What is political deference? Is there any point today in trying to retrieve a type of political respect specific to the Anglo-British constitution, which has been discarded as analytically worthless and politically broken since the 1970s? In this Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Catherine Marshall, Professor in British Studies (political history) at Cergy Paris Université and Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College (2022-23), will retrace the genealogy of political deference back to Walter Bagehot in the mid-Victorian period and retrieve its value for the present UK system of government, at a time when its vulnerability has been exposed. She will explore how we might retain some form of the older positive idea of deference – an ethics of deference – while adapting it to a new political landscape in which British constitutional principles have been compromised.