See how they run

When Parliament goes rogue, one must prorogue. It is very popular with the man in the street and only the political bubble has gone into meltdown. For all the storm-cloud warnings over threat to suspend Parliament, in fact it is losing only four sitting days (which Diane Abbott would tell you is almost two months). It is not exactly the Reichstag fire.

Possibly the outrage had been written in advance in the expectation of MPs being sent home for the rest of the year. That has not happened.

The Twitterstorms and inevitable ePetition filled by earnest LibDems, Momentum and their botnets are in overdrive.

The blue benches’ main Rebel Without a Clue has been spluttering in terms where I fear for his health, raving of unconstitutional action, to describe the prorogation procedure which is used every year to end a Parliamentary session: extending the session to nearly three years may have been unconstitutional, but finally ending the resulting zombie session cannot be.

We are assured by the angry folk that it is undemocratic to give MPs another four days off, but not undemocratic to stand for election on one manifesto promise and then use every parliamentary tactic and more to oppose that promise. It is unconstitutional finally to bring in the annual prorogation, but not unconstitutional for the House of Commons to usurp the executive.

Master Hobbes will be republishing here his vital definitions from the First Book of Leviathan (which we must be careful not to call his ‘metaphysics’) but we need a modern political dictionary, which I could begin with:

Unconstitutional: Resulting in something with which the commentator disagrees;
Undemocratic: ditto.