The Prime Minister

and Cabinet
Stephen Buckley

P O L I T I C S S T U D Y G U I D E S
The Prime Minister
and Cabinet
Books in the Politics Study Guides series

British Government and Politics: A Comparative Guide

Duncan Watts

International Politics: An Introductory Guide

Alasdair Blair, Steven Curtis and Sean McGough

US Government and Politics: An Introductory Guide

Will Storey

Britain and the European Union

Alistair Jones

The Changing Constitution

Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd

Democracy in Britain
Matt Cole

Devolution in the United Kingdom

Russell Deacon and Alan Sandry

Elections and Voting in the UK

Chris Robinson

The Judiciary, Civil Liberties and Human Rights

Steven Foster

Political Communication
Steven Foster

Political Parties in Britain

Matt Cole

The Politics of Northern Ireland

Joanne McEvoy

Pressure Groups
Duncan Watts

The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Stephen Buckley

The UK Parliament
Moyra Grant
The Prime Minister
and Cabinet

Stephen Buckley

Edinburgh University Press

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,
Ronald Buckley, 1927–2002

© Stephen Buckley, 2006

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in 11/13pt Monotype Baskerville by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10 0 7486 2289 6 (paperback)

ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2289 4 (paperback)

The right of Stephen Buckley to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly

Publishing Initiatives Fund
Contents

List of boxes viii

List of tables ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction xi

1 The Executive Territory 1

Introduction 2
Defining the executive 2
Relations between the executive and the legislature 12
Concluding points 19

2 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 25

Origins and history 26
Role and functions of the modern Cabinet 28
Size and structure 30
Cabinet ministers: how to be appointed 39
Cabinet ministers: how to get sacked 43

3 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 49

Introduction 50
Cabinet committees 50
The Cabinet Office 60

4 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 70

Introduction 71
Collective cabinet responsibility 71
The case of Robin Cook and Clare Short 81
Is cabinet government in decline? 84
Cabinet government: alive and well 86
Concluding points 89

5 The Prime Minister: Power 93

Introduction 94
Origins and history 94
The role of the Prime Minister 95
vi The Prime Minister and Cabinet

The powers of the prime minister 101

Checks on prime ministerial power 106
6 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 116
The bureaucracy of the Prime Minister 117
The Prime Minister’s Office: Policy and Government 119
The Prime Minister’s Office: Communication and
Strategy 125
The Prime Minster’s Office: Government and Political
Relations 126
Wider dimension of support for the Prime Minister 128
Case study: Lord Birt and blue sky thinking 131
Trends in prime ministerial support 134
Should there be a Prime Minister’s Department? 135
7 The Prime Minister and Style 143
Why is style important? 144
Style as personality 144
Style and skill 149
Style in Opposition 150
The case of Tony Blair as Prime Minister: a ‘tousled
efficiency’ 152
The case of Margaret Thatcher: not ‘to be’ but
‘to do’ 157
The case of John Major: the ‘poor general’ 162
8 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief ? 165
Introduction 166
Prime ministerial government 167
Presidential government 171
Comparing the Prime Minister and the President 172
President or Prime Minister? The debate 172
9 The Core Executive 183
The core executive: definitions 184
The core executive: a useful model 185
The relationship of the key players in the core 188
How the core executive works 194
Criticisms of the core executive 200
Concluding points 202
 Contents vii

10 Conclusion: The Prime Minister, Cabinet and

Synoptic Skills 207
Synoptic study 208
References 210
Index 214
Boxes

5.1 Prime ministerial roles and power: an overview 96

6.1 Official and political Number 10 118
6.2 The Prime Minister’s Office (June 2005) 127
7.1 Prime ministerial styles 148
7.2 Thatcher’s and Blair’s advantages: a comparison 160
8.1 Comparison of the Prime Minister and the President 173
8.2 Michael Foley on the British Presidency 178
9.1 Relations in the core: the key questions 189
9.2 The core executive: 1940s to 1980s 197
9.3 More or less government? Blair and the core executive 202
Tables

1.1 The separation of powers in the UK and the USA 5

1.2 The UK: a separation of powers or fusion? 6
2.1 The Cabinet (June 2005) 31
2.2 Before he/she was Prime Minister 33
2.3 The movement of ministers 40
3.1 The purpose of cabinet committees 53
3.2 Ministerial (standing) committees of the Cabinet
(May 2005) 56
3.3 Ad hoc/miscellaneous committees (May 2005) 57
4.1 Three strands of collective responsibility 73
5.1 Cabinet government: the 1916 reforms 97
5.2 Sources of prime ministerial authority 102
5.3 The formal constitutional powers of the Prime Minister 104
8.1 Evidence for and against prime ministerial government 168
Acknowledgements

This book is the product of more than ten years of conversations and
discussions with a steadily growing number of A-level students. There
are now too many of you to list, but you know who you are, and your
teacher thanks you from across the years. I should like to acknowledge
a greater (and long overdue) debt of honour to the Department of
Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford for all
the initial encouragement in the study and teaching of politics. More
recently, I should like to thank the Politics Association, especially the
tireless work and encouragement of Glynis Sandwith and the PARC
editor, Duncan Watts, who edited this volume with equal measures of
enthusiasm and patience. I never come away from a conversation
with Duncan feeling anything other than inspired and supported.
Pauline Rees, Jacqui Wood, Vanessa Pryce, Jackie Cahalin, Ed Elvish,
Lance Edynbry and Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh University Press
have all helped in different ways at different times – thank you. Finally,
thanks are due to my family, both in Oldham and in Barrow but espe-
cially to my wife Caroline and our children Amelia and Will.
Introduction

The central executive territory of the British system of government

is an exciting, dramatic and highly complex area of modern politics.
This book is designed to satisfy A-level students and university under-
graduates who are seeking a single-volume approach to this particu-
lar aspect of their political studies.
This book seeks to illustrate a central point about the modern
system of government and governance in the United Kingdom – that
the Prime Minister and Cabinet now represent the central element of
a core system of government made up of a complex and compli-
cated network of relationships, alliances and resource partnerships.
While the Prime Minister and the Cabinet are essential components
of this system, they are not always able to dominate and control the
way it functions. They must work to accommodate the aims and
ambitions of other agencies while, at the same time, responding to the
unpredictable and rapidly changing contexts of domestic and inter-
national circumstances that are, to misquote Dickens’s Mr Micawber,
‘beyond their individual control’.
The book begins with an overview of the executive territory that
introduces the key structures, concepts, theories and histories of the
executive branch of British government. All the discussions that take
place in the remaining nine chapters are set initially in context as part
of this opening chapter.
Chapter 2 charts the origins, role and structure of the British
cabinet system of government and will provide details of the make-
up of the modern Cabinet prior to discussing the traditional and con-
stitutional roles of modern cabinet government. Cabinet hierarchies
and the selection and removal of cabinet ministers will also be
covered here.
Chapter 3 will continue to look at the Cabinet but will focus on the
bureaucracy of the cabinet system. We shall examine the develop-
ment of cabinet committees, the use of cabinet committees by recent
Prime Ministers and effectiveness of cabinet committees. We shall
also consider the structure and role of the Cabinet Office and the
structure and role of the Cabinet Secretariat under Tony Blair. The
xii The Prime Minister and Cabinet

chapter will conclude with a discussion of the recent reforms to the

workings and structure of the Cabinet Office.
Definitions and traditional views of how the doctrine of collective
responsibility came into being will be discussed in Chapter 4 as will
the impact of recent events, especially those surrounding the war in
Iraq, on the condition of cabinet government. This will lead into a
detailed introduction to the debate surrounding the ‘decline’ of
cabinet government which will be developed in more detail in later
chapters when the focus is on prime ministerial power.
Attention turns to the Prime Minister in Chapter 5 with a dis-
cussion of prime ministerial power and the constraints on the
powers of the Prime Minister. Chapter 6 will develop the discussion
to focus on the support and bureaucracy of the Prime Minister and
will include analysis of the role of Downing Street, wider means of
prime ministerial support and a case study of the role of Lord Birt.
The chapter will also look at trends in prime ministerial support, and
will consider the question: should there be a Prime Minister’s
Department?
The debate on the nature of prime ministerial style and why the
study of prime ministerial style is important is the focus of Chapter 7.
The distinction between style and personality and political style as
political skill will be discussed before comparing the political styles of
Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.
Chapter 8 – ‘Hail to the Chief ?’ – will consider the extent to which
the Prime Minister is, or is in the process of becoming, a presidential
type of leader, and will provide an overview of the debate surround-
ing the issue of prime ministerial versus presidential government.
Arguments here will be illustrated with examples from the prime min-
isterial careers of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The arguments
for and against presidentialism will be outlined, as will the key argu-
ments of Michael Foley.
The ‘core executive’ analysed in Chapter 9 brings together all the
key elements and conclusions of the book. The ‘core executive’ refers
to the key institutions at the very centre of a system of government.
It consists of a large and variable number of players that includes the
Prime Minister, the Cabinet and its committees, the Prime Minister’s
Office and the Cabinet Office. It also includes large co-ordinating
departments such as the government’s law officers, the security and
 Introduction xiii

