Presented by Professor Emeritus Patrick Weller AO and Ben Taylor.

Britain has long been governed by conventions, by understandings of how affairs should be run that have moral but no legal force. Many of those understandings have been trashed in the last three years.

Self-restraint, once described as a key element in the British polity, has been discarded.

This presentation examines what has happened and why it matters for the future governing of Britain.

Patrick Weller is emeritus professor at Griffith University. He was professor of politics there from 1984 to 2015. He has written extensively on Australian politics and executive government. The most recent book is The Prime Ministers’ Craft ( Oxford University Press, 2018). It was nominated as Times Higher Education’s “Book of the Week” in August 2018.

Interview conducted by Ben Taylor.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.