A head of state whose constitutional role is to be above politics isn't a lot of use with coalition politics and fixed term parliaments. Of course being above politics is a necessary veil to draw over the immodesty of hereditary monarchies wielding temporal and spiritual power.
If we are to have the new politics we'll need a better, democratic, mechanism for choosing who should be invited to attempt to form an administration after a vote of confidence has been lost. The misrepresentation of constitutional duty and responsibility inflicted upon us last week by a defeated party leader won't do in the future, any more than it did recently.
Once we choose not to end a Parliament with a lost no confidence motion - a wholly proper and democratic choice, though unfamiliar in our constitutional practice - then we must have a proper and democratic means to determine who gets next go.
We could consult the Italians whose fixed term parliaments are much enlivened by the fluidity of the coalitions operating within them. We would be fortunate indeed to elect ourselves a president as admirable as President Napolitano but, over time and with practice, we would learn to avoid the more corrupt of our older politicians and recognise the best of our statesmen. It would be helpful, too, to provide an elected Upper House for our Parliament, a sort of training ground for the highest office where years of service in a revising and tempering role would reveal who was wheat and who chaff, for no politician could go straight from the political battles and naked animosities of the Commons into the statesman status that confers eligibility for head of state.
All this would need a constitutional court with clear and universal accessibility, and to which the head of state could turn for interpretive advice and confirmation. There is no need to codify the entire constitution and lose the joys and subtleties of its infinite flexibility, just a touchstone, so to speak.
We could keep the monarchy as well, but more for the expression of national emotions than for the wielding and transmission of power; a necessary separation of monarchy's two roles: a wholly mystical depository of the idea of nationhood; and an efficient embodiment of the power of the state and proper access to it.
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I don't share your optimism about the prospect of an elected Upper House.
Whilst such an arrangement would have clear positives in terms of democratic accountability and so on, what exactly would stop it being corrupted and defiled by the party system as the lower House has been?
One of the great advantages (ok perhaps the only advantage) of the current arrangement is that the members of the Upper House can think, speak, and act as they see fit, because they cannot be threatened with deselection or dissolution.
Looking back over the NuLab nightmare, it's so often the House of Lords which has imposed something resembling common sense on the more outrageous emanations of the Commons.
Why mess with something that demonstrably works well?
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