Historian DAVID STARKEY on how our self-satisfied politicians have launched a ...

Historians should avoid colourful predictions, however tempting they might seem. 

At the moment I’m touring the country with a lecture called Henry VIII And The First Brexit, which compares the king’s eventual clean and triumphant break with the Roman Church with our own messy and humiliating attempts to extricate ourselves from the European Union.

But audiences really want me to talk about the present.

‘What do you think is going to happen?’, they ask. I shrug my shoulders and explain that, since history only works by looking backwards, those historians who pose as prophets are charlatans.

My audiences think I’m copping out, of course – and they are right.

I haven’t always been such a purist. Three years ago, I published a book on Magna Carta to mark the founding document of our Parliamentary constitution, that had been sealed 800 years earlier in 1215.

In holding a medieval king accountable to his subjects – or some of them, at least – Magna Carta was a revolutionary step and is rightly celebrated.

But I ended on a note of caution. All is not well with Britain or our politics, I said. ‘Is it silly to think there is a touch of 1215 – a whiff of revolution – in the air?

And it came true in June 2016, with the decisive referendum vote to reshape our politics once again and leave the European Union.

The referendum was a very British revolution. And it’s been followed by a very British counter-revolution, which shows every sign of succeeding.

Don't be deceived by the lack of violence or the comparative good manners of those now seizing control. This is a coup, and what is at stake is the nature and legitimacy of Parliament itself.

Ruled by comfortable, smug elites, Parliament is choosing to ignore the ordinary British people as they attempt to hold power to account.

It is no exaggeration to say that British democracy, which stands in direct line with Magna Carta, is now unravelling before us.

If today’s self-satisfied MPs and Ministers – I have already described them as a Parliament of Pygmies – have no time for the voters, they have little time for history, either.

They seem to have forgotten that the original power of our Parliament lay in its claim to represent everybody and not just a few privileged groups, as in continental Europe. (Take for example the Estates General in France or the Cortes Generales in Spain, two early parliaments which promptly died out in the 17th Century.)

They should remember, too, that our Parliament owed its survival to its willingness, with more or less of a struggle, to adapt and remain representative. As time went by, Parliament broadened out to include newly powerful social groups as they appeared.

First came the Reform Act of 1832 which gave the vote to the newly prosperous middle class. This ushered in several decades of dominance by the Liberal Party, which was only broken by the genius of Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli, who is the founder of the modern Conservative Party, recognised Conservatism’s natural affinity with ‘the radical masses’.

Disraeli’s intuition was vindicated with the second Reform Act in 1867, the next major parliamentary change, which enfranchised the skilled working man and began the process that turned the Tories into the natural party of government.