A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

By 2024, the prime minister had emerged as the dominant figure in control of foreign policy, taking over the powers initially from the monarch, then Parliament, then the Foreign Secretary. The prime minister decides British foreign relations, whether the country goes to war, and how it is fought. This chapter will examine how and why this transition occurred, and why the prime minister today can afford to be more preoccupied with foreign rather than domestic policy, and what this has meant to the office and powers of the prime minister – even in the face of war and increasing geopolitical tension.

In this chapter, we examine the almost uniquely powerful position the British prime minister is in compared to heads of government abroad, and the long list of the PM’s powers and resources. With so much in their favour, why is their performance often so underwhelming? Premierships can go by in a blur of frenzied activity. Prime ministers typically only reflect fully on the powers and resources they possessed after their period in office is over, when they are writing their memoirs, ruefully reflecting on what might have been. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t precise powers, some formal, others informal, accumulated over the years, and it is these that we consider in this chapter. The most successful prime ministers, like Thatcher or Attlee, knew, by study or osmosis, how to use them.

Chapter 2 shows the company’s first tour was planned according to protocols from Mary’s reign, and relied on age-old trade routes to find their way to two locations that served Dudley’s interests. Later, as Dudley’s interests shifted and as plague, extreme weather, and floods hit their routes, the company adopted the circuits we now associate with later companies. The players’ London origins also shaped their early approach to commercial playing, performing in inns and hiring livery company halls, but hostile city authorities compelled them to look beyond London’s walls, prompting the construction of the Red Lion. Drawing on new archaeological evidence, I argue the Red Lion was designed to reflect the Great Hall at Whitehall, to give public audiences a taste of the spaces the players enjoyed at court. The plays the company adopted in the 1560s promoted Dudley’s Protestant ethos and presented characters based on the very artisans and labourers who made up their audiences and in whose midst the players lived in London.

The conclusion examines the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the formation of the Irish Free State, foregrounding the British-Irish political figures brought together at 10 Downing Street who illuminated the events of this book. Far from a sideshow to developments in Ireland, the concluding chapter submits, Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to both Irish and British contemporary assessments of the Irish Revolution. Irish nationalists in Britain, further, mobilised popular political interest, and activism, on an unprecedented scale across this decade of constitutional crisis, war, and revolution. The potential influence of Irish nationalism in British cities, moreover, occupied the minds and minutes of British policy makers, from Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George. How was Irish nationalism re-constructed across Britain between 1912 and 1922? Shaped by the influences of the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, and the British Empire, Irish nationalism was the cumulative experience of layers of overlapping representations of, and relationships with, ideas of nation. In its modes of political activism, gendered experiences of political life, and representations of public politics, Irish nationalism was impacted by changes, and continuities, across the British polity between the late Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods.

Chamberlain and Churchill’s characters and attitudes to war are compared as a partial explanation of their different reactions to events in the 1930s. The two men are placed in the context of how foreign and defence policy was formed, and the principal people with whom they interacted in Whitehall are introduced. Particular attention is paid to the limitations of the intelligence services and to Churchill’s contacts and sources of information, including membership of an official committee on air defence.

Chapter 8’s aim is to interrogate the relationship between the court spaces depicted onstage in Shakespeare’s plays and the mimetic undertones that those represented spaces call forth for audiences. Clifford’s chapter explores Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True. Whitehall’s 'old name' lingers in the play as a reminder of its previous owner’s disgrace and its current owner’s power. Like Jacobean Whitehall itself, the palace’s narrative history is embedded in its architectural presence. Taking York Place/Whitehall as its centerpiece, this chapter considers court spaces in All is True in relation to the play’s narrative structure, arguing that the play’s engagement with Tudor history is partially defined by the royal places it represents or describes onstage. This chapter unpacks the spatial points of reference available to an imagined court audience for the play. Clifford argues that the palatial commonplaces upon which it relies might have been more meaningful to a court audience than that of the public theatre, thus positioning it as a play imagined for a royal performance.

Chapter 6 challenges the orthodoxy that plays were essentially premiered on the public stages prior to their performance at court. Jason Lawrence focuses on the royal performances of Othello and Measure for Measure at Whitehall in late 1604, in an attempt to modify some critical statements about these plays. It is Lawrence’s contention that the court performances of both of these plays were effectively prepared as royal premieres for the king. The two new plays share a common source in Cinthio’s prose Hecatommitti, and Lawrence demonstrates how the significant alterations and additions made in each case engage directly with the interests of the new monarch, suggesting that Shakespeare was, at least partially, dramatising stories from his new-found Italian source with these royal performances in mind. Lawrence shows that, in each case, any prior performance might have been intended primarily as a rehearsal for the court appearance. The length of Othello in particular fits with Richard Dutton’s argument about the preparation of longer play texts specifically for Jacobean court performance, although, significantly, in this case it would be for a brand new rather than revised play.

Rebecca Olson describes the use of painted cloths in the 1611/12 court season, which included The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Highly portable and useful for creating smaller spaces within chambers, textiles were regular fixtures at both Whitehall and contemporary playhouses. But the actual textiles used at court, including painted cloths, would have been different from those hanging in playhouses: whereas costumes were provided by acting companies, and were therefore likely to have been those used in London, the hangings used at court were procured by the Revels Office. Olson provides an overview of what is known about the period’s once-ubiquitous painted cloths to describe how they would have set the scene for high-stakes performances of some of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Once dismissed as 'poor man’s tapestry', it appears that painted cloths were in fact preferred in certain dramatic situations, even when more luxurious materials were available. They consequently provide us with a lens through which to reconsider not only what the courtly theatre looked like, but also the degree to which its aesthetic relied on a deliberate blurring of quotidian and elite forms.