Starkey on constitutional reform

I know most people who read this will also read Iain Dale, but this paragraph from his interview with David Starkey deserves prominence. Starkey gets it exactly right:

We need a version of the American constitution. When you think of all the silly fuss over the office of Lord Chancellor – when did a Lord Chancellor last do any serious harm? The alleged confusion of political and judicial functions. What’s been so striking about a lot of Labour constitutional reform is that on the one hand it’s done big things that it shouldn’t have done, and it’s also done little things that there was no need to do like fiddle around with the position of Lord Chancellor. The catastrophe is one body being both the executive and the legislative. It means that it does neither job very well. In particular our Parliament is useless as a legislature. It’s why our legislation is so awful. It’s why, of course, MPs have actually got no function. MPs now are, at best, overpaid social workers. What we need, I think, is something very much like the American model, and I would go the whole hog. I would have a directly elected Prime Minister. The emergence of somebody like Gordon Brown, who is so totally unsuited to the office and never actually been subject to the test of election, would be unthinkable in America, because from primaries onwards you are subject to this test. We should have something very much like the American cabinet, which is outside the legislature. We should have an elected Lords. The obvious basis for the Lords are the old counties. The catastrophe of the semi-abolition of the old counties under Heath was a catastrophe. Incidentally, there’s only been one government that’s as bad as this and that’s Heath’s. Heath and Joseph together were a catastrophe. Every single thing they touched turned to something brown. I would create a second chamber that has two members elected from each county.