Commentaries

Extract

Let me start on a note of consensus, if not reconciliation. I am certain that we all agree that there would be no one else as well equipped to give the opening paper for this seminar as is Lindsay Curtis. He is well equipped by direct experience, by close knowledge, by personal commitment, and at the same time not least by an ability to stand back from the unfolding of a complicated bit of business and assess what has been going on. His paper is the ideal source of ideas, but in speaking to it I will be able to pursue only one or two.

As this is a seminar arranged by the Law School, it would only be appropriate to start with a text from WS Gilbert. In Act One of that understandably neglected work, “Utopia Limited”, there enters a character named Tarara who explains his constitutional function thus:

[B]y our Constitution we are governed by a Despot who, although in theory absolute — is, in practice, nothing of the kind — being watched day and night by two Wise Men whose duty it is, on his first lapse from political or social propriety, to denounce him to me, the Public Exploder, and it then becomes my duty to blow up His Majesty with dynamite ... and as some compensation to my wounded feelings, I reign in his stead.