. . . the Prime Minister is the keystone of the cabinet arch. John Morley, 1889
The office of the Prime Minister is what its holder chooses and is able to make of it. H. H. Asquith, 1926
‘We do have a system in which very great power is given to people if they have a large parliamentary majority as well . . . The deal is that you give people very considerable power for five years, then they can be thrown out. And, in the meantime, if things get bad enough there are ways of getting rid of them. That is the deal of our constitution.’ Lord Butler of Brockwell, Secretary of the Cabinet 1988-97,
Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minster, 1982-85,
speaking in 1998
‘. . . I am talking for the present about the essential nature, the Platonic idea, of the system . . . We have a system of Cabinet Government, not a system of Presidential or Chief Executive Government. Cabinet Ministers are explicitly collectively responsible for the policies and actions of the Governments of which they are members . . . virtually no powers are formally vested I the office of Prime Minister, and those formal powers the Prime Minister does have are powers of patronage and not of policy. He is the chairman of a collective, which is called the Cabinet; and, once he has chosen his colleagues – and unless and until he fires them – his own strength lies essentially in being the Chairman of the Cabinet.’ Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Secretary of the Cabinet 1979-87,
Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, 1970-75, speaking in 1999
‘The debate about the powers of the Prime Minister is not sterile. It strikes at the heart of the British Constitution.’ Professor George Jones, 1998
Arguments have raged around the powers of the British Prime Minister for nearly 300 years. Sir Robert Walpole, widely agreed to be the first of the line, relished the power but could not abide the job description. The debate has been indissolubly bound up with the powers and the purposes of what Robert Armstrong has called ‘the Committee of the Privy Council, which is the Cabinet, the apex where politics and administration come together and where differences and conflicts have finally to be reconciled and resolved.
Lord Armstrong, in describing the ‘Platonic idea’ underpinning what one might call the classical notion of Cabinet government for my students at Queen Mary and Westfield College in early 1999, was well aware of ‘the ways in which the system has been adapted, stretched and distorted at particular times’. As an official who had served as Principal Private Secretary to Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, and as Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, he could hardly fail to appreciate how easily the Platonic can give way to the pragmatic in real-life as opposed to textbook government and politics. And it was this ruling reality to which Robin Butler had been referring at another seminar a few weeks earlier.
Butler, too had an abundance of front-line experience, having worked as one of Armstrong’s assistants in the Heath and Wilson Private Offices in the 1970s and having run Mrs Thatcher’s for part of the 1980s before replacing his old friend Armstrong as Cabinet Secretary in 1988. Between them their insider knowledge of Whitehall embraces virtually the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
Robin Butler’s public version of his IHR seminar, delivered at the Mansion House two months later as his Attlee Foundation Lecture on ‘Cabinet Government’, concentrated on charting the decline of the full Cabinet (as opposed to Cabinet committees and increasingly informal ministerial groups) as the decider of important business. He deployed statistics which embrace the period covered by this book to illuminate his theme:
‘During Attlee’s Premiership (and excluding the part years of 1945 and 1951) there was an annual average of 87 Cabinet Meetings and of 340 circulated papers. The lowest year for circulated papers was 1949 when there were 252. By the early 1970s, when I first sat in the corner of the Cabinet Room as a Junior Private Secretary in Mr Heath’s Office, there was an average of 60 meetings a year and of 140 Cabinet memoranda per year.
‘By the early 1990s, a significantly different pattern had emerged. There were, by then, no more than 40 meetings of the Cabinet per year (and, if statistics were kept on the length of the meetings, much shorter ones). More significantly, there was a very marked reduction in the number of memoranda considered. In only one year of the 1990s were more than 20 memoranda circulated.’
These 1990s Cabinet papers, Butler explained, ‘would have mainly covered the annual public expenditure plans, the economic material on which the Chancellor of the Exchequer collected the views of his colleagues four weeks in advance of the Budget and the legislative programme for the coming year’. The remaining business of the Cabinet in the Major years ‘was introduced orally under four standard agenda items – Parliamentary Business, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs and European Affairs’.
