Читать книгу The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval - Mark Garnett - Страница 9

Since its inception (generally associated with the prolonged political dominance of Sir Robert Walpole (1721–42)), the role of British Prime Minister has attracted considerable and understandable attention from a variety of perspectives. The interest has increased in the years since 1979, thanks chiefly to the arrival in office of the most noteworthy individual to hold the office since Churchill was finally chiselled out of Downing Street in 1955. Although the primary subject-matter is the same, and their approaches sometimes overlap, the authors of important studies of the role can be consigned to five camps.

(1) Contemporary historians: these focus on individual Prime Ministers – their innate qualities, and their interactions with the broader context of their careers – or a succession of such individuals. Anthony Seldon is a prime example, having published studies of Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, all of which are based on meticulous research including interviews with key participants.

(2) Practising (or former) politicians: these include individuals (like Richard Crossman, John Mackintosh and even Dr Gordon Brown) who were academics as well as politicians, but also non-academics (like Tony Benn and Graham Allen) who have tried to reach a critical understanding of the Prime Minister’s role rather than merely reflecting on current developments. These observers might seem more authoritative than people whose analyses arise from second-hand knowledge. However, the view from ‘the inside’ could be misleading for other reasons: certainly the practitioners who have written on this subject are far from unanimous in their conclusions.

(3) Authors of memoirs and diaries: these include politicians and important officials who have recounted their experiences and observations without the primary purpose of shedding light on the Prime Minister’s role. During the Thatcher years it seemed obligatory for Cabinet ministers to write their memoirs. As sources of insights these were of variable quality, but the best (like Nigel Lawson’s compendious The View from No. 11 (1992)) are invaluable. The publication in 1993 of diaries written by the maverick Thatcherite Alan Clark sparked a revival of this genre. Even if original diaries were redacted before publication, their main value for scholars lay in the unwitting revelations – often ones which the authors thought too trivial to leave out. In this respect, Labour politicians and their highly placed supporters have been far more prolific than their Conservative counterparts, so that anyone who was sufficiently interested could compile a voluminous day-to-day record of New Labour’s period in office (1997–2010) on the basis of these publications. The main contributor to this avalanche of research-rich material is Alastair Campbell. While his friend Alan Clark enriched Britain’s political literature by recounting the experiences of a narcissist who came close to the inner circles of British government, Campbell’s published diaries are the reflections of an incurable, indefatigable reporter, whose diligence as a diarist makes even the prolific Tony Benn look like a dilettante.

(4) Journalists: these include authors who have provided day-to-day snapshots for various media outlets, as well as those (like Andrew Rawnsley and Tim Shipman) who have published substantial studies of specific episodes. It seems churlish to deny the most perceptive of these authors honorific membership of the ‘contemporary historian’ club. They are distinguished here by their different vantage point, as bona fide inhabitants of the ‘Westminster village’ rather than occasional academic visitors.

(5) Last, but emphatically not least, are political scientists whose contributions are outlined in the rest of this section, mainly for the benefit of students of the subject. Readers with non-academic reasons for reading the book can be assured that this part of the literature is not revisited until the concluding chapter; and even then the main purpose of the discussion is to summarize the argument offered here rather than to engage too closely with existing interpretations.

For political scientists who have examined the role since 1945, the key questions have concerned the decision-making power of Prime Ministers – ‘Can they dominate the policy-making agenda, or are they heavily constrained by the Cabinet and/or other significant actors?’ – and an evaluation of the role in relation to institutions in other countries (e.g. ‘Is the British Prime Minister becoming more like a US President?’). Before 1979, the most widely discussed contributions came from scholars who argued that the Prime Minister’s role was superseding that of the Cabinet, which since the publication in 1867 of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1963) had been regarded as the fulcrum of the British system. According to the revised argument, Britain’s government was now essentially ‘prime ministerial’. Significantly, the best-known proponents of this view – John Mackintosh (1929–78) and Richard Crossman (1907–74) – were both active political practitioners as well as academics.

