Читать книгу The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval - Mark Garnett - Страница 16
Choosing a champion
ОглавлениеBefore the period under review, there were already signs that parliamentary prowess was becoming less important as a qualification for the leadership of Britain’s main parties. In 1963, Harold Macmillan manipulated the informal process to choose a Conservative leader in favour of the Foreign Secretary Lord Home, who promptly disclaimed his title and entered the Commons as Prime Minister and plain old Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The latter did have experience of the House, but this had ended in 1951, when he assumed his hereditary title. As such, the returning Home was in a worse position than a parliamentary novice, who might have adjusted to the Commons fairly quickly. In 1951, the Labour leader had been the mild-mannered public school product Clement Attlee, whereas as Prime Minister Sir Alec would have to face up to Harold Wilson, whom even Macmillan (who had served in the Commons almost continuously since 1931) recognized as an unusually artful opponent.
Consciously or not, Macmillan and his co-conspirators were acting on the thoroughly modern assumption that Home’s parliamentary performances would not matter: he would be able to command a majority in the Commons because he was Prime Minister. If Home’s tenure of No. 10 had depended on his ability to match Wilson as a parliamentary performer, the result of the 1964 general election would not have been close; no objective observer could have denied Wilson’s superiority. As it was, although the Conservatives lost the election they did well enough to deny Labour a secure majority. Although most of the party had rallied behind Home, after the 1964 election the Conservatives tacitly accepted that Macmillan had made a mistake and did their best to ensure that it could not be repeated. The party rules were changed, so that MPs would be given a formal vote for party leader rather than allowing an individual to ‘emerge’ (as Home had done) through informal consultations with senior party figures. The first beneficiary was Edward Heath, who was chosen on the ill-founded assumption that he could match Wilson at the dispatch box.
The long-running rivalry between Wilson and Heath was ended by the latter’s deposition as Tory leader in 1975; Wilson stepped down as Prime Minister in the following year. Unlike the Conservatives, the Parliamentary Labour Party had always followed a formal procedure for the election of its leader, so the kind of coup engineered by Macmillan on behalf of a personal favourite was not open to Wilson. However, he gave his preferred successor, James Callaghan, advance notice of his intention to resign. Undoubtedly Wilson’s choice was influenced to some extent by confidence in Callaghan’s ability to cut a suitably ‘prime ministerial’ figure in Commons debates, despite Labour’s failure to win a secure majority in either of the elections of 1974.
By contrast, Heath’s refusal to stand down as leader after the general election of October 1974 – his third failure to win a majority in four attempts – provoked a further change in the Conservative Party’s rules (overseen, appropriately, by Sir Alec Douglas-Home) which for the first time allowed challenges to incumbent leaders. While other possible challengers flinched, Margaret Thatcher stood against and beat Heath in February 1975. In this case, Thatcher was rewarded for her remarkable chutzpah in standing against the first Conservative leader who had been chosen by an electoral process of any kind. However, she had also shown herself to be a very effective parliamentary debater as part of the Conservative team attacking Labour’s economic policy, so her supporters had no reason for apprehension on that score.
Between 1979 and the time of writing (July 2020), the two main parties have been led by sixteen individuals (leaving aside caretaker leaders). Of these, many had qualities which would have made them respectable candidates in the days when parliamentary performance was a crucial consideration for aspiring leaders. However, at least two (one from each side) would certainly not have been chosen if parliamentary performance had been more than the marginal factor which it must have been for Macmillan in 1963; indeed, before 1979 any leadership aspirations they had shown would have been taken as signs of eccentricity.
The individuals in question only rose to the leadership of their respective parties because of further rule changes, which took the final choice of leader away from those who were really qualified to judge their performances in the Commons – that is, Bagehot’s ‘electoral college’, the MPs. By 1997, both Labour and the Conservatives had tried to appease their grassroots members by giving them an important role in leadership elections. In the Conservative case, the new system at least permitted MPs to reduce the field of contestants to two over a series of ballots before handing the final verdict to party members. But in 2001 this parliamentary safety net proved to consist of over-cooked spaghetti, when the anticipated run-off between candidates from the left and the right of the party (Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo respectively) failed to materialize, since Portillo’s underwhelming campaign had been further damaged by rumours concerning his personal history. Almost by default, the candidate previously designated as the ‘honourable runner-up’ by the Conservative right wing, Iain Duncan Smith, took Portillo’s place as the challenger to Clarke, who had narrowly won the third and final ballot among MPs and had all the necessary attributes for leadership except antipathy towards the European Union. This single disadvantage was enough to secure victory for Duncan Smith (Bale et al., 2019, 135–6). Thus, the leadership of a great political party passed to an individual whose only claim to prominence had been his persistent record of rebellion against its European policy during the 1990s – something of which he openly boasted during the 2001 leadership battle.3 The MPs who voted for Duncan Smith in preference to Portillo did so in the full knowledge that there could be no serious comparison between these two individuals as parliamentary performers (Denham and O’Hara, 2008, 59–62).
