Have no clue who you are referring to there...but would like to know
Walter Bagehot (in true British fashion, pronounced "Badgett") was editor of
The Economist during and after the (American) Civil War. He wrote
The English Constitution, which famously outlined how the British government worked and the role of Parliament vis-a-vis the Crown*. He also compared the British system to the American system, and described why he felt the British system was ultimately superior. He famously argued that a presidential government was more concerned with putting forward good candidates than choosing good executives, and that America only made it work because our people had "a genius for politics." In addition, he felt the fixed terms of presidents hindered government's ability to respond to crises, whereas a parliamentary system could replace leadership as needed based on immediate exigencies (see Chamberlain/Churchill, perhaps, as a future example of his point).
He also decried populism, and was not a fan of an expanded franchise, which grates modern sensibilities, but any time you hear someone say, "Of course I didn't vote for no Muslim from Kenya," you kind of get where he was coming from. He greatly feared competency giving way to the will of the "ignorant masses."
* His most important contribution had nothing to do with America, but with his description of the role of the monarch. He was the one who defined the monarch's three rights as "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn." He's been called the author of the British Constitution because, by the end of Victoria's reign, the relationship he had first described decades earlier had become an entrenched constitutional principle.
