Sovereignty is as sovereignty does

An apocryphal story is told of Stalin's choice of design for the Hotel Moskva. In the midst of interwar purges, a nervy architect presented two visions to the Chairman. Instead of choosing, Stalin grunted, registering no preference. Not wanting to displease his mercurial leader, the architect built a hotel according to both styles. It was one building constructed in two totally different halves. This absurd result came about because the leader's will was incomprehensible. To be sovereign, it is necessary to act like a sovereign. More specifically, absolute power must be at least partly comprehensible if it is to be usable. Stalin could not have ruled effectively through grunts alone.

This is also true for the Queen-in-Parliament. The sovereign increasingly fails to communicate its will in clear terms. To remedy this, agents of Parliament try to infer intent, rather than make messes like the hapless architect. Sovereignty will diminish or deform without comprehensible language. Comprehensibility depends on rules of recognition, which are not fixed, but change with shifts in context and communal norms (Hart 1961). This means that the government, administrators and judges are constantly groping to interpret public reason, and this task is made all the more difficult by Parliament's increasing resort to indeterminate language.

Quoted at the opening of this chapter are, respectively, the shortest and longest statutes found from the 6,635 Acts surveyed in these pages. The Chimney Sweepers Acts (Repeal) Act 1938 is just a single section long. This is exceptionally rare. Only six other statutes in 115 years were similarly diminutive.