Under Tony Blair this patterned was maintained, with virtually every item of his historically very terse Cabinets (ministers and officials made much in early 1999 of Cabinets sometimes lasting ‘at least an hour, up from the 30 to 45 minutes’ of the early Blair years) arising under one or other of the four regular headings.
Robin Butler’s conclusion drawn from his study of the changing pattern of Cabinet government over fifty years was quite striking. ‘By the 1990s, it could be said that, from being an executive body (at least in a formal sense) in Attlee’s time, Cabinet had reverted to something close to what it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a meeting of political colleagues at which the issues of the moment were informally reported or discussed.
The differences between the two arch insiders, Robin Butler and Robert Armstrong, should not be exaggerated. But Butler seemed more at ease with and more readily accepting of the reality of power as exercised during the 1990s (including the first twenty months of Tony Blair’s premiership) than the man who had taught him much of his craft during their time together in No. 10. I invited him during his IHR seminar to describe and tread the jagged line between prime ministerial power and Cabinet power. The full exchange (from which I have already quoted in part) concluded the seminar and ran like this:
HENNESSY: Can I ask a final question? The subject is this endless debate about prime ministerial versus Cabinet government . . . You have always been rather like the Cabinet system you have presided over – you have always been adaptable, and managed to portray whatever is going on as pretty well consonant with at least one bit or other of the past (which is, as you know, how you have run the constitution for so long with such aplomb applauded by me and others). But do you think there is a degree to which we ought to worry about excessive prime ministerialism, creeping prime ministerialism? Give us the Butler benchmarks against which we can judge this and when we might have to start making a bit of a fuss on behalf of that beautiful constitution which you so carefully preserved for so long.
BUTLER: I do not think so. I think the instruments are all there for, if a Prime Minister gets off the leash, doing something about it. What could illustrate it better than what happened in the Margaret Thatcher case in 1990 . . .?
HENNESSY: One of her Cabinet ministers said to me that it took a very long time.
BUTLER: Well, it was not eleven years that a serious number of them seriously wanted to get rid of her. What two, three years maybe? If that situation develops then the instruments are, I think, still there. We do have a system in which very great power is given to people if they have a large parliamentary majority as well. John Major did not have that and so John Major’s power was very greatly constrained during the last government. The deal is that you give people very considerable power for five years, then they can be thrown out, and, in the meantime, if things get bad enough there are ways of getting rid of them. That is the deal of our constitution. And I think there are enough means to get rid of them that it is not seriously our concern.
HENNESSY: On that reassuring note, we can all sleep easier in our beds.
In fact, I was not altogether reassured, not least because it took a quite exceptional concatenation of circumstances to eject Mrs Thatcher in November 1990. Like George Jones, I have always believed that this debate lies at the heart of the British Constitution as it involves the necessary restraint of the potentially overmighty powers that have fallen into the hands of the British Prime Minister since Sir Robert Peel’s time at least. And I do not see the British system resting on those self-righting characteristics with which Robin Butler sought to calm his listeners. The debate has exhibited an extraordinary durability and vitality not because it has been a job-creation scheme for generations of historians and political scientists but because it matters – and continues to matter to the likes of Robert Armstrong and Robin Butler, too, and those they have left behind in Whitehall.
When Lord Armstrong addressed my MA students in January 1999, he concluded with some observations on the Blair style of decision-taking which he acknowledged was ‘far from the Platonic idea of Cabinet government’. Because, he continued, ‘it was familiar from the days of opposition, ministers were comfortable with it. It seems to have worked well enough while ministers new to government were learning how to run their departments and manage their policies, and while those policies were for the most part policies already formulated and agreed in opposition. But we have been seeing these last few weeks just how fragile the system is, with little local difficulties becoming serious enough for ministers and commentators alike to talk about a “re-launch” of the New Labour government. [Lord Armstrong was talking shortly after Peter Mandelson’s resignation from the Department of Trade and Industry and the departure of Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s press aide, from the Treasury – both in the wake of the furore about the home loan to Mandelson in Opposition days from Geoffrey Robinson.] I think that we are seeing that this system is not well suited to the strains and stresses and complexities of responsibility in government.