intelligence services and the Treasury. We will look at definitions and

theories of the nature of core executives, the nature of prime minis-
terial / civil servant relationships in a core executive and the chang-
ing context of prime ministerial influence. We will also look at how
the core executive works and how it has evolved before considering
some of the criticisms of the core executive.
Finally, the concluding Chapter 10 will bring together the key
arguments of the book and will suggest ways in which students may
wish to use the other books in this series to undertake a detailed syn-
optic overview of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in terms of other
aspects of the British political system, and even perhaps to consider
using the information and arguments here as a starting point for
detailed comparative study.
The chapters in this book focus on the British executive at a crucial
point in its history. This fact is illustrated by the following points, all
relevant in the summer of 2005:
• A Labour leader/Prime Minister recently returned to power in an
historical third election victory.
• A Prime Minister who has announced his intention to retire before
the next general election.
• An obvious ‘leader in waiting’ in the shape of Gordon Brown.
• A European Union in political turmoil following the rejection of
the Constitutional Treaty.
• The continued presence of British armed forces in Iraq with no
obvious sign of an ‘exit strategy’.
• Terrorist attacks on London by suicide bombers and subsequent
anti-terrorist measures that raised some issues of civil liberties.
The sheer complexity of the situations listed above defy any simplis-
tic attempts by politicians to deal with them in anything like the ‘trad-
itional’ and ‘constitutional’ ways beloved of those who cling to an
essentially nineteenth-century view of how the central executive
should be arranged.
As we have already said, the modern political world is complex and
complicated, and the political relationships that develop within it are
a product of that complexity and confusion. As far as the United
Kingdom is concerned, the traditional view of a neat machine at the
heart of a government based on collective Cabinet responsibility no
xiv The Prime Minister and Cabinet

longer applies. This is now government by complex and interwoven

webs of relationships, networks and contacts. How much of this is
actually controlled by the politicians enmeshed inside it is a question
for which there are no simple answers.
CHAPTER 1

The Executive Territory

Contents
Introduction 2
Defining the executive 2
Relations between the executive and the legislature 12
Concluding points 19

Overview
The opening chapter examines the central branch of government that will
form the basis of the rest of the book – the executive. By choosing to focus
on executive power and executive territory in its broadest sense, a firm
grounding will be established on which to construct a much more detailed
analysis of the central executive territory in the British system of
parliamentary democracy.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• Defining the executive
• Defining the Cabinet
• Defining the Prime Minister
• Summary of the positions of heads of state and heads of government
• Comparing parliamentary and presidential systems
• The relationship between the executive and the legislature
2 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Introduction
To develop a full understanding of the role, place and importance of
the Prime Minister and Cabinet in the modern British system of
government, it becomes necessary to place both institutions in the
wider context of executive powers and territories in Western liberal
democracies. Having established a clear set of guidelines as to the
nature of modern executive power we can go on to construct a detailed
analysis of Cabinet and Prime Minister.

Defining the executive

In this section we shall begin by defining the executive before going
on to provide clear definitions of:

• Cabinet
• Prime Minister
• Heads of state and heads of government

This section will also provide a brief comparison of parliamentary

and presidential systems.
If we attempt to locate the centre of political power and authority
in a state we usually find it in the executive branch of government.
It is the role of the executive to organise and arrange the affairs of the
nation state by formulating and then implementing policy decisions.
The work of the executive is usually performed by two distinct groups
of people:

• elected politicians
• paid, permanent officials (such as the Civil Service in the United
Kingdom)

It is this political control of the state’s affairs by the executive that we

refer to as government. The terms ‘executive’ and ‘government’
therefore become interchangeable. In the United Kingdom, the gov-
ernment consists of the chief or head of the executive – the Prime
Minister – plus his or her chosen Cabinet and junior ministers. Other
political systems organise their executives in similar ways.
 The Executive Territory 3

• In the United States the President is the chief executive and chooses
the Cabinet. Cabinet posts in the US, however, are filled by
unelected individuals.
• Germany has a parliamentary head of government, or prime
minister, called the Chancellor. The Chancellor is chosen by a
majority of the popularly elected lower house of parliament, the
Bundestag (Federal Assembly). The Chancellor then selects a
Cabinet of about twenty ministers from among the parties in the
Bundestag to form what is usually a coalition government.
• The government in Japan is headed by a Prime Minister who
appoints the Cabinet.
• The head of government in Turkey is a Prime Minister who
appoints the Cabinet.
• Spain, a constitutional monarchy like the United Kingdom, is
headed by a President of the government (basically a prime min-
ister). The monarch appoints cabinet ministers on the recom-
mendation of the prime minister.
• Sweden, another monarchy, has a Prime Minister who appoints
his or her Cabinet.
• Finally, in France, the head of the government is the Prime
Minister, who is appointed by the President. The Council of
Ministers (Cabinet) is appointed by the Prime Minister.

The notion of the modern executive was given its most influential
interpretation by the eighteenth-century French political theorist,
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. Montesquieu was
observing the system of government in pre-Revolutionary France. In
1748, in his book The Spirit of Laws, he first put forward the theory of
separation of powers. The French state at this time was ruled by
the monarchy, and Louis XIV had emphasised the power that lay in
his hands by referring to himself as ‘the state’ – ‘L’état c’est moi’.
Therefore, in eighteenth-century France, Louis was laying claim to be,
in one person, the living embodiment of the legislature, the executive
and the judiciary.
In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu questioned the absolute power
of the rulers of France by making a case for a ‘separation of powers’
based on the principle that the legislature, executive and judiciary be
ordered in such a way as to be three independent and separated
4 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

branches of government. Organise a government on these lines,

argued Montesquieu, and each branch will check and balance the
other, thus maintaining a democratic system, freedom of the individ-
ual and offer protection against tyrannical power that places the
whole state in the hands of one person. If the three branches of gov-
ernment are not separated, then liberty is lost.
In the United States, this principle of separation of powers has
been a central doctrine of the Constitution since its framing in 1789.
In British politics, however, the principle is less clear. The key factor
to keep in mind when observing and comparing separation of powers
in the two systems is the respective constitutions. Compared against
the rigid and written American Constitution the British Constitution
is uncodified and has evolved over time as opposed to being fixed at
a clear starting point in history. This evolution has allowed the three
branches of government in Britain to overlap, become blurred and in
some cases ‘fuse’ together.
Table 1.1 attempts to clarify these three roles and to show how they
operate in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Two key points need to be re-emphasised in relation to the table –
first, the written American constitution clearly establishes the princi-
ple of extensive separation of powers (as opposed to the uncodified
United Kingdom Constitution); and, second, as we have already
mentioned, several aspects of the British system have become ‘fused’.
This fusion is illustrated in Table 1.2.
Having established a basic definition of executive power we need
to look closely at its application in the British system of government.

The Cabinet
The Cabinet dominates the executive branch of government in
Britain. Britain is therefore traditionally said to have cabinet gov-
ernment made up of a relatively small group of MPs drawn from
the legislature and headed by the Prime Minister. The Cabinet is tra-
ditionally said to operate as a decision-making body, to provide an
opportunity for the general management over the formulation of
policy, and to give some clear cohesion to the programme on which
the government has been elected. In doing this, the structure of the
Cabinet should allow all departmental perspectives and competing
claims to be filtered through the specific issue being debated. It is this
 The Executive Territory 5

Table 1.1 The separation of powers

in the UK and the USA

The element UK USA

Legislature – • Parliament – the • Congress – Senate

passes and, in House of Commons and the House of
some cases, and the House of Representatives.
makes the law. Lords. • Has more
• Passes more law opportunity to
on behalf of the pass laws of its
executive than it own than the UK
makes itself. Parliament.

