Constitutionally Incapable

Since the Opposition cannot be relied upon to lose the next general election, the Glorious Successor has abruptly discovered electoral reform. The Glorious Successor, being a consensus politician whose ideal of policy-making is an acrimonious compromise between inaction and abjection, has taken a number of radical steps to ensure that - as with the private finance initiative, bankers' bonuses and the pay gap - there will be as little unpleasantness as possible for the people who really matter. Essentially, the Glorious Successor has dusted off the Jenkins report, which his predecessor commissioned and then decided that the present system was serving him quite well enough thank you, and has discovered something called the Alternative Vote system. The Glorious Successor plans to order the forthcoming Daveybloke administration to hold a referendum offering the public a choice between the present first past the post system and the Alternative Vote, which "offers little prospect of a move towards greater proportionality and in certain circumstances it has even less proportionality than first past the post" - clearly an ideal choice for any prime minister who offers little prospect of a move away from Blairism and in most circumstances has even less interest in what the public wants. The Glorious Successor has added a whiff of his own unique contribution to the history of statesmanship, the Vision of Britishness, whereby things are done not because they are a good idea but because the year ends in a particular digit which has some mythological significance in our glorious history. Thus the Glorious Successor would like us to have a written constitution by 2015, not because this constitutes a realistic timetable for the adoption of such a thing, but because that year will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of a noted assertion of aristocratic rights. Conveniently for the Glorious Successor and other people who really matter, the year 2015 will also probably mark either the end of the first Daveybloke administration to be first past the post, or the start of the second.