If the parliamentary perspective really mattered, the choice of Duncan Smith looks even more maladroit than Michael Foot’s elevation to the Labour leadership in 1980. Presenting Foot as a potential Prime Minister was widely seen as a hopeless instance of miscasting, not least (and significantly) because he had been badly injured in a car accident in 1963 and thus looked older than his years in television appearances. However, Foot was a Rolls-Royce compared to Duncan Smith’s Reliant Robin in terms of parliamentary skills. Although the House of Commons is irredeemably partisan, the acid test for a good leader in that environment must still be the hypothetical case in which the final outcome of key votes depends on the eloquence of rival speakers. More realistically, a party leader with a gift for oratory is better equipped to enthuse the party faithful than someone whose speeches, in terms of delivery and content, would only appeal to those whose minds are closed to any alternative position. Although he was seen as a disastrous leader, Foot always received (and deserved) a respectful hearing in the House; Duncan Smith was not even very good at preaching to the converted (as he demonstrated at his party’s conferences). A less sentimental party than Labour would have dispensed with Foot’s services before the 1983 general election; a less ideological party than the Conservatives would not have allowed Duncan Smith anywhere near the leadership in the first place.
Labour took more than a decade to emulate the Tories in this respect. But in 2010 it showed distinct symptoms of plumping for leadership candidates who pleased the party as a whole regardless of their parliamentary prowess, when the preference of MPs for David, rather than Ed, Miliband was over-ridden by other elements of the party. In terms of parliamentary stature, David was the better qualified Miliband; but he had enjoyed more opportunities than Ed to shine in set-piece debates, so this could be rationalized as an occasion when the extra-parliamentary party decided to go for potential rather than proven ability.
However, no such excuse was available to the Labour Party when in 2015 it anointed Jeremy Corbyn as Ed Miliband’s successor. In terms of nominations by the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn came fourth of the four candidates who progressed to the final round of voting. Corbyn resembled Duncan Smith in having built his reputation on principled disloyalty; although Corbyn cast far more votes against his party than Duncan Smith, the latter compensated for his infrequent disobedience by voting against the official Conservative line on the issue (Europe) which was calculated to cause maximum damage. More importantly in the present context, in both instances the voting records of Corbyn and Duncan Smith spoke more eloquently to the extra-parliamentary selectorate than any words that either had ever uttered in Parliament. Unlike leftist predecessors who had either won or aspired to the Labour leadership (e.g. Foot and Tony Benn), Corbyn was not regarded as a good parliamentary orator except by those who shared his views. As in the case of Duncan Smith, the votes of ordinary party members in 2015 saddled a potential party of government with a leader who palpably lacked the confidence even of his own cohort of MPs.
The decision of Conservative MPs to select Boris Johnson as one of the two candidates to proceed to the final round of voting in 2019 falls into a different category. Any parliamentary reputation (deserved or not) enjoyed by Corbyn or Duncan Smith prior to their election as leaders arose from their dogged perseverance in the face of hostility from loyal MPs within their own parties. They might never have come close to commanding a majority in the House of Commons in their rebellious days, but at least they had never shown signs of treating the Chamber as a means to a personal end. In his first parliamentary stint as MP for Henley (2001–8) before he decided to put himself forward for London’s elected Mayoralty, Johnson’s speeches made no favourable impression. This remained the case between his return to the Commons in 2015 and his promotion to Foreign Secretary after the Brexit referendum in 2016. Johnson’s attempt to identify (and, by implication, to compare) himself with Winston Churchill was self-evidently improbable. However, by 2019 a considerable number of grassroots Tories had convinced themselves that membership of the European Union presented an existential threat to the UK. Cometh the hour, cometh the Churchill impersonator. Tory MPs were acutely aware of the enthusiasm for ‘Boris’ among their constituency members, and feared the grassroots reaction if they kept Johnson out of the final ballot. As a result, in the general election of 2019 the two main British political parties were led by individuals who would not have been serious contenders for their positions if parliamentary considerations had been an important (let alone crucial) factor.
