KARL Marx well understood the derivative nature of political events and particularly political rhetoric.

Writing about Louis Bonaparte 150 years ago, he observed that in moments of "revolutionary crisis" men (and they were mainly men back then) borrowed from the past "names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present" a new "scene" in "time-honoured disguise and borrowed language".

Elsewhere in his "Eighteenth Brumaire" essay, Marx was pithier. History repeats, he concluded, "first as tragedy, then as farce". Federalism is but one example. Seriously contemplated by the British Government following the election of dozens of Sinn Fein MPs in 1918, Unionists of the period certainly regarded its failure as a tragedy for the old Anglo-Irish Union.

Just as Nationalist critics will most likely regard continuing talk of a federal response to the recent election of 56 SNP MPs as farcical. On election night Boris Johnson muttered the "f" word, while on Saturday Graham Brady, chairman of the Conservatives' 1922 Committee, said a long-term goal ought to be a "truly federal arrangement that treats all the nations of the United Kingdom similarly".

There are the usual problems with this. First, Mr Brady is chiefly concerned with "English Votes for English Laws" rather than what one might call authentic federalism. For others, and I suspect this includes the Mayor of London, it remains little more than a word, certainly not a holistic constitutional programme.

As a concept, federalism is often misunderstood, an inevitable consequence of the UK's long-standing aversion to such talk. As I argue in an updated edition of my book "Britain Rebooted: Why federalism would be good for the nations and regions of the UK", any federal settlement would have to include a written constitution, some sort of English regionalism and an Upper House reconstituted along regional and national lines.

A few years ago the Conservatives were rather keen on House of Lords reform, even publishing a Draft Bill that set out proposals for an Upper House of 300 members, 80 per cent of whom would be elected for 15-year terms by the Single Transferable Vote. That, of course, died a swift death at the hands of Tory rebels, while the party's 2015 manifesto wimped out, saying that while there remained a "strong case" for an elected second chamber, it wouldn't be "a priority" in�¨the next Parliament. Still, this doesn't rule out another attempt; after all, the Tories now have a Parliamentary majority, and there's a degree of cross-party consensus about the way forward.

The previous and current government has better form when it comes to answering the English Question. George Osborne clearly wrong-footed Labour by embracing "Devo Manc" and the promise of a "northern powerhouse" so firmly over the past year. This looks likely to stimulate demand from other city regions across the country, and with Greg Clark (a committed decentraliser) now in place as Local Government Secretary, that process will be given a helping hand from Whitehall.

Lords reform and English governance are key, so "devo-max" for Scotland, as some appear to believe, would not create a federal UK, and nor, arguably, would the creation of an English Parliament, the hobby horse of some Tory backwoodsmen like John Redwood. It has to mean a lot more than yet more piecemeal, ad hoc reform.

I've long argued that the UK can already be viewed as a "quasi-federal" entity, and indeed last year the Society of Conservative Lawyers published a paper called "Our Quasi-Federal Kingdom" which might offer some clues as to how some senior Conservatives see the next few years panning out. Downing Street, as I wrote last week, is acutely aware its constitutional strategy needs a more coherent shape.

The paper sought to cast federalism within a long-standing "Tory tradition" of incremental constitutional reform, and concluded that Parliament ought to pass a "Statute of Union" declaring the UK to be "a quasi-federal, voluntary union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland". This the Society envisaged going hand in hand with the devolution of "full territorial competence" to the Welsh Assembly, more devolution for Scotland and EVEL as per the recommendations of the McKay Commission.

Although little noticed when originally published on 19 September 2014 (for obvious reasons), I understand that the Society's report is now being more widely distributed and discussed, although with less emphasis on the "quasi" part. It may not be obvious at the moment - witness the Prime Minister's cautious demeanour in Edinburgh last Friday - but there's a recognition, according to one Tory insider, that Mr Cameron needs to make a "grand gesture" on the constitutional front.

A remarkably number of senior Conservatives have become born-again federalists in the last couple of years, including the party's historian Lord Lexden, once the Prime Minister's employer at Conservative Central Office and now the author of several "federalist letters" to The Times of London.

It seems Lexden has also had a hand in a report to be published on Wednesday by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law called "Constitutional Crossroads: Ways Forward for the United Kingdom", which looks likely to echo conclusions from the Society of Conservative Lawyers. This is where lawyers, rather than politicians, come in rather useful, for they put flesh on the bones of glib sound bites.

And while Royal Commissions have fallen out of favour (there have only been three in the UK since the early 1980s), the former Scottish Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind recently proposed one to consider a "quasi-federal system" of government across the UK. They might, as Harold Wilson once quipped, take minutes and waste years, but that is strength rather than a weakness, constitutional reform cannot be a rush job.

We have been here before. In 1969, Mr Wilson appointed a Royal Commission on the Constitution as a response to the first SNP "surge" a couple of years earlier. It took four years to report and still makes interesting reading, even though it's rather sniffy about federalism. There was too little demand, the Commissioners concluded, while its advantages would be more theoretical than real.

But that was orthodoxy back in 1973, when the UK was unrecognizable from that in 2015. The Royal Commission was in thrall to Dicey, the absolute "sovereignty" of Parliament and lots of other long-demolished shibboleths. Federalism was not only "foreign" to the British constitutional tradition (nonsense in any case), but would appear "strange and artificial" if implemented.

There was, however, a caveat, a glimpse of an open mind amid the dogmatism: the UK, concluded the Royal Commission, "is not an appropriate place for federalism and now is not an appropriate time". It would be interesting to know if they would have considered 2015 an "appropriate time", for a lot has happened in the past 42 years.

For too long the Conservative response to the Scottish Question has been grudging, reactive and unimaginative, but with an eye on his political legacy, not to mention good governance, the Prime Minister ought to view the recent election result as an opportunity rather than a threat.