would be Quinault’s view, but it does not ring true of William Gladstone, Lord Salisbury and Ramsay MacDonald. Almost all these prime ministers were capable of reflecting on what they were about; and if Lloyd George and Blair chose not to do so, that is a measure less of their capacity than of their temperament.

The Victorians in particular would have found constitutional debate part and parcel of their political lives. If they were nervous about democracy, it was because they paid attention to what was happening abroad and especially to the revolutions in France. They flourished in what has been well described as a “time of foreboding” and were well aware of dangers of democracy identified by James Mill and his contemporary critic, Fitzjames Stephen, by W.E.H. Lecky and by Gladstone’s friend, Lord Acton. Sir Henry Maine gave powerful voice to those fears in his Popular Government. There was a common concern that the demos would prove more tyrannical than any absolute ruler and too greedy for its own good. Social cohesion rested on holding a balance between the classes. One man, one vote, might destroy that balance. There was a fear too of “wirepullers”, demagogues who could whip up popular passions for their own end with little heed as to what might follow.

Quinault is prepared to discuss these fears in the context of the thinking, for example, of Gladstone and Salisbury, but he fails to relate them to a debate which shaped both the architecture of the modern British state and the model of democracy that is all-­pervasive in Britain’s political culture. He chooses not to define democracy, seeing it simply as work in progress. It is possible to guess from some of his incidental judgements that proportional representation looms large in what he thinks it ought to involve. Not one of the prime ministers under study would have agreed, but rather than take their arguments seriously, Quinault brushes them aside as the almost inevitable consequence of their political opportunism. That is at best a partial truth.

All have in common what has been misleadingly described as the Tory view of the constitution. This identifies a bipolar structure of authority, a monarchical element, initiating, directing, energising, which is located now in prime minister and Cabinet, and a checking, criticising element, once to be found simply in Parliament, but now finding wider expression. Over the last two centuries, our political leadership has managed to preserve the monarchical element and to ensure that democratic elements of the constitution have grown within the existing framework of authority and accommodated themselves to it. This does not look to be chance.

Concepts of parliamentary government and representative democracy have been used by leaders like Stanley Baldwin to shape Britain’s political culture: it could even be argued that he was the architect of what might be termed Britain’s “electoral democracy”, a system in which the leadership is chosen by the people but in which its freedom to act is tempered only by the need to secure re-election.

Quinault’s conclusion, that Britain’s democracy remains a “work in progress”, seems, therefore, deeply flawed. As he acknowledges, modern British politicians and their electorate have shown scant enthusiasm for constitutional debate, let alone change. Europe or,  less likely, devolution, might yet prove ­catalysts for that to alter, but whether that happens or not, Salisbury, Baldwin and their Labour counterparts merit further study as architects of what has proved a highly resilient political system.