This new interpretation was not universally accepted, partly because of its troubling implications but also because it seemed at best an over-simplification of the real situation. All systems of government are complex – not least liberal democracies, which are supposed to depend on the voluntary adjustment of interests, mediated by sophisticated bureaucracies as well as political parties which are influential in themselves. Even before the advent of Margaret Thatcher, political scientists had qualified the picture presented by Mackintosh and Crossman (e.g. Jones, 1965, 167–85). They were joined in 1976 by an even more eminent analyst-practitioner, the recently retired Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who tried to demonstrate that Cabinet government was alive and well, thanks not least to his own unswerving fealty to constitutional convention (Wilson, 1976).

In his introduction to a volume devoted to the role of the Prime Minister, Anthony King wrote that, ‘With luck, interest in the remarkable premiership of Margaret Thatcher will have the effect of further stimulating interest in the prime ministership’ (King, 1985, 10). This was a pretty safe expectation, although the debate became more contentious after Thatcher had left office. Michael Foley’s provocative book The Rise of the British Presidency (published in 1993) asserted that Thatcher’s approach to governance had taken Britain beyond a merely ‘prime ministerial’ system, and that in important respects she had acted as if she were a President. As an expert in US politics, Foley was able to identify specific examples of ‘presidential’ tendencies during the Thatcher years. Using terms like ‘spatial leadership’ and ‘leadership stretch’, he argued that just like a US President British Prime Ministers can distance themselves from their parties, exploiting the media in particular as a means of reinforcing the idea that their authority arises from a personal connection with the electorate (Foley, 1993).

Foley’s book could have appeared at a more propitious time. By 1993 Thatcher’s successor, John Major, was projecting a very different style of leadership. Arguably, then, even if a British ‘presidency’ had risen during the 1980s it had sunk along with Thatcher herself – indeed her downfall could be attributed to a reaction against her domineering style. This course of events seemed to verify the opinion of the former Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, who wrote in 1970 that a Prime Minister who ‘habitually ignored the cabinet … could rapidly come to grief’ (Gordon Walker, 1972, 106). Normality seemed to be restored under Major, and for most political scientists ‘normality’ meant collective government. The membership of the ‘collective’ did not necessarily coincide exactly with the ministers who formed the Cabinet, but this had never been the case. Rather, the ‘core executive’ consisted of the Prime Minister and representatives of institutions which enjoyed ‘resources’ of various kinds – that is, ministers in the most important departments and their senior civil servants (see, for example, Rhodes and Dunleavy, 1993; Smith, 1999). The ‘prime ministerial/presidential’ approaches depicted politics as a ‘zero-sum game’, in which an accretion of power for the Prime Minister entailed a corresponding loss for other actors and institutions. The ‘core executive model’ rejected this picture, presenting the relationship between the Prime Minister and senior colleagues as one of mutual dependence and co-operation. There was room in the core executive model for special advisers, too, but these relative newcomers to the political scene were not regarded as very significant since their ‘resources’ depended on ministerial favour – that is, if their political employers were unhappy with their services, their influence could be ended abruptly.

By the end of the millennium events had moved on, and in 2000 Foley published a new version of his book with a defiant title (The British Presidency) which suggested that his interpretation was now established fact rather than a provocative hypothesis. His argument was based chiefly on the first Blair Government (1997–2001), whose practices seemed in many respects to transcend Thatcher’s tentative ‘presidential’ steps. However, as Foley himself knew very well, any claim that Britain was governed by a President was bound to run into the objections that its head of government was a constitutional monarch, and the Prime Minister (unlike a President) was directly responsible to Parliament. Foley’s readers would be aware that he was trying to identify presidential features which had crept into a system whose formal constitutional status had not changed. However, his titles (and, often, his style of writing) gave a contrary impression; and others were less equivocal in their equation of New Labour with ‘presidential’ government. Indeed, the emphatically un-Blairite Labour MP Graham Allen published a very lively tract arguing that it would be much better for Britain if it implemented a formal presidential system of government, rather than suffering from the drawbacks which inevitably arose from a hybrid presidential/parliamentary system (Allen, 2003).