Executive – • The Crown, the • The President and

those who are Cabinet, The Prime those individuals
responsible for Minister and chosen by the
making the ministers, and the President to be
day-by-day Civil Service. part of the Cabinet.
decisions on • Also includes some
how the country local and regional
should be government and
governed. needs to take
account of UK
membership of
the EU.

Judiciary – • The judicial system • The Supreme

where laws put and the hierarchy of Court that acts as
forward by the courts. the guardian of the
executive and Constitution
passed by the
legislature are
interpreted and
enforced.

process, particularly the quality of the debates and discussions, that,

in recent years, has been subject to close scrutiny by those who feel
that Cabinet has drifted away from what was its traditional role. For
some people, this is nothing less than the decline of cabinet govern-
ment, and will be discussed at length later in this book. Nevertheless,
6 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 1.2 The UK: a separation of powers or fusion?

The Prime Minister • Head of the executive, yet is elected to

represent a constituency in Parliament
(the legislature) and regularly attends
sessions in the Commons.
Compare this with
• The American President is elected to
be head of the executive. The
President has no part to play in the
day-to-day business of Congress.
The Cabinet • Similar to the Prime Minister in that
most cabinet ministers will be MPs
elected to represent a constituency in
the Commons. They are therefore in
the executive and the legislature.
Compare this with
• The Presidential Cabinet in the US
which is appointed, not elected, and
which has no role in the business of
Congress.
The Lord Chancellor • The leading Law officer in the UK.
• Appointed by the Prime Minister.
• Member of the Cabinet.
• Speaker in the House of Lords.
• The most senior judge in the judiciary.
• The lord Chancellor is probably unique
in that he manages to be a member of
all three branches of government.
• Law lords also find themselves in
both the legislature and the judiciary.

in broad terms, cabinet government remains the collective expression

of the executive. The origins of the Cabinet, and an overview of the
constitutional struggles with the monarchy, will be discussed in
Chapter 2. For now, we offer a broad analysis of the principles of
cabinet government.
The Cabinet has been traditionally viewed as playing a crucial role
in the democratic system, accountable to Parliament for the actions
 The Executive Territory 7

of government departments and ministers and providing, in the

memorable phrase of the nineteenth-century political writer, Walter
Bagehot, ‘the efficient secret of the English constitution . . . the close
union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative
powers . . . A cabinet is a combining committee – a hyphen which
joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the
executive part of the state.’ In practice, however, the role of the
cabinet in the unwritten constitution has always been informal. If we
go back and examine the origins of cabinet government around the
time of the 1688 Glorious Revolution we will see that the Cabinet
was given no legal powers, no formal status. Whatever powers the
Cabinet might be said to hold have always been those given to the
individual ministers by the Crown and not to the Cabinet in any col-
lective way.1
For some observers, the constitutional vagueness on which the
Cabinet rests is a cause for concern. While arguing that the Cabinet
is ‘a self-moderating form of government which protects against
tyranny and is quite different from the dictatorial, presidential or
monarchical systems found in many countries of the world and
throughout history’, John Kingdom goes on to argue that it is only
convention that ensures that cabinet government will take place, and
that these particular conventions, though supremely important, are
among the most fragile in the Constitution.2 Kingdom’s arguments,
especially those relating to the lack of constitutional constraints on
the executive, and the suggestions that the real power of the execu-
tive lies not in the Cabinet but elsewhere, will be examined in detail
in later chapters. It is enough for now, in this general introduction to
executive power, to point the way to these later debates and to empha-
sise their importance.
The Prime Minister chairs the modern Cabinet. It will be the
Prime Minister who will select those Members of Parliament who will
sit in the Cabinet and who will eventually reshuffle them around the
cabinet table or sack them. Most cabinet members have the title
‘Secretary of State’ and will be given responsibility for managing a
Department of State, or ‘Ministry’.
We have already made the point that the constitutional position
of the Cabinet is, at best, vague and that the Cabinet as such has no
legal powers. What powers the Cabinet may be said to have are
8 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

actually those vested in its members as secretaries of state. It is only

the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility that binds all members
of the cabinet to support the decisions taken in cabinet meetings.
Failure to do this usually results in resignation or the sack. We will
examine the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility in more
detail in Chapter 3.
Cabinet functions will be covered in depth elsewhere but for now
may be briefly summarised as follows:
• Deciding the main directions of domestic and foreign policy.
• Controlling the agenda in Parliament.
• Co-ordinating the policies of government departments.
• Allocating the expenditure of government
• Long-term strategic planning.
• ‘Troubleshooting’ unforeseen difficulties and problems.
For the Cabinet to be able to carry out the growing workload of gov-
ernment effectively, a system of cabinet committees has been
developing steadily since its introduction in 1916. Although the exis-
tence of cabinet committees was only officially recognised in 1992,
the network of committees has broadened into three main groups:
committees, subcommittees and ministerial groups. These commit-
tees and groups now form a significant part of the cabinet system and
will be discussed in detail when we look more closely at the Cabinet
and when we address the issues and questions surrounding the sup-
posed decline of cabinet government.
Given the scale of what we have already described, it should come
as no surprise to discover that the modern Cabinet requires a sub-
stantial bureaucracy to help with the growing amount of admin-
istration. Since 1916, the business of the Cabinet – its agendas,
discussions, decisions and minutes – has been the responsibility of a
cabinet office headed by a cabinet secretary. At the time of writing
the cabinet secretary was Andrew Turnbull and, as such, he held the
position of the most senior civil servant in the United Kingdom.
Turnbull retired in the summer of 2005 and was replaced by Sir Gus
O’Donnell.
The Cabinet Office is based in 10 Downing Street from where it
organises every aspect of the work of Cabinet and its numerous
subcommittees and groups. As we shall soon discover, the various
 The Executive Territory 9

duties of the Cabinet Office and its official committees can often be
interpreted in an overtly political and non-neutral manner. Given the
nature of cabinet minutes, and the fact that they are drawn up by the
Cabinet Secretary in consultation with the Prime Minister, some min-
isters frequently question the extent to which the minutes of a cabinet
meeting have been written more to reflect the wishes of the Prime
Minister than being an accurate record of what took place in the
meeting. As we will go on to illustrate, it is possible to see the Cabinet
Office as having a clearly political role at the heart of the executive.
As we shall see, not everyone can agree on what position the
Cabinet now occupies in the executive. Views range from the gloomy
prognosis of the ‘death’ of cabinet government through to the more
realistic arguments surrounding ‘systems’ of cabinet government and
beyond to the views of those who argue in favour of the centre of the
executive being dominated by a flexible and changing ‘core’ of key
players enmeshed in a complex system of relationships.

The Prime Minister

The position of the Prime Minister is similar to that of the Cabinet
in that it has no clear constitutional role. Nevertheless, the office of
Prime Minister is now undoubtedly at the very heart of the executive
and, as such, holds substantial political power. Because of the vague
nature of the Constitution on the position of the Prime Minister, and
because of the particular way that the position has evolved, there are
substantial and far-reaching powers now associated with the office
that are not always immediately obvious simply by observing the
‘official’ powers.
It is this ‘evolution’ of prime ministerial power that we will examine
in some detail in Chapter 4. Similarly to that which has already been
said here about the Cabinet, it is important to remember the lack of
clear constitutional structure around the post of prime minister.
Having evolved as a result of a ‘Hanoverian lack of Kingly interest in
all things British’,3 the post of prime minister quickly developed in
order to fill the power vacuum that the monarch had left in the
Cabinet. There is, in this evolution of power, an interesting historical
irony. The office of prime minister, certainly by the early nineteenth-
century at least, had assumed a superior if not supreme position in
relation to the rest of the Cabinet. The whole point of the struggles
10 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

between Parliament and the Crown in the late eighteenth-century

had been about the overbearing political power of the monarch.
What the architects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had not
intended was that the power and position of the monarch would
simply be rewritten and reconstituted through the prime minister
almost as a kind of ‘popular’ monarchy.
In this introductory overview of the British executive it is neces-
sary to raise the issue of the ‘Prime Minister as President’ debate in
order to highlight the detailed discussions elsewhere in this book and
to offer a brief attempt at a general comparison of heads of execu-
tives. To a certain extent, the debate surrounding prime ministerial
power has moved on substantially since the early days of the prime
minister versus president arguments. Cabinet ‘systems’ and ‘core’
executives are two schools of study that offer us greater insight into
the true nature of prime ministerial power than was necessarily the
case as recently as the mid-1990s.

