Ignore the Chaos. Britain’s System Is Working.

In times of crisis, Britain’s arcane constitution seems absurd—often because it is absurd. Questions emerge to which no one ever seems entirely sure of the answer. What if, for example, Boris Johnson had not resigned last week but instead sought to cling to power by asking the Queen to dissolve Parliament to hold new elections? At this point, somebody is sure to cite some old but meaningful convention, only for somebody else to discover that the source of this apparently sacred but largely forgotten rule is in fact an anonymous letter written to a newspaper. This all actually happened.

So whenever Britain emerges from one of its political upheavals, calls emerge for the country to codify its constitution in a single, intelligible document like the United States’. Britain may have escaped , the argument goes, but it is still far too reliant on the “good chap” theory