Making sense of the week which was

26th April 2026 What, if anything, is the constitutional and legal significance of the fall-out from the Starmer-Robbins matter? * From a political perspective this last week or so in the United Kingdom has certainly been exciting and dramatic. As set out in the last post here, we have a Prime Minister making a succession of bad decisions, and blaming and sacking others for those decisions. In particular, we have a Prime Minister who speaks often about process sacking a senior foreign office official without any process whatsoever. And as I have described at Prospect, that sacking by a Prime Minister who demands of the civil service that things are ‘delivered’ was of an official who worked out a way of ‘delivering’ the appointment of an Ambassador which the Prime Minister, against cabinet secretary advice, had publicly announced prematurely. This is all a fascinating political spectacle. * But. So what? What is the legal or constitutional significance of what has happened – and what…