Head of state, head of government

When considering the nature of executive power it is useful to have
made the clear distinction between ‘state’ and ‘government’ before-
hand. We have already explained the nature of government as
embodied in the élite group who have the authority to make laws and
to run the state – but what is the state?
It is often useful to think of the state as all the things that would
remain if the government as a group of elected individuals were to
be abducted by aliens some time next week. The politicians may be
gone, yet the institutions and central concepts of the state would
remain. The United Kingdom would presumably retain its territory
and borders, the citizens (or subjects) of the state would also remain,
as would the idea of a British nation sharing a set of broad similar-
ities in terms of language, culture, history and values. Law and
order, the authority we give to the police, the acceptance of a limited
monarchy and the central institutions of government would remain
also. It would no doubt be the case that a new government would be
constituted and assume control over and within the Constitution
and that Parliament would still be sovereign – the highest law-
making authority in the land. Governments organise and order the
 The Executive Territory 11

workings of the state. Those governments will come and they will
go. The state remains. The problem in the United Kingdom, as we
shall now show, is never this simple. The line between ‘state’ and
‘government’ is never clear, and the powers of the monarch and
prime minister in relation to the state and government can be
equally confusing.
In the United kingdom the monarch is the formal head of state.
When power was transferred from the monarch to the executive at
the end of the eighteenth century, it allowed a distinction to be made
between head of state and head of government. As we shall see,
however, this distinction is not always clear.
The main powers that the Prime Minister has at his or her disposal
are known as prerogative powers and are derived from those
functions that, before 1688, were performed by the monarchy. This
constitutional convention (there are no statutes or legal rulings that
confirm this state of affairs) allows the Prime Minister to carry out
functions in the name of the monarchy even though the crown plays
no active part in them. Part of these prerogative powers are per-
formed by the current Prime Minister on behalf of the Queen as
head of state as opposed to those that Tony Blair will find himself per-
forming as head of government.
In those political systems based on republican, as opposed to
limited monarchy, doctrines, the powers of the head of state would
normally be carried out by an elected president and would be outside
the arena of party politics and would therefore be performed on
behalf of the whole nation. Those duties that do have a party politi-
cal aspect are normally carried out by a head of government, either
by a prime minister or some such equivalent. The only other estab-
lished democracy that accepts this dual role of head of state and head
of government is the United States. In France, Germany, Ireland and
most other western democracies, the distinction between head of state
and head of government is clear and makes the comparison with the
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom more stark, especially as the
British Prime Minister does not usually make it clear in which capa-
city he or she is operating. In this sense, Margaret Thatcher’s descrip-
tion of her meetings with the American President as being that of ‘two
heads of state’ at least clarified the issue for her, irrespective of the con-
stitutional questions it raised. Having raised the issue of distinctions
12 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

between heads of state and government in relation to our discussions

on executive power we shall leave the debate and return to it later in
the book.

Relations between the executive and the legislature

Having established a basic set of definitions of the executive around
the Cabinet and the Prime Minister it will be useful to our later dis-
cussions of executive power in the United Kingdom if we outline
some key points that are relative to the nature of the relationship
between the executive and the legislature. In this section we will
introduce the following areas for discussion:
• Cabinet and Parliament
• Prime Minister and Parliament
• The executive and the European Union
The relationship between the executive and the legislature in a
political system is crucial to how that system will operate and govern
in practice. The United Kingdom has parliamentary govern-
ment. Here, the personnel of the executive are drawn from, and may
be located in, the legislature. In a parliamentary system the govern-
ment is held to be collectively accountable to the legislature for the
decisions that it makes and will remain in office only for the time that
it can retain the confidence of that body. Australia has this form of
government, as does New Zealand. Not surprisingly, because the
United Kingdom was a major influence on its post-war re-structuring,
Germany may be said to have many of the features normally
associated with parliamentary government, apart from the crucial
difference by which members of the German Cabinet are not
required to be members of the German legislature – the Bundestag.
Alternatively, some executives are part of presidential systems of
government. In this system the executive and the legislature are com-
posed of two separate groups of people. As we have already shown,
the President of the United States is elected for a four-year term of
office. The election for the President is separate from those elections
that choose members to sit in the two houses of Congress. The
President and the members of his Cabinet are prohibited from being
members of the Congress by the American Constitution.
 The Executive Territory 13

Not all liberal democracies organise the relationship between the

executive and the legislature on a strictly parliamentary or presiden-
tial basis. France, for instance, has a hybrid form of government that
combines features that are both presidential and parliamentary.
In its strictest sense, the phrase ‘legislature’ describes those institu-
tions in a political system that make or pass law. In the United Kingdom
these functions are carried out by the two chambers of Parliament at
Westminster and tend on the whole to be concerned more with passing
than with making laws. There are interesting comparisons to be made
here between the legislative arrangements in Britain with those of other
systems, most notably the United States.

Cabinet and Parliament

The majority of Cabinet members are drawn from the ranks of those
members of the winning party in a general election who have been
elected to represent constituencies for that party in the House of
Commons. The rules governing membership of the Cabinet are once
again based on constitutional conventions as opposed to strict rules of
statute. This looseness has allowed prime ministers to promote indi-
viduals to the Cabinet who have not been elected to serve in the
House of Commons. Lord Young served in the Thatcher Cabinet
between 1987 and 1988, while Lord Carrington had been Foreign
Secretary in an earlier Thatcher Cabinet in the early 1980s and had
held a Cabinet position for the Ministry of Defence under Heath
during the first half of the 1970s.
The Cabinet has a collective responsibility to the United
Kingdom Parliament. This collective ministerial responsibility is one
of the key features of parliamentary systems of government. Under
this convention the supremacy of the legislature is emphasised by its
ability to demand the resignation of the government if confidence in
that body is lost. This convention does not apply to presidential forms
of government because in most cases, the members of the executive
are not drawn from the legislature. The extent to which this doctrine
remains a central aspect of the British Constitution will be an issue
this book looks at in more detail in Chapter 3.
The other key convention governing the relationship between the
executive and Parliament is the doctrine of individual ministerial
responsibility. In brief, the convention of individual ministerial
14 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

responsibility requires each cabinet minister to be responsible to

Parliament for his or her own personal conduct, the general conduct
of his or her department, and the actions of his or her civil servants
in terms of policy-related actions or omissions. The most important
consequence of this convention is that the minister is answerable to
Parliament for the work of his or her department. Some prefer to
interpret this as Parliament having the power to force the resignation
of a minister who has been considered negligent. We should perhaps
remind ourselves at this point that the Cabinet has no formal powers
other than those invested in its individual members as secretaries
of state.
In recent years the key debate relating to the Cabinet and
Parliament has been dominated by discussions around the extent to
which the executive is able to dominate the legislature. As we shall see,
this domination is possible for a number of reasons:

• A highly effective system of government whips in the Commons

ensures that, in most cases, back-benchers vote in the way that is
expected of them.
• The British system of first past the post encourages large govern-
ment majorities and so therefore produces parties in Parliament
capable of dominating business irrespective of the opposition.
• The payroll vote ensures that junior members of the government
would effectively destroy any higher ministerial career if they were
ever to vote against the government.

