n Anthony Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage, two MPs are standing in the corner of one of the lobbies of the House of Commons, plotting. It is, wrote the great chronicler of Victorian England, “on the first of those days of awful interest, in which the Queen was sending for one crack statesman after another”.

There is a log-jam. Parliament does not like the look of any of the characters attempting to form a government, which means that the lifespan of an administration is measured in weeks not years. Surveying this constitutional carnage, Harold Smith MP says to Green Walker MP: “I really do not see how the Queen’s government is to be carried on.”

With the craziest general election for generations in prospect, it looks as though this May we could hear a modern version of the Victorian refrain: how is the Queen’s government to be carried on? What, exactly, happens if neither the Tories nor Labour can get an overall majority in the Commons by reaching the threshold of 326 seats?

This time, if it is a hung parliament, there is a plan laid out in the Cabinet Manual first drafted before the 2010 election by Lord O’Donnell, formerly the country’s top civil servant (as Sir Gus). It includes a chapter designed to guide party leaders and officials on what should happen after an inconclusive election.

In essence, the prime minister stays in office until he or his opponent can do a deal with one or more of the smaller parties, such as the remnants of the Lib Dems, the Ulster Unionists and even the SNP.

Resolving this could take several weeks, with senior civil servants now telling their staff privately that there will be no need for Parliament to meet until there is a deal done.

It is easy to see this in terms of mandarins wanting to appropriate power and control the process, but that is not entirely fair. Senior civil servants are conditioned to serve the administration of the day, and their primary interest at moments of potential crisis is in keeping the show on the road. This is an admirable instinct.

But while the idea of MPs not meeting until there is a deal in place might sound like a neat technocratic solution, there is a big problem. What is in danger of being forgotten in all this is Parliament, and principally the Commons, to which in May the voters will have just sent their representatives.

It would be deplorable if the party leaders and their aides spent weeks behind closed doors trading who knows what – the UK’s nuclear deterrent, Scotland, an EU referendum – without rigorous parliamentary scrutiny every few days.

Throughout, the Prime Minister should be available to report to the Commons – not just to the media – on the status of talks or matters arising. That could run from market jitters over the negotiations to a crisis facing Nato on the Russian border.

Otherwise, the danger is that there will be a rerun of what happened in 2010, or worse. Then, the relative unfamiliarity of a hung parliament gave the party leaders too much scope.

In 2010, Tory MPs were too busy being astonished that Mr Cameron had failed to beat Gordon Brown outright after the worst financial crisis in 70 years. With great agility, and brass neck, Mr Cameron and George Osborne exploited the confusion to construct a deal. That shortage of early scrutiny is how the nonsense of the five-year, fixed-term parliament act got through, when Mr Osborne said to the Lib Dems that he wanted five years rather than four.

The entire coalition package was then presented on a take-it-orleave-it basis to Parliament, where it was made clear to Tory MPs that anyone daring to raise objections to acts of constitutional vandalism would be in breach of that bogus concept: “the national interest”.

Thankfully, a group of MPs has started to agitate on these very questions. Graham Allen, the Labour MP for Nottingham North and chairman of the Constitutional Reform Committee, made an important intervention last week when he called for the Commons to meet on Saturday May 9, two days after the election. Otherwise, as Mr Allen put it, there is a danger of a “stitch-up between the party leaders”.

Of course, it remains possible that there will be no need for talks. Once Easter is over, the nervous Tory high command’s expectation is that voters will tune into the campaign and make a decisive decision. In this scenario, the paths of the two deadlocked main parties diverge in the final days or hours, leading the Tories to surge to a share of the vote somewhere above 36 per cent. Then Labour falls back to 30 per cent and before you know it Ed Miliband will be an ex-Labour leader teaching a course at Harvard on political leadership.

However, if the Tories do not get such a decisive break, and if neither Mr Miliband or David Cameron can win outright, Britain is destined for a hung parliament and coalition negotiations. If that happens, MPs should head for Westminster and march through the doors of the Commons.

This would at least demonstrate to voters that the Commons they have just elected matters. Indeed, surely one of the reasons that MPs more broadly have come to be mistrusted is that they are perceived as being too meek when it comes to sticking up for the voters and their Parliament. Perhaps this is because in recent decades MPs have given away considerable amounts of power, to the EU, devolved parliaments and quangos; or perhaps it is because too many MPs, bullied by the whips, do not care to defend Parliament against the Executive.

The New Labour view was that this worrying about the rights of Parliament is outmoded Victorian nonsense. Yet look where a casual approach to constitutional proprieties has landed the UK. A poorly designed devolution settlement has resulted in a Nationalist government in Scotland and an SNP surge that is rapidly accelerating the decline of the traditional party system and threatening the Union.

In that context, if chaos is to be the new normal, with more coalitions and cross-party deals, then of course the Civil Service is right that the Queen’s government should be carried on calmly throughout negotiations and even into a second election. But the men and women we send to Westminster should not be passive spectators waiting to hear what has been decided by the elite. They should be right in there, scrutinising the machinations of their leaders. Ultimately, the Commons should be in charge.