Broken politics: pack up rotten Westminster and relocate it north

It has been widely noted that those who come into association with Boris Johnson do not do well out of it. Wives, lovers, proprietors, Prime Ministers, colleagues, Westminster underlings, civil servants and advisors all emerge from proximity to the great man somehow diminished, sometimes short-changed, compromised or even discredited, while he continues to rise. This may explain why, by his own admission, the Prime Minister has few actual friends. 

Boris Johnson is no social neutron bomb. He does not just destroy people; his progress shakes institutions to their foundations as well. The rule of law, the sovereignty of parliament, the integrity of the civil service, the probity of the police, the Union, the BBC, even the church have all been splattered by his muddy wake.

Sometimes this is funny, just what people expect of “Good Old Boris” and his disrespect for norms. But let us not dwell on the Johnson drama, it will play out soon enough. 

This week, next month, in May, by the end of the year, at the General Election, he’ll be gone. We already have his legacy of misrule, although not all Tories are as gloomy as one well-connected businessman, who sighed, “it really doesn’t matter about Boris, we’ve lost the next election anyway.” 

We are left with shredded national institutions in a dysfunctional state. In all our interests, the United Kingdom’s priority must be to see whether and how things can reasonably be put back together again. 

Some have already lost heart. The great constitutionalist Peter Hennessy has had his faith in “the good chap theory of government” crushed by Johnson. “He hasn’t got a single feel for either proper behaviour, proper procedure, not a single nerve end,” he told Prospect recently. Lord Hennessy, who has long championed Britain’s unwritten constitution, now thinks some basic constraints on governmental behaviour need to be written into law. 

The historian Linda Colley makes a similar case for the need for cast-iron constitutional constraints to curb unfettered Prime Ministerial power because; “Since Margaret Thatcher, prime ministers have become more presidential in style and behaviour, guarded by special advisers, not just civil servants. This matters all the more because the UK’s constitutional conventions and statute laws have comparatively little to say about constraints on executive power.”

The problem with written constitutions is who writes them. A famous statue of the slave-owning founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was removed last year from New York City’s council chamber after some members said it made them feel uncomfortable. 

Jefferson was the main author of the Declaration of Independence but was absent as emissary to France when the Constitution was framed. In modern times re-writing the rules is more often undertaken by authoritarians than by heroes of the enlightenment. 

Alarmingly they attempt the direct opposite to enshrining the inalienable right of all citizens to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Instead, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Victor Orban, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan have all overseen constitutional adjustments to take such things away and bolster their power over others.

Here the Leader of the House accepts that “we have moved, for better or worse, to an essentially presidential system,” but Jacob Rees-Mogg goes on to use this argument to undermine the legitimacy of MPs, in his party and the Commons as a whole, to challenge the incumbent prime minister. 

If Boris Johnson is deposed, Mogg threatens, there should be a general election with all the instability that would bring.

This insidious and high-handed assertion overlooks the fact that the last five Conservative Prime Ministers have each been involved in a handover of leadership in Westminster without going to the country immediately: 1990 Thatcher/Major, 2016 Cameron/May, 2019 May/Johnson. 

Meanwhile, the most senior law officers, Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman are busying themselves with proposals to take away citizens’ rights by abandoning the European Convention. Are these the kind of people any sane person would want anywhere near drafting a written British constitution? 

There could be a simpler way to refresh and rebalance the nation’s deteriorating political health without letting the lawyers, politicians and academics loose on what vestiges of protection from an overmighty government we still have. 

“Not fit for purpose” has become a cliché of political discourse. It was first put into common coinage by John Reid, announcing his plan to split the Home Office. Home Secretaries have a habit of bequeathing phrases; we owe “draconian powers” to Roy Jenkins. 

Whoever is to blame for the wording, there is little doubt that Parliament and the Downing Street complex are no fit for purpose for the exercise of modern legislative and executive power. 

The magnificent Palace of Westminster is crumbling and rat-infested. MPs are dithering over multi-billion pound plans to decant the government into temporary premises nearby while it is simultaneously restored to its former glory and made fit for contemporary insulation and IT cables. The whole Partygate scandal has been blamed on the Prime Minister’s office being his home as well, with hundreds of people crammed into a stuffy and unsanitary warren of rooms. 

Westminster should be left to the tourists and the cycle lanes. A new centre of government should be built away from London – further West and further North – most likely in the West Midlands. This would be a dramatic shake-up for the practice of British government, and for the preconceptions about it which lead so many to condemn the alleged London-centric attitudes of the “Westminster bubble”. 

The new town would contain decent modern state-funded accommodation for the Prime Minister and parliamentarians; no need for Lulu Lyttle, rich donors and expenses. If the workers in ministries and government agencies must be sent out of the capital, the same should surely apply to the politicians who sent them there.

This type of movement of an administrative capital has often been carried out around the world, from Abuja to Washington DC. Ankara, Brasilia and Canberra start the alphabet of more than thirty such shifts. The great cities left behind have not suffered, but the impression has been dispelled that an elite of the rich and powerful are huddled together conspiring against everyone else out in the provinces.

The need to travel and the simple accommodation offered would probably shake out the House of Lords, leading to its replacement by a more democratic and representative chamber of administrators. MPs might even be inspired to consider electoral reform again of their own chamber. 

This country does not have a great record for carrying out grand projects. 

The move would be a learning experience and at significant expense to the taxpayer. It would also create new jobs and homes and be a major step in the levelling up of the regions. 

A Midlands site would give some point to HS2 high speed railway and to Unite the Union’s hotel development. Above all, this big move would bring down the final curtain on nasty Whitehall farces at a time when few are still laughing at them.