The Prime Minister and Parliament

In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister is the head of govern-
ment, exercising many of the executive functions nominally vested
in the sovereign, who is head of state. According to custom, the
Prime Minister and the Cabinet (which he or she heads) are respon-
sible for their actions to Parliament, of which they are members by
(modern) convention. The Prime Minister at the time of writing is
Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party, who has been in office since
1997.
The Prime Minister has been a member of the House of Commons
since the early days of the twentieth-century. Sir Alec Douglas-Home,
who was Prime Minister for a brief period after the Profumo scandal
 The Executive Territory 15

in the early 1960s, was the first person to renounce his peerage in order
to re-enter the House of Commons to lead a party and secure a brief
tenure of office. Other than this, you would need to go back to the pre-
miership of Lord Salisbury (1886–1902) to find a Prime Minister who
assumed the office directly from the House of Lords.
The House of Commons has the power to act as a check on the
powers of the Prime Minister. As head of government the Prime
Minister requires the continued support of the House of Commons.
Without this support, expressed mainly by the continued goodwill of
the party that he or she leads, it is increasingly difficult for the Prime
Minister to remain in power. The Prime Minister therefore gets a sub-
stantial proportion of his or her authority through the continued
support of the House of Commons. As we shall see, the House of
Commons checks the powers of the Prime Minister mostly through
committee hearings and through question time, a weekly event where
the Prime Minister is required to respond to the questions of the
leader of the Opposition and other MPs.
The Prime Minister has a slightly different relationship with the
House of Lords. Under the Salisbury Convention (1915), the Lords
does not normally seek to oppose any measure that is promised by the
government in its election manifesto. When the House of Lords does
oppose the Prime Minister, it is generally ineffectual in defeating
entire bills (though almost all bills are successfully modified by the
Upper House during their passage through Parliament).
Peers (members of the House of Lords) are created by the sover-
eign on the advice of the Prime Minister; by obtaining the creation
of several new peers, the Prime Minister may flood the House of
Lords with individuals who will support his or her position. Such a
tactic was threatened in 1911 to ensure the passage of the Parliament
Act which, together with the Parliament Act of 1949, reduce the
powers of the House of Lords and establish the supremacy of the
Commons (in particular, the House of Lords can only delay, but not
reject, most bills on which the Commons insists). Challenges during
2004–5 by the Countryside Alliance on the legality of the Parliament
Act were not successful.
It has been argued that recent prime ministers have shown a
healthy disdain for Parliament, especially the routine business of the
House of Commons. Margaret Thatcher’s style in the Commons
16 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

was ‘robust’ and ‘uncompromising’ while Blair’s reforms to question

time have caused some critics to ask how seriously he takes his
responsibilities in relation to the Commons. The system of Prime
Minister’s Questions (PMQs), for instance, was reformed by Blair
shortly after coming to power in May 1997. Previously, PMQs had
taken place on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Under the new
arrangements of question time the leader of the Opposition may
make up to six interventions (previously three) and the leader of the
Liberal Democrats will normally ask two questions (previously one).
This change has prompted much debate. At the time of the change
the Conservatives opposed the move claiming it reduced the number
of times the Prime Minister was forced to account for his actions in
Parliament.
It is generally accepted, then, that in most circumstances, the
modern Prime Minister has substantial devices and opportunities
which allow him or her to give a clear impression that he or she is,
indeed, dominating Parliament. It is not possible to argue, as it is in
the case of the United States Congress, that Parliament is always able
to exert the same pressure on the Prime Minister as Congress fre-
quently does on the President. Unlike American presidents, British
prime ministers have a number of means at their disposal by which
they can frequently dominate the legislature for significant periods of
time, not least because they are themselves members of the legislature
and dominate the party with the largest majority. Other means of
executive dominance of Parliament that will be discussed in this book
include:
• Control of the Parliamentary timetable
• The opportunity to dominate debate
• The power to dissolve Parliament
• The timing of the general election
Each of the above factors needs to be examined in detail to give a clear
account of the arguments surrounding the executive ‘dominance’ of
the legislature in the British system of government. As we shall point
out throughout this book, however, the all-embracing nature of the
executive can often be overstated and, for every example of executive
‘dominance’, there remains the potential for the legislature to exercise
significant restraint and control.
 The Executive Territory 17

The executive and the European Union

The traditional role of the United Kingdom executive has changed
considerably in the period since Britain became a member of the
European Union. Since 1974, the Cabinet is no longer the key deci-
sion-making body in respect of any policy area which falls under the
jurisdiction of the European Union. Important policy areas, such as
agricultural support, consumer protection, the environment, interna-
tional transport, workers’ rights and trade are all covered by European
Union legislation. In this context, the European Council of
Ministers becomes the key body, and it is here that Britain is repre-
sented by appropriate cabinet ministers according to the policy area
being discussed.
When attending meetings of the European Council of Ministers,
the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers all need to be clear with
one another regarding the ‘UK/EU’ line they will be negotiating on
once they are at the meeting. Other than the Prime Minister, it is the
Chancellor of the Exchequer who will find himself or herself most
likely to be called upon to exercise these crucial diplomatic political
skills.
Membership of the European Union has given the United Kingdom
executive an added dimension to its role that was obviously not an
issue prior to joining. Membership of the EU has often been a crucial
issue in respect to the doctrines of collective and individual minister-
ial responsibility. In 1975 Harold Wilson took the decision to free his
cabinet ministers from collective responsibility so that they could
campaign for either a ‘no’ or ‘yes’ vote in the referendum on contin-
ued membership of the European Union. European elections would
provide another opportunity to set aside collective responsibility in
1977 while the issue of Europe proved to be the major obstacle to
Cabinet unity for John Major during his term in office after the 1991
general election.
Membership of the European Union has also established a clear
distinction between European law and United Kingdom law. Should
there be any conflict between the provisions of European law and
those of United Kingdom law, then it is European law that must
prevail. As a signatory to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the United
Kingdom agrees that cases which reach the highest domestic court of
appeal (in the United Kingdom this is the House of Lords), must be
18 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

referred to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg for a

final hearing.
This European dimension to the work of the executive is a major
aspect of its role. Lower courts in member states may ask the ECJ
for rulings on the interpretation and meaning of treaties, while there
is no appeal against decisions made by the ECJ. These powers,
already substantial, have been extended by the Maastricht Treaty
(1993) which gives the Court powers to fine member states for failing
to comply with judgments.
Membership of the European Union has therefore required the
development of a complex relationship between the executive and the
courts in the United Kingdom. When courts have ruled that British
law conflicts with European law, then the executive in the United
Kingdom has been required to introduce new legislation that brings
UK law into line with EU law. The executive therefore faces domestic
courts with substantially more power than was the case before British
membership of the European Union. The key case in establishing this
dominance was the Factortame Case (1991). Factortame was an
important case involving the registration of Spanish fishing vessels in
Britain and a piece of UK legislation intended to prevent this. When
examined through the facts of Factortame, the position of domestic
courts and the ECJ becomes at once clearer, while bringing with it
at the same time some crucial questions on the very nature of
Parliamentary sovereignty.
A further consequence for the executive of UK membership of the
EU has been the gradual pressure that has been applied to the notion
of a unitary state. The regional emphasis on subnational government
has resulted in EU funds flowing into regions independently of the
executive and, since 1997, the creation of devolved assemblies in
Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
In July 2005 the United Kingdom assumed the revolving presi-
dency of the European Union for a six-month period. The opportu-
nity to hold the presidency at this particular point could not have
come at a more crucial time in the history of the Union. In May 2005,
the French and Dutch electorates had delivered ‘no’ votes in referen-
dums on the EU constitution and, as a consequence, tension between
Britain and France heightened. During the presidency the Britain
government will host a series of events under the general heading
 The Executive Territory 19

Better Regulation Executive (BRE) that will seek to improve the

dealings and delivery of EU business. Cabinet Office work during the
UK presidency will also be co-ordinated by the Better Regulation
Executive. In turn, the BRE will be supported by a Better
Regulation Task Force, an independent body which advises gov-
ernment on action to ensure that regulation and enforcement of reg-
ulation meet the required standards. In June 2005, there were also two
cabinet committees with specific European briefs although a closer
look at the forty-plus committees and subcommittees reveals a much
greaten impact by Europe and of EU issues on the whole structure of
the cabinet committee system.
In short, continued British membership of the European Union
continues to be a key factor in the nature of the relationship, not just
between the executive and the legislature, but also between the exec-
utive and every other part of the system of government.

