As I write this article, after returning from meetings with the Communist Party hierarchy in Beijing, I do not yet know what action, if any, the UK will have taken in Syria following the deployment of chemical weapons in that unhappy country.

It is strange how different things look when seen from different points of view. In Beijing, questions such as the proper methods of maintaining a rules-based order and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of intervention by one nation in the affairs of another were at the core of the discussion. By contrast, on returning to the UK I find that the primary issue appears to be the constitutional power of the government to take military action.

Until very recently, the constitutional position on this had always been very clear. The government exercised the power of the Crown to engage in warfare without the need for specific parliamentary approval. Parliament exercised its power in these matters solely through an explicit vote of confidence. So long as the government maintained the confidence of the House of Commons, it could continue to direct our forces in line with the decisions of the Cabinet.

More recently, a convention – not yet encoded in any law – has arisen, under which sustained military intervention is seen to require the backing of parliament. But within this convention it has so far been clear that rapid actions, undertaken in conformity with international law, can be undertaken by the government without specific recourse to parliament in advance.

There are certainly arguments of some weight that can be deployed in favour of several different answers. But, for myself, after having spent six years sitting in meetings of the National Security Council trying to make the right decisions on such matters, I cannot see how the UK will be able to respond with sufficient flexibility and immediacy to rapidly changing events in the world if it really becomes the case that even highly constrained and brief actions have to be cleared in advance through a process of parliamentary debate and voting.

In relation to these sort of actions it seems to me, at least, the best and most workable way for democratic accountability to operate is through the continuing need for a government to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons rather than through specific requirements for parliamentary approval for specific actions.

No doubt the readers of this column will have their own views in these matters and it is right that they should continue to be debated.