Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick’s new book, Could it Happen Here?, is a wake-up call to those who care about the health of British democracy. National complacency about our constitutional and democratic system needs to give way, they argue, to clear-eyed reflection on its weaknesses and what might be done to address them.
Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick have written a timely book, Could it Happen Here? (Haus Publishing, 2025), exploring the extent to which the UK’s constitutional arrangements would be capable of withstanding an authoritarian onslaught. In a review that I wrote for the Telegraph (the title of which I did not choose), I summarised Hennessy and Blick’s inquiry in the following way
No great leap of imagination is needed to envision the authoritarian leader of a western democracy who refuses to accept an adverse election result and tries to cling to power. It has happened elsewhere: could it happen in Britain? That question lies at the heart of Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick’s concise, intriguing book, Could It Happen Here? … [T]hey explore a scenario involving a hypothetical Prime Minister who refuses to resign when confronted with a hung Parliament in which other parties, via a coalition or otherwise, could form a government.
Were such a situation ever to arise in the UK, it would, needless to say, amount to a full-frontal assault on the democratic process. But is a scenario of this nature really worth worrying about? In the prologue to their book, Hennessy and Blick address precisely that question in the following way:
We have no wish to cause alarm. We are not devotees of the ‘what if ?’ school of history. We can scarcely believe we are trailing these thoughts and possibilities in the pages to come. Until the summer of 2024, it simply would not have occurred to us to do so. But, with the significant surge of the hard Right in Western Europe, more than a flicker of it in the British election debate of June to July 2024, plus the still vivid memory of how easy it proved for some of the conventions and decencies of political behaviour to be swept aside during the Johnson years in No. 10 (which we discussed in an earlier treatment, The Bonfire of the Decencies), there lurks in the British political air a tang of unease.
That prologue is dated November 2024, since when, of course, much has happened to remind us that respect for basic constitutional principle in developed liberal democracies cannot be taken for granted. Having made the case for considering the central question with which the book is concerned, it proceeds in three parts. In the first, entitled ‘The Limpet Prime Minister’, the authors flesh out the scenario: one in which a government (most likely a hard-right one) loses a general election yielding a hung Parliament in which a vote on the King’s Speech is lost, in circumstances that suggest other parties could form a coalition or that a single party could form a minority government on a confidence-and-supply basis. In Hennessy and Blick’s scenario, however, the Prime Minister, having lost their majority at the election, refuses to resign, in clear breach of relevant constitutional conventions regarding government formation and change in the aftermath of a general election. The remainder of the book is devoted to considering what could be done in such circumstances, as well as to conducting a broader constitutional health check that notes the extraordinary pressure placed upon the constitution during the period beginning with the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and culminating in the premiership of Boris Johnson — ‘a one-man stress test for the British constitution’ whose effect on the constitution the authors liken to ‘letting a JCB loose in an area of outstanding natural beauty’.
The conclusions that Hennessy and Blick reach are gloomy — although their pessimism is arguably well-placed. Short of the nuclear option of the King dismissing a ‘limpet Prime Minister’ — a step that, the authors note, would be fraught with risk for the monarch — they are concerned that the constitution would be ill-equipped to deal with the crisis scenario the book addresses. More generally, they are worried that the last decade — which, among other things, has witnessed an increasingly politicised approach to the civil service, the ‘demeaning’ of public institutions, from the judiciary to the BBC, a limited commitment to the rule of law and the ‘reckless’ use of executive power that reached its nadir with the unlawful prorogation of Parliament in 2019 — demonstrates ‘there are weaknesses in our system’, ‘people ready to exploit them’ and ‘ideas that might drive them to do so’. They call for ‘a long, hard look at the state of our defences against potential authoritarianism’, arguing for ‘the creation of a committee of Privy Counsellors to examine the long-term resilience, preservation and protection of British parliamentary democracy’. Such a group, suggest Hennessy and Blick, should seek to define the essential preconditions for the maintenance of democracy, assess the key potential threats, and identify how such threats can most effectively be managed in a way that would be consistent with the fundamental values underpinning our system of constitutional democracy.
During the course of their analysis, Hennessy and Blick point out that:
The constitutional slice of a nation’s culture is critical to the maintenance and transmission of core values, which is why Britain’s lack of a written document makes the task of transmission from one generation to the next so taxing and crucial.
That is surely right, shared understandings, mutual respect and a commitment to uncodified, legally unenforceable standards being axiomatic to the operation of the UK’s constitutional system. And this, in turn, and underlines why, in some respects, that system may be particularly vulnerable to risks of the type with which the authors are concerned, and why the authors are therefore correct to sound the alarm. This is not, by any means, to reduce matters to a binary distinction between codified and uncodified constitutions, or to suggest that the former are resilient and that the latter are not. Indeed, history, as well as current events, demonstrate the falsity of any such analysis. Crucially, however, complacency must be avoided, particularly in circumstances, and at a time, when relying on ‘good chaps’ to do the right thing is implies abject credulousness.
As the authors say, this is ‘not a time for claims that “it’ll be alright on the night”‘ or for allowing ‘insouciance and inadvertence on the part of the many’ to the facilitate the realisation of ‘malign intent on the part of a few’. Their thesis is not that ‘it’ will happen here, whether ‘it’ is the phenomenon of the ‘limpet Prime Minister’ or the broader phenomenon of constitutional vandalism wrought by the forces of authoritarianism. But it would be perilous to dismiss out of hand their conclusion that ‘[i]t could happen here’. The key challenge, therefore, is to ensure that democracy in the UK, and the wider constitutional culture that facilitates and supports it, remains in rude health — an endeavour that will be more likely to succeed if we acknowledge that our constitutional system has particular vulnerabilities (as well as strengths), and if we recognise that assuming the UK to be immune from the present global turn to authoritarianism amounts to British exceptionalism of the worst, most naive form.
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