The Prerogative

An ageing King, four years into a reign he knows will be brief: an intermission between his mother and his son. A Prime Minister who is the first Labour leader in more than a generation, returned on the lowest turnout since universal suffrage and elected more on who he wasn't than on anything he was. A political system in which even a vote of no confidence cannot dislodge the deadlock.And behind the doors of Buckingham Palace, an intellectual King who has spent fifty years reading the country's constitutional thinkers - Bagehot, Burke, Dicey - and concluded that the arrangement he was born to defend has stopped working.The Prerogative asks what happens when the man who is meant to do nothing - the monarch who is supposed only to consult, encourage, and warn - decides to do something.It is a novel about Britain's largest constitutional crisis in three hundred years. It is also a novel about democracy and the purpose of both the means and the outcomes of government.