Alan Rusbridger: So I suppose a useful starting point is to say that the Johnson government really made the case for a written constitution. If Boris Johnson hasn’t, then nothing will.
Jonathan Sumption: I don’t dispute that politicians have been behaving badly, and the more senior the politicians, the worse they’ve been behaving. I just don’t think that a written constitution is a solution. The British constitution undoubtedly depends to a high degree on conventional standards of behaviour, which have been broken in the past couple of years. But all constitutions, even the most formal, have that in common.
It is very striking that the two countries in which confidence in politics has declined most spectacularly in the last decade are this country and the United States. We have a wholly political constitution, while the US is the extreme example of a formal constitution, judicially supervised. Did…
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