It is possible to regard the broadening of the choice of party leaders to grassroots members as an inevitable development for a variety of reasons. But whatever the precise triggers for the procedural changes in both of the main UK parties, the effects were likely to strengthen the position of incumbent leaders. The ultimate arbiters of their fate would no longer be the parliamentary colleagues who could evaluate their qualities at first hand; rather, it would be people who were unlikely to have met them in the flesh. The Conservative Party’s rules, as modified in 1997, were designed to evade the real nightmare scenario, in which a leader who has been defeated in a vote of confidence among his or her MPs is reinstated by the votes of the extra-parliamentary party. No doubt recalling the situation in 1975, when, given the chance of a party-wide ballot, a majority of constituency members would have supported Heath rather than Thatcher, the Conservatives stipulated that a leader who had been beaten in a vote of confidence among MPs would be excluded from the ensuing contest. However, the 2019 Conservative leadership election suggested that this precaution was either unnecessary or futile. A leader who was deemed incapable by the parliamentary party, but still commanded the affection of grassroots members, would be most unlikely to face a confidence vote in the first place, let alone lose it. Conservative MPs were only able to get rid of Duncan Smith because grassroots members had woken up to their mistake after two years of maladroit leadership. The indefatigable but ineffective attempts of Labour MPs to dethrone Jeremy Corbyn confirmed this impression; unlike Duncan Smith, who never had the chance to test his popularity in a general election, Corbyn was rendered invulnerable to defenestration by the result of the 2017 general election, and given a licence to exhaust the faith of his supporters in the ensuing 2019 contest.
In 1975, when Heath was toppled by Thatcher, the resentment of ordinary party members against ‘disloyal’ MPs was informed by a mixture of attitudes which now seem quaint and outdated. With hindsight, the mid-1970s can be seen as the end of a brief post-war interlude in which elitists and meritocrats (especially, but not exclusively, those who supported the Conservative Party) could feel that deference was automatically due to the leader whose appointment had been based on the free choice of MPs. This feeling allowed the Conservatives, when permitting the existing leader to be challenged, to place a very low threshold on the necessary level of initial backing; only two MPs (who could remain anonymous) were needed to nominate a challenger. It was assumed that an involuntary change at the top would only take place if there was overwhelming evidence that this was unavoidable, so that even if grassroots members continued to support the supplanted leader they would gradually reconcile themselves to the new regime (as happened in Thatcher’s case).
By 2019, the balance of deference had been reversed, and many MPs felt compelled to surrender their personal views whenever these conflicted with the perceived preferences of grassroots members. The last vestige of Walter Bagehot’s ‘electoral college’ had been removed. The only lingering residue of the old ways is the reluctance of individuals who hope to be candidates in any party-wide ballot to betray their hopes of a change of leader too openly. Thus as soon as Theresa May began to look like a ‘lame duck’ leader after the 2017 general election, Boris Johnson’s prominent antenna of self-advancement started twitching, but he had to curb his enthusiasm, no doubt remembering the fate of another former MP for Henley, Michael Heseltine, who explained his failure to succeed Margaret Thatcher in 1990 by saying that ‘In our party, the man who wields the dagger never picks up the crown.’ This dictum had already been disproved (albeit in 1975 the assassin who had been rewarded was a woman rather than a man).4 Indeed, if in 1990 the Conservatives had already given the final say over the choice of leader to the party as a whole rather than restricting it to MPs, Heseltine’s chances of picking up the crown would have been much better than under the prevailing rules, which entrusted the decision to guilt-wracked Tory MPs rather than the constituency members whose support Heseltine had been cultivating carefully since his resignation from the Cabinet in 1986.
There is, of course, a perfectly respectable case to be made for parties choosing leaders who reflect the views of their most radical supporters. If such individuals prove capable of generating country-wide enthusiasm, the choice will have been vindicated. If not, the results will become apparent at the next general election, if not before; and party members can decide for themselves whether they want to repeat the mistake. However, the effects of the first-past-the-post electoral system – and the advantages enjoyed by the two main UK parties in terms of media support, financial resources, ‘brand recognition’, etc. – mean that even if leaders have become a crucial element in voters’ choices (see chapter 6) a party which makes a bad decision is unlikely to suffer the full consequences. A more serious situation arises when both of the major parties choose leaders who are viewed negatively by a majority of voters. Thanks to the distortions of the electoral system, this means that Britain can be left with a Prime Minister who is distrusted (even despised) by a majority of his or her own parliamentary colleagues. If, as we have argued, Prime Ministers are ‘majority leaders’ because of the position they hold, the individual whose party prevails in this unpopularity contest will stand a good chance of serving a full term in office.