What is political deference? Is there any point today in trying to retrieve a type of political respect specific to the Anglo-British constitution which has been discarded as analytically worthless and politically broken since the 1970s? The aim of this lecture is to look at this slippery concept, retrace its genealogy back to Walter Bagehot in the mid-Victorian period and retrieve its value for the present UK system of government at a time when its vulnerability has been exposed by the Johnson years. The ultimate question is how to retain some form of the older positive idea of deference — an ethics of deference — while adapting it to a new political landscape in which British constitutional principles have been compromised.