Concluding points
Chapter 1 has provided an introductory overview of the British exec-
utive: the central concern of this book. Having established the essen-
tial elements of our discussion, we may now move on to discuss each
of them in more detail. In doing so, we are constructing an analysis of
the British executive as it stands in the early years of the twenty-first
century. We are concerned to discover how much power it has and
where that power comes from. We are also concerned to understand
more about the key players and institutions within the executive
and how these players and institutions act and react within and around
the internal and external mechanisms that seek to control them.
In putting together the various discussions in this book, and in
outlining a wide range of theories and debates along the way, we
shall be making a case that the British executive is not as all-powerful
as some commentators have suggested. In discussing the Cabinet
and the Prime Minister, it will become clear that, in many respects,
the central executive does, indeed, have substantial powers and that,
on occasion, these powers appear to override the scrutiny and
control of Parliament. It will also be shown, however, that there is a
significant number of factors that combine to control and constrain
the executive and that leave the Prime Minister some distance
 20 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

removed from the type of ‘President’ that some observers claim to

detect.
This is not to say that we will attempt to play down the power of
the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is clearly the most powerful
figure in British politics and has a relationship with the Cabinet that
has changed substantially in the later part of the post-war period. The
changing nature of this relationship has done much to shift views that
were once based around the traditional and historical understanding
of what ‘cabinet government’ was supposed to represent. As we shall
see, it is increasingly the case that the ‘powers’ and ‘strengths’ of the
Prime Minister are, for better or worse, now linked inextricably to the
leadership style and personality of the person in power. This, coupled
with the Cabinet he or she appoints, and the methods by which he or
she chooses to manage that Cabinet, reveal much about the nature
and workings of the modern executive.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

You began this chapter by looking at some broad definitions of the
executive. You should recall that our aim was to provide a basic
overview of the British executive in its broadest sense that would give
us a foundation on which to construct a detailed analysis of the Prime
Minister and the Cabinet.
In giving a broad definition of the executive, we also defined the
Cabinet and the Prime Minister, putting both of them briefly in their
historical context and developing our understanding by making a
clear distinction between the terms ‘head of state’ and ‘head of
government’. To emphasise these definitions further we also looked
at a brief comparison of parliamentary and presidential systems.
We have also looked at the executive in terms of its relationship with
the legislature. This was achieved in three key areas: Cabinet and
Parliament, the Prime Minister and Parliament and the executive and
the European Union.
The chapter concluded with a brief overview of the nature of the
debates surrounding the executive, and made the case that the book
will not necessarily be arguing the line that the British executive is
over-powerful and out of control. Subsequent chapters in the
book will show how Prime Minister and Cabinet remain
constrained by a series of factors exercised mainly by the larger
political system of the United Kingdom, along with some key external
factors.
 The Executive Territory 21

Glossary of key terms



Cabinet The leading members of the government, chosen by the Prime

Minister to lead the department of a particular policy area. Traditionally the
place where major government decisions are made.
Cabinet committees Appointed by the Prime Minister to deal with items
of government business. Discussions in committee are supposed to
inform decisions in full Cabinet. In June 2005, including subcommittees,
there were around forty-two cabinet committees.
Cabinet Office Prepares the agendas and minutes of the Cabinet. Plays
an important role in co-ordinating the work of government.
Collective cabinet responsibility The doctrine stating that all members
of the government are collectively responsible for its decisions. In recent
years it has been suggested that the application of the doctrine has
undergone considerable change.
European Commission The permanent bureaucracy of the European
Union. The primary role of the Commission is to initiate new European
legislation.
European Council of Ministers The ultimate decision-making body of
the European Union.
European Court of Justice The Court sits in Luxembourg and interprets
European law. The decisions it makes are binding on all member states.
Executive The government – the body within a political system that runs
the state.
Factortame Case (1991) An important case involving Spanish fishing
fleets in British waters. The case established that in areas of EU legislative
competence, EU law is supreme and the British courts must give it
precedence over national UK law where the two conflict.
Glorious Revolution (1688) The culmination of the struggle between
James II and William of Orange. Introduced a limited and constitutional
monarchy upheld by a bill of rights which set out the rights of Parliament
in relation to the monarch. Not to be confused with the US Bill of Rights
that sets out the nature of the relationship between citizens and the
state.
Government The elected individuals who make up the executive.
Head of government In the United Kingdom the Prime Minister.
Head of state The person who represents all the people of the state. In
the United Kingdom, sometimes it’s the Queen; on other occasions it’s the
Prime Minister. This situation has arisen because of the prerogative
powers of the Prime Minister.
Individual ministerial responsibility Ministers are responsible to
Parliament for their conduct as ministers and for the general work of their
departments and the actions of their civil servants. Similar to collective
cabinet responsibility in that observers question how effective the doctrine
is in modern government.
 22 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Legislature The body in a political system that makes and/or passes

laws. In the United Kingdom this function is performed by Parliament.
Parliamentary government The UK system whereby the legislature
consists of two houses, the Commons and the Lords and where the
Commons consists of members elected at least once every five years by
people living in constituencies.
Prerogative powers The main source of the formal powers of the Prime
Minister and derived from those once held by the monarch. Prerogative
powers fall into two categories: those performed on behalf of the monarch
as head of state and those performed as head of government.
Prime Minister The head of the British government. Since 1997 until the
time of writing, this position has been held by Tony Blair.
Separation of powers The doctrine that requires the various institutions
of the state to share the functions of government.
Uncodified Usually used to refer to the unwritten or ‘uncodified’ British
Constitution as opposed to the written American Constitution. Large parts
of the British Constitution are in fact written down, they’re just not all
together at the same time and place in the same document – hence they are
‘uncodified’.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe what is meant by the term ‘executive’.
Use your own words to produce short paragraph definitions for: Cabinet,
Prime Minister, head of state, head of government.
Briefly describe the similarities and differences between parliamentary and
presidential systems of government.
Describe what is meant by the term ‘legislature’.
Briefly describe the nature of the relationship between the legislature and
the executive.
Explain the significance of the Factortame Case (1991) for the UK executive.
Essay questions
To what extent does the UK executive illustrate the doctrine of separation
of powers?
‘The power of the UK legislature is compromised by membership of the
EU.’ Discuss.
Revision task
Use one side of one sheet of A3 paper to produce a revision diagram that
shows all the following:
 The Executive Territory 23

The structure of the UK executive branch of government.

The links between the UK executive and legislature.
The more terms from the Glossary (see above) that appear on your
revision chart the greater its revision value to you.

 Helpful websites

The British government has a large number of websites that will be useful
to students of government and politics. These, and others listed here,
are well worth a visit. Some government websites do appear to
change domain from time to time. A good search engine such as
‘Google’ or ‘Yahoo’ will normally get you to where you want to be if
any of the links here are no longer valid.
www.number10.gov.uk/
The 10 Downing Street website.
www.direct.gov.uk/
Particularly useful for department and Civil Service links.
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
Very good for detailed studies of the central government machinery.
www.civilservice.gov.uk
As you would expect from the Civil Service, lots of material on structures
and procedures but particularly good for tracking the often bewildering
number of reforms to government bureaucracy.
www.parliament.uk
A very ‘traditional’ website and not always that easy to navigate. The
search facility can be frustrating.
www.eu.org
For all things European.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
An excellent website with very good search and archive facilities.
www.politicsassociation.com
The Politics Association was founded in 1969 to promote the teaching of
politics. Their quickly developing website offers good links and lists of
learning and teaching resources.
 24 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

 Suggestions for further reading

More detailed suggestions for further reading will be found at the end of
the remaining chapters. For this overview of the central executive territory
the following general texts will be useful starting points.
Coxall, B., Robins, L. and Leach, R. (2003) Contemporary British Politics
4th edn (Palgrave).
Dearlove, J. and Saunders, P. (2000) Introduction to British Politics (Polity
Press).
Heywood, A. (1994) Political Ideas and Concepts (Macmillan).
Jones, B. and Kavanagh, D. (1998) British Politics Today, 6th edn
(Manchester University Press).
Jones, B. (ed.) (2004) Politics UK, 5th edn (Longman Pearson).
Kingdom, J. (1999) Government and Politics in Britain (Polity Press).
McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).
McNaughton, N. (2001) Success in Politics, 2nd edn (Murray).
Moran, M. (2005) Politics and Governance in the UK (Palgrave).
Sampson, A. (2004) Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the
21st Century (Murray).
Wilson, C. (2003) Understanding AS Level Government and Politics
(Manchester University Press).
CHAPTER 2

The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure

Contents
Origins and history 26
Role and functions of the modern Cabinet 28
Size and structure 30
Cabinet ministers: how to be appointed 39
Cabinet ministers: how to get sacked 43

Overview
In the second chapter, we examine a broad range of issues relating to the
origins and history, role and functions, and size and structure of the modern
British system of cabinet government. By understanding the origins and
basic functions of the Cabinet we will be better placed to discuss in detail
the support system and bureaucracy of the Cabinet before going on to
examine the various competing theories as to the future of the system of
cabinet government as a whole.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• The development of the modern Cabinet
• The traditional and constitutional roles of the modern Cabinet
• An overview of the key functions of modern cabinets
• The size and structure of cabinets and the notion of cabinet hierarchies
• The selection and reshuffling of cabinets
26 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Origins and history