Despite Blair’s presidential style the core executive approach was still generally accepted among political scientists at the time of his resignation in 2007 (Diamond, 2014, 193–213). It received timely support from scholars, notably Andrew Blick and George Jones, who found plentiful precedents for contemporary developments, even in the practices of the earliest Prime Ministers like Walpole and Pitt the Younger, who had employed the ancestors of today’s ‘spin doctors’ and special advisers (Blick and Jones, 2010). While invaluable from an historical point of view, this plus ca change approach could be countered by the argument that examples drawn from the period before universal adult suffrage (1928) related to a very different political context. Since then, the exigencies of ‘total war’ would have promoted a lasting enhancement of the Prime Minister’s role, even under a premier with none of Churchill’s relish for supreme command, or Clement Attlee’s eagerness to exploit what remained of the wartime spirit in order to push through a socio-economic revolution.

Since 2003 the debate has continued but in a more subdued and nuanced fashion. While rejecting the ‘presidential’ thesis, most contributors have accepted that the Prime Minister’s role has been strengthened (e.g. Heffernan, 2005; Dowding, 2012). The resulting scholarship has enhanced understanding of British politics in general, but it still reflects the preoccupation of political scientists with definitions, models and institutional comparisons. It is a common refrain in the academic literature that the role of the Prime Minister is still ‘under-theorized’. It could be argued to the contrary that much of the work on the Prime Minister emanating from political scientists suffers from an excess of theory, being conducted within analytical frameworks which downplay other considerations (in particular, Britain’s relative decline as a global power, and the influence of the media; see Rose, 2001)), and draws too heavily on formal interviews tinged (even tainted) by hindsight, rather than contemporary media reports or the published diaries of key participants.

While the core executive approach is a valuable corrective to the notion that the Prime Minister can govern without co-operation of some kind, this is an unavoidable feature even of undemocratic states and thus cannot shed much light on the way in which the role has developed since 1979 (Brown, 2010). The core executive model focuses on the distribution of power – that is, in simplistic terms, the ability to get things done, for which co-operation (willing or not) is obviously needed. In Britain, the realization of most policy objectives (better health care, higher standards of education, etc.) cannot possibly be effected by a single person, but depends on co-operation at all levels down to nurses and classroom teachers. The argument presented here is that a more relevant question relating to the Prime Minister is that of prominence, particularly in terms of electoral politics. This is much more compatible with a zero-sum game; if the front page of every newspaper features a photograph of the Prime Minister, his or her colleagues are being denied equal publicity, even if they are making more noteworthy contributions to governance.

A book which is more concerned with prominence than power is suggested by other developments in the academic literature. For example, Rod Rhodes and others have investigated developments within the British state, which in their view has been ‘hollowed out’ in recent decades (e.g. Rhodes, 1994; Campbell and Wilson, 1995). This seems difficult to square with the core executive model, since it implies that ministers and government departments have been losing their ability to effect constructive change and hence have fewer ‘resources’ at their disposal. On the face of it, this does look like a significant shift in the Whitehall power-game; if ministers have lost status and authority, the same is not true (at least directly) of the Prime Minister, who has no departmental responsibilities. If governmental capacity has weakened, more onus would be placed on the Prime Minister to create the impression of success, for vote-winning purposes. On a related theme, Patrick Diamond has argued persuasively that, having been seriously affected by the hollowing out of the state, civil servants now increasingly find themselves being ‘politicized’ – that is, working to enhance the popularity of the party in office, rather than pursuing what they conceive to be the national interest (Diamond, 2018). Looking back over the period since 1979, it is difficult not to hanker after the days in which departmental ministers and their civil servants really did enjoy ‘independent resources’; in terms of the ability to achieve constructive results (and to palm off responsibility when things go wrong) Prime Ministers themselves would be better off if this were still true.

It could be argued that too much of the political science literature on the British Prime Minister has been vitiated by disciplinary perspectives. If we cannot hope for ‘joined-up government’, we can at least aspire to joined-up thinking, approaching recent developments in the Prime Minister’s position without theoretical preconceptions. The changes in the role since Thatcher will become apparent to anyone who reads Harold Wilson’s contribution to the debate. In The Governance of Britain (1976), Wilson still felt able to describe the role of the British Prime Minister as ‘one of the most exciting and certainly one of the best organised’ positions in the democratic world (Wilson, 1976, x). If at least one of these claims is no longer true – and ‘well organised’ is not the term which immediately springs to mind in relation to any aspect of the contemporary British political system – inquiries into the most probable causes must be as broadly based as possible, and as free as humanly possible from any ‘mind-forged manacles’.