: palpable anger.

In one day, every comfort that I took from studying Dicey’s The Law of the Constitution had been smashed. Famously unwritten as it is, our constitution has often been defended, quite properly I always thought, because it holds parliament – the democratically endowed legislature – as sovereign.

Bills of rights are all well and good, but what about when written constitutions ossify and prove immovable in the face of obvious changes in people’s views and needs (see the gun control debate in the US).

Or what about when commendable changes in written constitutions mask new and more seditious forms of suppression (see the racial divisions that persist more than 150 years after the emancipation amendment)?

For all its many flaws, our system has always had the considerable benefit of empowering our democratically elected legislature to respond to our needs and reflect our views. But yesterday that idea was dealt a catastrophic broadside by a privileged, unelected, dishonest narcissist with no popular mandate whatsoever.

As if this insult wasn’t enough, the meeting of the privy council – that most ancient of constitutional institutions – which has decided to dispense with the tiresome business of parliamentary debate, was headed by no less than the human apotheosis of privilege: Jacob Rees-Mogg. How many of us even knew that this pompous amateur historian was the Lord President of the Privy Council?

Prime ministers are, strictly speaking, always unelected, but Boris Johnson was chosen by barely half of the members of a political party who couldn’t even achieve an overall majority at the last election. Just 0.13 per cent of the population decided that Boris Johnson should lead Her Majesty’s government.

That is old news of course. But when the next fool from the cabinet inevitably appears on some car crash television interview to toe the line, and tells you that there is precedent for this abomination, remember that there is no analogy between what has happened today and what happened over seventy years ago.

The short suspension of Parliament in 1948 was used to curtail the power and influence of what was still then an archaic and anachronistic House of Lords. It was brought about by the government of Clement Atlee, whose mandate vested in the still unparalleled landslide victory over Winston Churchill in 1945, and whose other achievements include the reconstruction of post-war Britain, the establishment of the NHS and the creation of the Welfare State. Boris Johnson…well…has not done those things. This is not 1948.

And as for dishonesty, Boris Johnson – a man who prides himself on (and is praised by his acolytes for) speaking plainly and forthrightly – isn’t even prepared to do the British people the courtesy of stating honestly why he has unmasked his batteries on the last vestigial democratic credentials of our creaking and beleaguered constitution.

There can be no sentient being in the country (I exclude from that definition the aforementioned cabinet) who will believe that Boris chose this time to prorogue parliament so that Her Majesty can give a speech talking about all the exciting laws that the Conservative Government, presumably with some help from their erstwhile friends at the DUP, are going to be introducing.

That he expects us to believe such a bald lie, or to simply keep quiet even if we don’t believe it, was perhaps the most galling insult of the day, in a strong field. We shouldn’t accept it. I don’t accept it. I’m angry. This cannot stand.

Paul Renteurs is a barrister at 2 Hare Court Chambers, having studied Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and Public International Law at the LSE