How Britain's uncodified constitution depends on convention

An uncodified constitution is not an unwritten one: British constitutional rules are dispersed across laws, common-law precedent, and conventions instead of being collected in a single core document. Conventions can sometimes be harder for politicians to violate because legitimacy depends on the spirit as well as the letter of the rules. The absence of one authoritative text also creates grey areas and makes constitutional rebalancing painful. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown serve as examples of prime ministers who lost authority after being seen to break the system's governing spirit. Codification would itself be divisive because deciding which inherited rules to include or omit would reopen contested constitutional questions.