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Dickens & Madson is instructed to lobby the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations in view of “attaining the presidency of the Republic of Tunisia.” It calls on Dickens & Madson's president, Ari Ben-Menashe, to secure meetings with Trump and other senior US officials before the elections. He’s also to arrange face time with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to obtain “material support for the push for the presidency.”

statement noted that Karoui would seek legal redress against those who portrayed him “in such a despicable manner.” It closed by referring to Karoui’s “principled and consistent position in supporting the Palestinian cause.” The party apparently felt compelled to emphasize their leader’s pro-Palestinian stance in response to critics’ claims he was colluding with Israeli agents. Ben-Menashe is a former Israeli intelligence officer

The media magnate has cast himself as the champion of Tunisia’s poor through his popular Nessma TV channel and his charity organization, Khalil, named after his 18-year-old son who died in a car crash. Critics disparage him as “Karoui Macaroni” because his charity has donated large amounts of pasta, among other things, to Tunisia’s swollen underclass.

Anger over widespread corruption, joblessness and rising food prices helped Karoui pull in second behind law professor Kais Saied in the Sept. 15 presidential primary, which saw voters rebuff establishment hopefuls, including Chahed and Abdelfattah Mourou of the pro-Islamist Ennahda party.

Some draw parallels between Karoui and Trump, both wealthy populists who have taken on the establishment and whose supporters are apparently immune to allegations of wrongdoing, putting it all down to “fake news.” Chaouachi agreed there may be some similarities. “They are both leaders who think outside of the box, who challenge convention.” She added, however, that “they are fundamentally different, and Mr. Karaoui is unique.”

Micro-institutions’ are small-scale rules, regulations, minor organisational norms and cultural practices, scattered across a range of institutional settings and often pretty obscure. They none the less can frequently govern how macro-institutions work out in practice.

Arguably, one of the key factors that separates core democracies from semi-democracies like Putin’s Russia is that in liberal democracies micro-institutions work to support democratic macro-institutions, while in semi-democracies they are subverted (subtly or flagrantly) so as to privilege incumbents.

the Johnson government (advised by Cummings who is openly contemptuous of parliamentary government) has now sculpted from the equally obscure prerogative powers surrounding the prorogation of Parliament a superficially bland but deeply toxic disabling of the Commons for 35 of the 61 days remaining to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

That the Queen and her constitutional advisors accepted this proposal at its face value is yet another nail in the coffin of the old constitution, with the monarch’s vestigial capacity even to ‘advise and warn’ now obliterated and shown up as a fiction, for the meanest of partisan exigencies.

Instead of great decisions resting on the clearly expressed will of Parliament, or the consultation of voters via a second referendum or a general election, a minority government and a PM that no one has elected are apparently set on achieving their will by converting to their purposes a swarm of micro-institutions of which almost all voters, and most constitutional ‘experts’ have little or no knowledge. The unfixed constitution has been exploited until it has failed to have any credibility as a guarantor of democratically responsive government or constraint on the executive’s power whatsoever.

possibility, though, is that the government lives on, Brexit happens, but the current constitutional failure deepens further into the UK becoming a ‘failed state’ in multiple dimensions, as even some liberal conservative voices have suggested. The management of a liberal democratic state is a delicate business. Coming after prolonged austerity Brexit has already wrought significant damage to the UK governing apparatus, with policy inertia exerting a pall for more than three years. We’ve known since the London and city riots in August 2011 that the UK state is in a fragile and not resilient condition. It is more than ever reliant on the quasi-voluntary compliance of almost all its citizens to carry on working. Johnson’s manoeuvre must cause a further delegitimization of government, risking a spectrum of severely adverse developments that might include significant civil disobedience, some public order turmoil, a weakening of ‘tax discipline’ (‘no taxation without representation’), and in short order the break-up of the UK.