‘We can already hear the commentators predicting – no doubt with the benefit of spin-doctoring guidance – a return to more conventional Cabinet government, as the government encounters unforeseen developments and crises – “events, dear boy, events” – to which they have to respond with policies and decisions, not just with criticisms and comments which are easy enough to make when you do not have responsibility for dealing with them. The further away from the last election we go, the greater the need to develop policies and decisions to deal with events and to look towards the future. And the more important it becomes for the Prime Minister to carry the government wholeheartedly with him and his immediate colleagues, as the next general election begins to loom ever closer. A return to a more collegiate style of government will not surprise me; perhaps it is already overdue.’
Armstrong’s analysis accorded more closely with mine than did Butler’s. By coincidence, the same day Lord Armstrong spoke at QMW I received a letter from a highly placed official at the heart of central government to whom I had sent the proofs of my latest attempt to photograph the Blair administration in flight. This particular snapshot reflected the position in the autumn of 1988, before the ‘events’ of December 1998 which saw the spectacular demise of Peter Mandelson on the field of his greatest expertise – crisis-managing the media. This is what the senior official wrote in what I interpreted as a fusion of the Butler notion of the ‘constitutional deal’ and the Armstrong argument about the collective grain of government reasserting itself in response to time and chance:
. . . the departures of Peter Mandelson and [Charlie] Whelan have changed the landscape, the former much more than the latter. Your next over-flight should nonetheless find the reins of government still firmly in the hands of No. 10 . . .
There has, however, to my eyes, been another change in recent months. Following the election when the manifesto and the campaign triumph allowed the Prime Minister in effect to set his own agenda, and to assume that his followers would follow him, the role of a Cabinet as a consensus-building body has begun to increase since the second half of last year. It is still more a forum in which colleagues inform each other what is going on rather than ask for views, let alone contrary views. But these views are beginning to appear in increasing volume. Which presumably meets some of your criteria for Cabinet Government. And of course the Prime Minister’s control of the Cabinet remains as absolute as ever.
From this January 1999 snapshot one can sense the fluidity of the picture and feel the interplay of power and personality that lies at the heart of both real-life government and the scholarly debates which feed off it. It is that interplay and those real-life, real-time overviews, which are the essence of this book.
The early weeks of 1999 proved especially fruitful and intriguing for long-time observers of such interplaying forces and factors. The issue of prime ministerial power intruded (and not for the first time) into the consciousness of Tony Blair who was, perhaps surprisingly, quite sensitive to the ebb and flow of the debate. An insider close to him had told me during the previous autumn that:
‘Tony is very good at the wide sky – the big picture – and very good at handling tomorrow. It’s the bit in between that’s the problem. He is interested in how history regards him as a Prime Minister. He doesn’t approach it in an intellectual way, though he is very interested in what intellectuals say about him.’
It was only a few months later, in February 1999, during a debate on Lords reform that the House of Commons became aware of a plan to curb the powers of the Prime Minister when that veteran observer of premiers and the constitution, Tony Benn, told the House that: ‘What we really need – and I a drafting it now – is some legislation. I am going to call it the Modernization of the Premiership Bill.’
The genesis of this idea had arisen at a meeting of Tony Benn and my students at Westminster a few days earlier, during which he compared the style of Labour prime ministers.
‘Clem [Attlee] was very collective in character . . . Clem was the chairman of a committee but also very decisive . . . Wilson was very much a committee man . . . Jim [Callaghan] was an old trade unionist who believed you ought to discuss . . . And now we have the president.’
