The UK’s latest constitutional crisis is the product of a million tweaks to a system that should have been binned long ago.
Until 1965, the Conservative Party leader didn’t emerge through any kind of election at all, but through a mysterious process of ‘consultations’ with various powerful people.
But as old systems of patronage and hierarchy eroded, and with the hereditary peer Alec Douglas-Home having secured the post, this system of quiet rule by backroom boys was deemed out-of-date in a world of expanding literacy and university education, TV and mass media. And so it was tweaked.