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is a useful starting point. This
‘revolution’ and subsequent settlement of 1689 provided a major
turning point in the evolution of the British political system. Before
1688 the monarch reigned supreme. Parliament, if and when it was
consulted, did little more than provide authority or legitimacy to the
decisions taken by the monarch. In effect, the monarch could rule
without Parliament for most of the time. The support of Parliament
increased and consolidated the monarch’s power, but it was not a
prerequisite.
‘Neither glorious nor a revolution’ is a phrase frequently used to
describe the events of 1688. In 1660, following the English Civil
War and brief republic of Oliver Cromwell, the Stuart dynasty was
restored but was, in the words of one writer, ‘too stupid and arrogant’
to accept the principle of constitutional monarchy. By the time James
II had acceded to the throne in 1685 the Protestant nobility and
gentry of England were rising against the centralising ambitions of
the Roman Catholic monarch. Events came to a head in 1688 when
the English nobility invited William III, the anti-French ruler of the
Netherlands, to take over the throne. William agreed and went on to
defeat James II in battle. The ensuing settlement – the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ – established the dependence of the King on the support
of Parliament and gave Parliament a veto over money matters. These
events signify a major shift in the balance of political power away
from the monarch and towards Parliament.
The phrase ‘Cabinet’ had been in use before 1688 to describe the
small and élite group of advisers who clustered, court-like, around
the monarch. After 1688 this group of people was required by
William III to rule England. William needed to consolidate his
power and run his new kingdom. He also found himself involved in
a series of wars against France which required him to have the
support of the majority in Parliament – the Whigs – who worked
closely with William in deciding which policies and proposals would
be acceptable to Parliament. The Cabinet therefore played a crucial
role in this two-way communication between the Throne and
Parliament. Essentially, the Cabinet had become ‘semi-formalised’.
It had none of the set procedures or party structures that we would
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 27

recognise today and remained a loose set of arrangements until the

following century.
A more recognisable version of the modern Cabinet evolved rela-
tively quickly during the reign of George I. George was an uninter-
ested and almost ‘accidental’ ruler of England who had no interest in
the politics of his country and spoke little English. Under George I,
the Cabinet, not the King, began to rule the country. When George
did attend, he understood little and contributed even less. He very
soon began to miss meetings and the Cabinet conducted business
without him. George II was similarly disinterested in the day-to-day
politics of running the country of which he was king, and it was not
until George III that the monarch attempted to regain control of the
system. George III reigned for a long time – 1760 to 1820 – and,
unlike his predecessors, he did not consider himself to be a German
first and King of England second.
Although not the first ‘Prime Minister’ in the way we would under-
stand it – this accolade may be saved for Sir Robert Walpole – George
III acted in a way that we would now associate with the Prime
Minister. He attended meetings, he led the discussions and played a
key role in the outcome of Cabinet deliberations. It was only the
periods of insanity, which blighted George’s life and became perma-
nent after 1811, that required the senior ministers in the government
to take over his roles.
The parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth century proved to be
key accelerators in the development of what we now refer to as
cabinet government. Reform Acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884/5 estab-
lished a much larger electorate and encouraged the development
of modern political parties. Voting discipline, party representation
and constituency elections became central features of the House of
Commons that became, after 1832, the stronger partner in the
Commons/Lords relationship. Cabinet members were now drawn
more from the Commons than the Lords as the influence of the
monarch declined. As the role of the Cabinet developed alongside the
changes listed above – especially the evolution of political parties – it
became increasingly the case that the Cabinet was formed from the
ranks of one political party and that the leadership of the party con-
trolled cabinet membership. The monarch no longer decided who
would sit in the Cabinet.
28 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Role and functions of the modern Cabinet

While the basic roles and functions of the Cabinet are very similar to
those that existed at the outset of the system, it is nevertheless import-
ant to recognise that there have been obvious changes to the trad-
itional and constitutional roles.

Traditional and constitutional roles of the Cabinet

The Cabinet is the key committee in the executive. It consists usually
of between twenty and twenty-five members drawn mainly from the
largest party in the House of Commons.
The modern Cabinet has evolved from a number of traditional
and constitutional roles. Initially, the Cabinet was the body in the
executive where the key decisions of government were made. By the
early eighteenth century the membership of the Cabinet was drawn
from the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and consisted
of a Prime Minister and leading ministers of the day. This key body
dominated the legislature and the business of Parliament. The notion
of collective cabinet responsibility may be traced back to these early
days when it was acknowledged that the Cabinet should agree on
policy in public, support the proposals and policies of the government
in public and, in the event of the government being defeated in
Parliament, then the Cabinet (and therefore the government) would
resign. As Lord Melbourne said to his Cabinet in 1841, on the issue
of the Corn Laws: ‘Bye the bye, there is one thing we haven’t agreed
upon, which is, what are we to say? Is it better to make our corn dearer
or cheaper, or to make the price steady? I don’t care which: but we
had better all tell the same story.’
The extent to which collective decision-making continues to exist
in its traditional form will be the focus of a much more detailed dis-
cussion in the following chapter. In terms of key functions of the
Cabinet, the following list provides a fairly comprehensive overview
of exactly what role the Cabinet plays in modern British government.
When reading this list, it is worth keeping in mind the notion of
‘traditional’, as opposed to modern, roles, and being prepared to
question the extent to which some of the functions that appear here
continue to reflect the reality of the modern Cabinet. Cabinet:
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 29

• Makes the final ‘decision’ on policy to be submitted to Parliament.

Although it no longer actually decides many policies in terms of
the detail, it remains the place at which the most important deci-
sions are registered. It would be more accurate, therefore, to see
this particular role as giving formal approval to decisions taken
elsewhere.
• Gives legitimacy and authority to government decisions.
• Develops a common government message for the media and for
Parliament.
• Has supreme control over the national executive.
• Provides co-ordination and delimitation of the departments of
state.
• Plans the business of Parliament.
• Provides political leadership for the party, in Parliament and for
the country.
• Arbitrates in cases of disputes between departments. In recent
years prime ministers have appointed ‘enforcers’ to carry out this
function.
• Provides crisis management during emergencies and on issues
likely to result in major political controversy.

You will see from this list that the Cabinet has what is essentially a
dual role – it proposes legislation and it then supervises the adminis-
tration of that legislation. The list can give only a snapshot of the
complex web of functions and roles of the Cabinet, however. The
reasons for this difficulty in defining exactly what the Cabinet does
should by now be familiar. First, the uncodified British Constitution
gives no clear role to the Cabinet, and second, every Cabinet is to a
large extent a creation of the Prime Minister of the day and, as such,
a reflection of how that person wishes to organise the running of
government.

The changing role of the modern Cabinet

Given the flexible nature of the British constitutional arrangements
and the personalised nature of cabinet management, it is fairly
obvious that the institution will have changed considerably over the
years. As we have already explained, the impact of a century of
political reform in the 1800s and the huge growth of government
30 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

following World War II have drastically changed the character and

nature of cabinet government. Alongside the physical expansion of
government, Cabinet has also had to adapt to the increasingly
complex and detailed workings of government departments, espe-
cially the way in which the workings of these departments have
become ever closer and more interlinked. When one considers this
alongside the huge growth in bureaucracy, administration and support
that has accompanied the growth of government, it becomes clear
that the Cabinet itself would obviously have changed over the same
period.
Is cabinet government alive and well? This is certainly something
we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, but it should by now be
apparent why the question is raised at all. With a huge and ever-
growing workload, an expanded network of cabinet committees, and
the arrival of increasing numbers of outside specialists and personal
advisers, it is little wonder that some critics worry that Cabinet is
losing full control over the government’s policies and decisions. Under
these circumstances and with ongoing changes, it is ‘inevitable’, in the
words of a number of commentators, that the traditional role of
Cabinet has been ‘eroded’. As we shall discuss at length elsewhere,
however, this rather gloomy view of the modern Cabinet may be
overcritical and based on a meaningless comparison with cabinets
from as far back as the nineteenth century. We shall certainly want to
examine the argument that what we have in the United Kingdom
now is less a Cabinet that would have been recognised by Melbourne
and Salisbury and more a modern ‘system’ of Cabinet that better
reflects the nature of twenty-first-century politics while maintaining
the underlying principles of what cabinet government should be. It’s
certainly different, but it’s not dead yet.

