Tories are Oliver’s army in disguise

Cam’s law could allow Jez to walk into No10 with no poll

Wannabe PMs Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab claim they can deliver a No Deal Brexit by October. Rival Matt Hancock insists Parliament won’t wear it.

That pitches the nation towards the biggest constitutional crisis since Oliver Cromwell took a swing at the King’s head. And I don’t mean a punch-up in a pub.

Our constitution is like eating in a restaurant with no menus. You have to trust the waiter is a good chap to bring the right food.

That’s how our constitution works. What historian Peter Hennessy calls the “Good Chap Principle.” As it’s not written down no one knows quite what it serves up.

Even the Queen says it’s a puzzle. So we blithely trust our leaders to be sound chaps and chapesses in interpreting it.

Now bozos like Johnson and Raab are threatening to throw the constitutional baby out with the Brexit bathwater.

MPs voted against No Deal and will do so again. Raab proposes to ignore that, close Parliament, and go ahead anyway. This should

perplex even Brexiteers. They say they voted leave to get our sovereignty back. Nigel Farage must have said it a thousand times.

But this questions where sovereignty sits.

Is it with the British Parliament? Or the British Government?

If it’s with the Government and not our elected representatives, that takes us a step closer to dictatorship.

Both Tony Blair and David Cameron failed to appreciate the historic significance of an evolved constitution, and played fast and loose with it for short-term gain. Blair offered Scotland and Wales devolution in 1997 to win votes, without clocking Scotland could be lost in an independence referendum.

Cameron’s wheeze was the Fixedterm Parliaments Act to convince Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems he was serious about coalition.

In theory it meant elections could only happen every five years. In practice it did no such thing as Theresa May showed by holding the 2017 poll two years after the previous one.

But the new rules put a spanner in the workings of Commons confidence votes. Before the Fixedterm Parliaments Act, a PM who lost one called a general election.

Now, if the next Tory PM goes under and Jeremy Corbyn wins a confidence motion of his own, the Labour leader could walk into No10 without holding an election at all.

This means the writing is on the wall for the unwritten constitution and there’s talk of replacing it with a written one.

Given the pig’s ear our current crop of politicos have made of Brexit, they are clearly not up to that kind of challenge.

And I can confirm that in writing.

BOZO Raab