"There has been plenty of preparatory work done for the populist who wishes to disregard procedural constraints, which are, in any case, weaker than we might like. This is the predicament explored in Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick’s comprehensive and quietly frightening new book Could It Happen Here?: The Day a Prime Minister Refuses To Resign. Hennessy and Blick’s imagined day of reckoning is a right-wing populist prime minister refusing to leave office after defeat at the polls. It triggers a revolution in fancy dress: “The Speaker refuses to take the Chair. They order the Clerks not to sit at the Table. The Mace is not carried into the Chamber.”

Hennessy and Blick show that the UK, the famously undocumented state, is guarded at a moment of crisis by nothing more than the “good chaps” theory that the people in power would act with integrity. But, in the event of a Farage victory, why would that assumption hold? Confronted with some bad chaps, the good chaps might fold one by one."
 

Philip Collins, Prospect