Concern about accountability is the outcome of dissatisfaction, whether with the actual working of mechanisms of accountability, or with the way accountability is being understood or misunderstood.

In the understanding of accountability in the English context, the objects of dissatisfaction include legal academic or common lawyerly preoccupation with legal accountability, one-sided polemical promotion of political accountability, and a basic legal/political dichotomy, which those advocating the priority of the legal or that of the political have both struggled to transcend.

This chapter's concern is the dichotomy between legal and political accountability, and its approach is historical. The approach taken here differs from modern conventional historical approaches in its use of history, which is express for the sake of transparency. My intention is not to put forward a historical account of the dichotomy so as to describe, record, and explain twentieth-century constitutional developments in all their complexity and nuanced detail. It is also not to use history so as to promote or venerate some or other aspect of the constitution or one or other of its leading authorities, as it was used on occasion in bygone periods, expressing nationalist sentiment and stimulating collective self-confidence. Rather, apart from using history in a conventional way to help clarify context and recall what might otherwise be forgotten or ignored, my intention here is to use history so as to help facilitate change or reorientation—through sensitivity to wrong turns taken, or perhaps to the right turns taken but towards destinations that no longer exist or no longer matter.

In the late-nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century, Albert Venn Dicey was the leading influence upon English constitutional thought and thus acquired great authority and the status of orthodoxy towards which the con­stitution's critics oriented their criticism or critical alternatives.¹ Dicey's differ­entiation of three views—the legal, the historical, and the political—in outlining his subject at the start of Law of the Constitution is well known, as is his prioritiza­tion of the legal view. According to Dicey, solely the law of the constitution was to be the subject of constitutional legal study.^[69] Much less well known or remem­bered is Dicey's now seemingly quaint notion of what he generalized to be a con­stitution's spirit and particularized as the legal spirit of the English constitution. It is alluded to here and there in Law of the Constitution but received sustained attention in his long forgotten comparative constitutional lectures delivered to students at Oxford, the LSE, and in the United States in the late-nineteenth, and the early-twentieth, century.^[70]

A.