There are two theories of British exceptionalism which we tell to reassure ourselves that this could never happen. Call one the Good Chap Theory and the other the Cable Street warm bath.
The Good Chap Theory was coined by Professor Peter Hennessey, himself the ultimate good chap, who has spent his life writing about how power is wielded in a country which has (unlike the US) no written constitution—nothing on paper—but which nonetheless muddles through. So taken with this notion is he that he called his collection of essays on the subject Muddling Through.
The Good Chap Theory is the idea that the letter of the rules is less important than the system being run by players who understand their spirit. It was a theory which sort of muddled through until tested to breaking point by Boris Johnson (aided by his sidekick Dominic Cummings) and then by Liz Truss, who got muddled and was rather quickly dispensed with.
The Cable Street warm bath is the one that basks in the fundamental moderation and decency of the British people. In the mid-30s, when fascism was on the rise throughout Europe, we Brits wanted nothing to do with it. Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts may have marched through Stepney in 1936—but they were met with honest working-class folk who gave them a thrashing.
Put these two fables together and we can amuse ourselves with the wild melodrama currently playing out in Washington DC and comfort ourselves that, to borrow the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 dystopian novel, “it can’t happen here”.
I’m not so sure. You can be reasonably sure that there are a bunch of bright twenty-somethings in Tufton Street—the HQ of shadowy well-funded right-wing thinktanks—watching every move in Maga-land and plotting exactly how they could transplant it.
We know Elon Musk has developed a keen interest in British politics and might gladly fund Nigel Farage/Richard Tice/Tommy Robinson (delete as appropriate) to have a go at wreaking the same kind of chaos in London as he has in Washington. Blow the whole thing up and start again.
Or you could read the lip-smacking X posts of the British Right’s philosopher-in-chief, Matthew Goodwin, in the hour of Trump’s inauguration. He asked his followers to imagine Day 1 of an equivalent regime in the UK: “A national border emergency is declared; the military is sent to stop the boats; all constraints on North Sea gas and oil are removed; shut down woke ideology; immediately end DEI; establish a new department of government efficiency”. Sound familiar?
How hard would it be?
Coups generally start with capturing the media. Quite a large chunk of ours wouldn’t need much capturing: they’re practically there already. The BBC wouldn’t be a hard nut to crack. Sack the chair (there’s precedent) and get them to sack the director general (ditto). Abolish the licence fee and say the organisation must in future stand on its own two feet. They’d soon fall into line.
You’d need your own version of Fox News: welcome GB News! Do we still need Ofcom to regulate fairness and impartiality? Thought not.
But don’t stop there. Ask every regulator to resign and replace them with loyalists. This would require dealing with the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Happily this office, set up by the Nolan Committee to straighten out public life in 1995, has never been on a statutory footing. So abolishing it would be the work of a moment—done by an Order in Council.
An Order in Council, if you haven’t been paying attention, is a form of legislation supposedly made by the monarch on the advice of the Privy Council. They are similar to the Henry VIII clauses which allow ministers to change primary legislation without the bother of parliamentary scrutiny.
You mocked as you saw Donald Trump sign all those executive orders without bothering Congress? Same idea. God bless Henry VIII.
Assuming there’s a comfortable majority in the Commons, and that MPs would be as loyal/intimidated as Maga representatives seem to be, there would be little problem with parliament nodding anything through. And anyway there is a modern trend of passing so-called skeleton bills which merely set out broad principles of a new policy without providing detailed specifics. That’s fleshed out by Henry VIII’s clauses.
In 1929, Gordon Hewart, the lord chief justice, published a book called The New Despotism, which he defined as "to subordinate parliament, to evade the Courts, and to render the will, or the caprice, of the Executive unfettered and supreme". And here we are, nearly 100 years later.
The House of Lords as a restraint? Again, perhaps you haven’t been paying attention. Time to scrap the feeble House of Lords Appointments Commission. Permanent secretaries? Did you not notice how easily Liz Truss sacked the redoubtable Tom Scholar (pay-off £335k); or how the Home Office top bod Sir Philip Rutnam walked out after suffering a “vicious and orchestrated campaign” against him once Priti Patel showed up (pay-off £340k)?
But we have apolitical judges, don’t we? They would surely be our last bastion. Well, yes and no. Perhaps you’ve noticed the campaign to undermine the Supreme Court? Or the nagging obsession with figures on the right to scrap the Human Rights Act 1998, curb judicial review and quit the European Court on Human Rights?
Right-wing academics writing for right-wing thinktanks have begun to roll the pitch to legislate to increase ministerial involvement in judicial appointments. Richard Ekins, an Oxford professor who heads Policy Exchange’s “Judicial Power Project” wants ministers to be able to reject candidates “where there are doubts about their suitability.” Just imagine where that leads!
But surely we have a system involving the Judicial Appointments Commission, created in 2006, which just appoints judges on merit—and that’s better than the American system under which a president can effectively pack the Supreme Court with people who see the world the same way he does? Well, what makes you think our UK Trump tribute act wouldn’t propose legislation to scrap our system and replaced it with a more malleable one?
Perhaps a new broom would restore the powers to create judges to the lord chancellor? And then you remember that our recent lord chancellors included Liz Truss and Chris Grayling.
One constitutional expert I consulted admitted all this could happen, while reflecting that, in the past, “embarrassment was an important factor.” But that’s when the Good Chaps Theory reigned. Does Nigel Farage strike you as easily embarrassed?
Now, as my Whitehall mole mournfully put it, it’s “Sod the System”.
So, yes, it could happen here. We’d need solid stone defences. And we don’t even have paper.