Mindful of the Government of Britain Bill he had published in 1991, I suggested he might now draft a ‘Prime Minister of Britain Bill’. He expressed great enthusiasm for this, announced his intention on the floor of the House five days later and sent me a copy of it in the middle of February. Four clauses long, it reflected Mr Benn’s argument, as outlined to my students, that ‘We have shifted from a parliamentary system to a presidential one because the British Constitution allows that to happen because the powers of the Crown are at the disposal of the Prime Minister.’ The Benn Bill proposed that eleven prerogative powers (two of which – the dissolution of Parliament and the appointment of a premier – are personal to the Monarch, not the Prime Minister) should henceforth ‘require the assent of the House of Commons before having effect’. They were, in addition to the Queen’s personal prerogatives:
The declaration of war on the committing of the Armed Forces to conflict, except in self-defence.
The signing or ratification of treaties.
The recognition of foreign governments.
The assenting to legislation or directives issued by the European Union.
The appointment of bishops, judges, peers, ministers, European commissioners, ambassadors, chairs of public bodies.
The establishment of royal commissions.
The issuing of orders in council.
The exercise of executive powers not conferred by statute.
The declaration of states of emergency.
Given that the Benn Bill had no chance of a successful passage through Parliament and into law, it no doubt afforded Tony Blair minimal grief.
The question of Mr Blair’s style of premiership, however, did cause him a degree of bother at much the same time, thanks to a passing remark in a lecture of mine on exactly this theme (to which I have already referred) which was published on 1 February, the day Mr Benn outlined his plan to curb the premier’s powers in the Commons.
In The Blair Centre: A Question of Command and Control? I had disclosed that in the spring of 1998, Lady Thatcher ‘found herself at a banquet in Buckingham Palace separated from the Queen and Blair only by a vast bowl of flowers. “I’m worried about that young man,” confided the warrior queen (as opposed to the real one) to her neighbour, a former colleague, without a trace of irony. “He’s getting awfully bossy.”
The Sunday Times picked up the story and ran it on its front page on 31 January, its Political Editor, Michael Prescott, writing that: ‘Those who remain close to the former Prime Minister confirmed last night that she is concerned about Blair’s “bossiness”.’
The unfortunate Mr Blair had to take questions on this the following morning when he appeared with Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan on ITV’s Good Morning with Richard and Judy programme as part of what was then a new strategy of by-passing the politicised and sceptical metropolitan media. Questioned about Lady Thatcher’s opinion, he said: ‘I don’t actually think I’m a very bossy person at all. You have to be firm as a leader.’ The story ran on-and-off for over a week until Jimmy Young, putting the same point to him on his BBC Radio 2 programme on 2 February, almost trapped the Prime Minister into an uncharacteristic criticism of his predecessor-but-one:
‘Yes, I mean, when I heard about this and I was thinking about Margaret Thatcher calling me bossy I was . . . well, anyway. But I don’t think I’m bossy but I do like to give a lead and I do think it’s important to do so . . .’
It was quite plain in early 1999, as it had been from the outset of Mr Blair’s premiership (and indeed from Mrs Thatcher’s), that the question of power at the centre would not go away (although the first two months of that year did represent an unusually rich and vivid recrudescence of an old debate).
In fact, premiership and Cabinet will matter as long as Prime Minister and ministers and meetings called ‘Cabinet’ exist. This is an issue that has straddled the coming and going of the British Empire; was total, limited and cold; the extension and completion of the franchise; and the accession to what was then called the European Economic Community. It will surely survive still closer European integration, a rebalancing of the wider British Constitution and a renegotiation of the relationship between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. For the debate is a kind of running commentary. It is about a governing state of mind, about process as much as policy, about the nature of political power and its arbitration at the epicentre of British government. It matters to insiders and outsiders, ministers and civil servants, Prime Ministers ad electors, professors and students. Sterile it is not. Boring it will never be, any more (I hope) than what appears between these covers. For the tension between Robert Armstrong’s ‘Platonic idea’ and Robin Butler’s ‘constitutional deal’ can never – and should never – be resolved. And each new arrival in No. 10 experiences it and manages it afresh, which is why transitions of governing and prime ministerial power repay especially close study.