It does not seem right that these boys have got off scot-free without even being identified while this teacher

“It does not seem right that these boys have got off scot-free, without even being identified, while this teacher, innocent of all charges, has had her name dragged through the mud,” he said last week. Contrast that with the experience of Rowena Jones, a student at Exeter University who appeared in court last month after making a false allegation of rape Ms Jones, 21, is now serving a two-month prison sentence. I do not think we need look further for evidence of the discriminatory treatment handed out to women by the British judicial system. Some habits are just too hard to break.THE CHANCELLOR played Santa Claus last week, telling pensioners that they are to be given free TV licences when they reach the age of 75 – but not until next autumn.

I don’t know the mortality rate for that age group, but it might have occurred to some bright spark at the Treasury that nine months is a long time to wait when you are in your eighth decade. Unless it is a disguised health incentive aimed at encouraging the elderly to hang on until the coveted piece of paper drops through the letterbox?. Like an examination question that turns up every so often – say, about once every 10 years – the theory of presidential government is with us once again It has a long history. In the 1940s and 1950s there were several works saying that Parliament had lost power to what was called the executive.

By this the learned authors did not mean principally the Cabinet but individual ministers operating through civil servants, who made rules which were unscrutinised by Parliament but nevertheless had the force of law. The war years and the immediate post-war years were, we should remember, the golden age of the civil service in this country.
The charge was not that the prime minister had become a president but, rather, that Parliament, by which was meant the House of Commons, had surrendered its powers to civil servants – and that at the same time the ordinary courts of law had been compelled to relinquish their powers to administrative tribunals controlled by Whitehall.We had to wait until the early 1960s for the theory of parliamentary impotence to mesh with and reinforce the theory of presidential government. In 1962 the late John Mackintosh published his book on cabinet government. In it he revealed, with a wealth of contemporary and historical illustration, the existence of cabinet committees. They had, so Mackintosh informed us, assumed most of the functions formerly fulfilled by the Cabinet itself, and were effectively controlled by the prime minister of the day.At this time Richard Crossman (who has also gone to a better place) was commissioned by Fontana books to compose a new introduction to their forthcoming edition of Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution, first published in 1867. Bagehot had drawn a famous distinction between the dignified and the efficient parts of the constitution.

Thus, according to him, the monarchy was dignified, the Cabinet efficient.Crossman believed that any article – even quite a long article, such as his introduction was intended to be – should preferably contain one idea only. The more paradoxical, outrageous even, that idea was, the more arresting the article would be. (It is a journalistic policy that is followed today by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.) Mackintosh gave Crossman his big idea. As the Cabinet had replaced the Crown, so the prime minister had now replaced the Cabinet, which joined the Crown as one of the dignified parts of the constitution. He developed these ideas in his Godkin lectures delivered in 1970 at Harvard University: or, rather, Mackintosh developed them, for though the words were spoken by Crossman, they had been written largely by Mackintosh.Harold Wilson found the theory of presidential government entirely congenial. What could be more agreeable than to be described as a president? He had already implied a comparison between himself and J F Kennedy Now, after 1966, he had a majority of nearly 100. It was at this time, not in 1964, that he began to talk about Labour as “the natural party of government”.