ABSTRACT
When, in 1989, Lady Ewart-Biggs wrote to Margaret Thatcher on behalf of Charter 88, the campaign for constitutional reform, soliciting support for measures designed to strengthen the citizen against the state, the response from the then Prime Minister was as predictable as it was untroubled. The government consider’, she wrote, ‘that our present constitutional arrangements continue to serve us well.’ The identity of ‘us’ remained elusive. Certainly it continued to serve governments and ministers well, investing them with a massive concentration of power and protecting them from effective discipline in their use of it. It was not so clear, except to those like Mrs Thatcher, that this kind of system continued to serve the rest of us very well.
