This is a delightful book: delightful in the sense of interesting, provocative, stimulating, and informed. It is highly unlikely that most of its readers will agree with all the arguments presented, but this is beside the point. This is neither a textbook nor a complete consideration of all the key issues in British constitutional and administrative law. It has two main aims. The first is to provoke debate and stimulate a deeper concern for the present state of the Anglo-British, or, more specifically, English constitution. Its second aim is to articulate, as it were, directive principles for the reform of the English constitution consonant with a “radical republican public philosophy” (viii).

Ian Ward has a lot of targets, some of them more deservedly so than others, especially if one is concerned about the exercise of public power in reality rather than myth. These targets include the monarchy, the church of England (and more specifically its status as the established church), the Parliament, the government, and the judges. It is with regard to Parliament and the government that “the smell is foulest” (ix), he states, a phrase rapidly followed by the adjectives rotten and corrupt. (At times the steady stream of similar words and phrases distracts from or leads to an occasional overstatement of his argument, but perhaps that is what an unashamedly polemical treatise entails.)

There are five substantive chapters in this book. The first seeks to wrest the constitution from the influence of the Victorians Walter Bagehot and A. V. Dicey. The second, under the heading of the “Mask of Anarchy,” addresses the state of Parliament and government. The third, under the heading of “Renaissance” looks at judicial power. The fourth addresses the geopolitical or multilayered constitution as it evolves with regard to both the European Union and devolution. The fifth chapter, in search of an English constitution, articulates the values for England's new constitutionalism and a “new imagining” of its public philosophy (190).

This is a timely book for it goes beyond the present reactive and occasionally rather superficial debate engendered by New Labour's policies of constitutional reform. Since the election of Tony Blair in 1997, the following reforms have been introduced: devolution, the Human Rights Act (1998), (some) reform of the House of Lords, a very slowly implemented Freedom of Information Act, and (enactment pending) a Constitutional Reform Bill dealing, inter alia, with judicial independence and judicial appointments, the office of lord chancellor, and the creation of a Supreme Court.

All this reform, however, has been essentially ad hoc, piecemeal, and pragmatic. Indeed, further, given where the greatest amount of public power lies, namely, in the prime minister in and through the government (usually), it is significant, as Ward cogently explains, that no meaningful reforms have been introduced at all to address this imbalance of power. One of the most difficult points to justify, in the present United Kingdom constitution, is the amount of untrammeled power held by a British prime minister. The present prime minister, Tony Blair, heads a party that received only 43 percent of the votes cast in the 2001 general election and only 25 percent of the eligible votes.

It is against this background that Ward's book should be placed, although it clearly has merit too in its own right. He relentlessly and forcibly addresses the democratic flaws in the present constitution, whether as “reformed” since 1997 or not. Most of the issues he considers are not novel, nor does he claim that they are. Rather the novelty of the book lies in the tone of its treatment of those issues (certainly as far as constitutional lawyers are concerned, less so authors such as Tom Nairn) and in his push for a reimagining of a radical constitution. The book is well-sourced across the centuries, drawing on politics, law, history, and literature. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Shelley (whose claim that poets are the true “unacknowledged legislators of the world” is quoted by Ward [202]) are present with John Stuart Mill, Neil MacCormick, and Nairn; Bentham and Blackstone, S. T. Coleridge, David Cannadine, and Thomas Carlyle add to the rich eclectic mix particularly noticeable—and notable—in the final chapter. The citation of many leading public law cases and reference to a wide range of public law publications indicate, however, the rootedness of this book in more traditional sources. Ward's polemic draws on this latter evolving tradition, not least regarding his exposition on the rule of law as the dominant and vibrant principle of a common law constitution. It is an exposition that leads Ward to conclude that “the constitution of a state cannot be sensibly divorced from the constitution of humanity” (191–92).

I recommend this book to those who want to be captivated by a consideration of the British constitution by one who is both expert and also not “boxed” in. The novice to the constitution may at times need to stay focused on the double element of the subtitle: myths and realities. A narrow constitutional law style review would engage with some of the specifics considered in the middle three chapters or, obviously, would place a different emphasis or “spin” (if that is not now too discredited a word) on the myths and realities presented.

Ward, however, has thrown down the gauntlet, inviting others to present if they wish an alternative new constitutional vision to his new constitutional order, and certainly he justifies a more principled reconstitution of public law and politics than simply an ad hoc and sporadic reform. This book deserves to be widely read and thoroughly debated.