Article I
The puzzle it answers
After thirteen years of Conservative government Britain ended up less conservative, and further left, than when the Tories walked in. People voted again and again to cut immigration. It rose. They wanted the boats stopped, cheaper energy, prisons that work, houses built. None of it arrived.
The lazy answers blame weak leaders, immigration or idleness. Starkey's answer is that the machine was rebuilt so the elected government is no longer the thing that governs. Everything else follows from that.
Article II
The inversion
Britain's old settlement was a political constitution. Parliament was sovereign, ministers answered to the Commons, the Commons answered to voters. Hard questions got settled by politics, which meant they could be argued over, traded off, weighed against a budget and reversed at the next election.
New Labour swapped it for a legal constitution. Questions that used to be political were handed to judges, tribunals and arm's-length bodies.
Once a question becomes law rather than politics it leaves the voters, it stops respecting a budget and it becomes very hard to reverse.
Article III
The load-bearing reforms
Starkey does not treat this as vague drift. He names the pieces. The Human Rights Act 1998, which folded the European Convention into domestic law and turned the courts into a de facto constitutional court. The Equality Act 2010 and its Public Sector Equality Duty. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which built a Supreme Court he says cannot sit with a sovereign Parliament. The steady expansion of judicial review. And the quango state, roughly four hundred bodies spending a large share of public money with little democratic check.
Devolution and the net-zero target belong on the same list. Rolled together, he calls it, borrowing Tony Sewell's phrase, an alien body of law grafted onto a system that takes words literally, which is why it does so much damage here.
Article IV
Why law cannot do the job politics did
This is the analytical core, and it is not an argument against rights. It is an argument that law is the wrong instrument for two specific tasks.
First, balancing an individual right against public safety. The senior law lord Tom Bingham said openly that human rights law is counter-majoritarian, built to protect minorities against the majority. Starkey's point is that this is fine as a description and ruinous as a system, because the presumption then runs permanently against the state's power to detain, deport or protect.
Second, spending money. A court does not see a budget. Rule that a child has a right to a given provision and there is no line in the judgment for what it leaves everyone else. Only politics can say "this much and no more," because only politics has to own the trade-off.
Article V
By their fruits
Starkey argues the diagnosis is confirmed by a consistent run of outcomes, all bad, all traceable to the same cause. Immigration and asylum that no government can control because removals drown in legal challenge. A two-tier feeling in justice that is embedded in law rather than down to one activist chief constable. Councils bankrupted by equal-pay rulings that treat the market rate as no defence. Infrastructure priced into paralysis. Economic stasis and a real risk of a debt reckoning. An army hollowed out and then subjected to lawfare while, he argues, the terrorists it fought walk free.
The thread tying them together: whatever the government tries, the same legal and expert machine turns the attempt into a worse result. He calls it being chained to a wheel.
See these claims tested against the data →
Article VI
The cultural front
The constitutional case has a cultural twin. Fifty years, he says, of a country taught to be ashamed of its own history cannot defend or govern itself with confidence. Mass migration on the Blair model dissolved a social fabric he remembers as unusually high-trust. This is the most contested half of the thesis, and the objections address it squarely.
He pairs it with a charge that the modern left believes words can overrule reality, gender over biology, benign labels smuggling in divisive policy and reaches for Orwell's Newspeak to name it.
Article VII
The long view
Here the Tudor historian does the work no pundit can. England, on his reading, built its liberty from the bottom up over centuries: a "crowned republic" of Crown constrained by law and consent, grounded in precedent rather than abstract reason. He sets the organic English model against the deductive Continental one, and argues the American Revolution succeeded precisely because it conserved the British constitution under new names, while the French tried to remake everything and produced the Terror.
The present crisis he rates with the reigns of Charles I and James II, a state turned against its nation, and he promises a future reckoning that will name its "guilty men."
Article VIII
The remedy: repeal, then restore
The answer is emphatically not revolution. Starkey's own rule: every revolution reproduces the worst features of the regime it overthrows. So the first and non-negotiable step is the Great Repeal, undoing the Blair-Brown settlement, repealing the Human Rights Act, leaving the Convention, gutting the Equality Act, unwinding the quango state. Cut the fetters before you try to walk.
Then restoration: reconnect with the older constitutional tradition and put politics back on top, with experts on tap and not on top. The missing ingredient, he says, is a leader who can explain all of this to the public, a Thatcher or a Churchill for the moment.
See the repeal turned into an actual plan →