Size and structure

While the number of government members may be over 100, the
membership of the Cabinet is usually somewhere between twenty
and twenty-five. The size of the British Cabinet is significant and will
be discussed in the ‘Small v. Big’ part of this chapter. The terms
‘Cabinet’ and ‘government’ are no longer synonymous. The modern
Cabinet represents only a very small part of what has become a very
complex structure of government that forms, as we shall go on to see,
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 31

Table 2.1 The Cabinet (June 2005)

Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury Rt Hon. Tony Blair MP

and Minister for the Civil Service
Deputy Prime Minister and First Rt Hon. John Prescott MP
Secretary of State
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rt Hon. Gordon Brown MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Rt Hon. Jack Straw MP
Commonwealth Affairs
Secretary of State for Environment, Rt Hon. Margaret Beckett MP
Food and Rural Affairs
Secretary of State for Transport and Rt Hon. Alistair Darling MP
Secretary of State for Scotland
Secretary of State for Health Rt Hon. Patricia Hewitt MP
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rt Hon. John Hutton MP
(Minister for the Cabinet Office)
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Rt Hon. Peter Hain MP
and Secretary of State for Wales
Secretary of State for Defence Rt Hon. John Reid MP
Secretary of State for Trade and Rt Hon. Alan Johnson MP
Industry
Secretary of State for Culture, Media Rt Hon. Tessa Jowell MP
and Sport
Parliamentary Secretary to the Rt Hon. Hilary Armstrong MP
Treasury (Chief Whip)
Secretary of State for the Home Rt Hon. Charles Clarke MP
Department
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rt Hon. Des Browne MP
Leader of the House of Commons, Rt Hon. Geoffrey Hoon MP
Lord Privy Seal
Minister without Portfolio and Party Rt Hon. Ian McCartney MP
Chair
Leader of the House of Lords and Rt Hon. Baroness Amos
Lord President of the Council
Secretary of State for Constitutional Rt Hon. Lord Falconer
Affairs and Lord Chancellor of Thoroton
Secretary of State for International Rt Hon. Hilary Benn MP
Development
Secretary of State for Work and Rt Hon. David Blunkett MP
Pensions
Secretary of State for Education and Rt Hon. Ruth Kelly MP
Skills
32 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 2.1 (continued)

Minister of Communities and Local Rt Hon. David Miliband MP

Government

Also attend Cabinet meetings:

Attorney General Rt Hon. Lord Goldsmith
Minister of State for Europe Mr Douglas Alexander MP
Lords Chief Whip Lord Grocott

a clear hierarchy of individuals that rises up from the lowly junior par-
liamentary secretaries to those promoted to be full cabinet ministers.
The list here shows the Cabinet as it was formed after the 2005
general election.
We have already explained that most cabinet members are drawn
from the House of Commons but it is also the case that some cabinet
members may sit in the House of Lords. You will remember that the
Lord Chancellor (also referred to now as the Secretary of State for
Constitutional Affairs) is a member of the House of Lords who holds
a cabinet position. Most members of the Cabinet will be ministers in
charge of Whitehall departments. The person appointed to be
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is in a slightly different situ-
ation in that the duties of this position are located in the Cabinet
Office and range over a broad spread of policy issues that cut across
departmental responsibilities and often include the ‘referee’ role in
disputes between departments and their ministers.

Cabinet hierarchy
Depending on which metaphor you choose to use, the Cabinet sits
either at the apex or core of either the hierarchy or web of govern-
ment. While it is clear that the Cabinet enjoys this position relative to
the rest of government, it is also important to point out that the
Cabinet itself reflects an inner hierarchy.
The most senior members of the Cabinet are usually considered
to be:

• The Prime Minister

• The Chancellor of the Exchequer
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 33

• The Foreign Secretary

• The Home Secretary
In recent years it has been possible to add the office of the Deputy
Prime Minister who is also the First Secretary of State to this list.
These positions are widely acknowledged to be the ‘great’ offices
of state, and it has more often than not been the case that a prime
minister will have occupied one or more of these positions prior to
becoming the First Lord of the Treasury. The two most controversial
and studied of modern prime ministers have bucked this particular
trend, however. The following table illustrates this point:
Nevertheless, the clear sense of hierarchy in the Cabinet remains.
If we move away from the key offices of state discussed above, we
encounter the secretaries of state for the big-spending departments,
such as Health, Defence and Education, through to the less politically
significant, and therefore less politically powerful, departments, such
as Culture, Media and Sport. Moving further down the ladder we
meet those junior ministers with portfolios (or responsibilities) for only
a part of the work of a department and who will not attend cabinet
meetings. It will also be seen from the list of cabinet ministers (above)
that one person – the Minister for Europe – attends cabinet meetings
even though there is no ‘Department for Europe’, and that the
Attorney General and the Chief Whip in the House of Lords also
attend the gatherings of this inner circle of government. It should also
be noted that, in the case of Communities and Local Government,
there is no separate Whitehall department. This particular aspect of
government is included in the broad remit of the Office of the
Deputy of Prime Minister along with a whole host of ‘social’ issues
such as homelessness, housing, planning, regions, science and

Table 2.2 Before he/she was Prime Minister

Tony Blair: PM 1997– No government experience

John Major: PM 1990–2, 1992–7 1989 – Foreign Secretary
1990 – Chancellor of the
Exchequer
Margaret Thatcher: PM 1979–90 1974 – Brief period at
Education
34 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

research, social exclusion and urban policy. Single government

departments have in recent times covered many of these areas. This
makes the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister a powerful yet fre-
quently overlooked and underestimated part of government.

Cabinet size: small v. big

The average size of the modern British Cabinet is twenty. For most
of World War II, Winston Churchill managed a Cabinet of between
five and eight members. Leaving aside Churchill’s less than success-
ful experiment of 1951 (see below) and other wartime arrange-
ments, peacetime cabinets in the United Kingdom have ranged
from sixteen under Andrew Bonar-Law in 1922 to twenty-four
under Harold Wilson in 1964 and the twenty-six of the Blair 2005
administration.
There are four key factors that explain the growth of the size of
British Cabinets.

• The growth of the state and the public sector is probably

the most important and significant reason. From the social
reforms of Gladstone and Disraeli through to the Liberal reforms
before World War I and on to the creation of the Welfare State
after 1945, the state has grown massively and government has
taken on more and more areas of responsibility. It is now the case
that most aspects of modern life and society are in some way
covered by government departments and therefore by cabinet
ministers. Even where change has occurred (the disappearance of
the Ministry of Agriculture, for instance) it is more likely to be the
case that areas will simply resurface under a new name, new
organisation. In the case of agriculture, we now have the depart-
ment of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Compare the May
2005 Cabinet with the first Blair administration of 1997 and you
will see other long-gone departments such as Social Security and
Environment that have merged with, or been gobbled up by,
other areas of government. The size of the Cabinet, however, has
grown from twenty-two ‘full’ members in 1997 to the twenty-six
of 2005.
• The proliferation of interest groups and pressure from
these groups may be seen as a second reason for the growth in
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 35

size of the Cabinet. Groups outside Westminster have pressurised

government over the years to the point where many sectors that
were previously unrepresented in the Cabinet, such as education,
health, culture and local government, are now present around the
cabinet table in the shape of a secretary of state or represented
within a department by a junior minister. Another example of
this type of pressure may be detected in the pressure from
Scottish, Welsh and some Irish interests to have full recognition
in Cabinet and, more recently, to use those positions to push for
devolution.
• The higher levels of the civil service provide a third reason
for the growth of the numbers in Cabinet. Career civil servants
see cabinet representation as the clearest sign of the political
significance of their particular area and are reluctant to take part
in any process that would genuinely slim government down at this
particular level.
• The increase in prime ministerial patronage is the fourth
and final key reason for the growth in size of the British Cabinet.
The larger the Cabinet, then the more opportunities a Prime
Minister has to manage the factions in his or her party be it in the
form of rewarding loyalty and talent, balancing the ‘court’ of
rivals, acknowledging party ‘favourites’ or keeping loose cannons
as close as possible.
Observers inside and outside the cabinet system have tended to
criticise the larger cabinets much more than the smaller ones. The
World War I cabinets of Lloyd George and the already noted World
War II cabinets of Winston Churchill are largely considered to have
been more effective than the larger versions. War tends to be the main
force behind moves towards smaller cabinets. Alongside those already
mentioned, it is worth noting that Blair, Major and Thatcher all
experimented at some point with smaller cabinets during the Kosovo,
Gulf and Falklands wars.
Criticisms of larger cabinets tend to focus on a wide-ranging list of
shortcomings that include:
• The cabinet process becomes too slow.
• Decision making in the Cabinet becomes cumbersome and
difficult.
36 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• Factions and competing political and departmental interests

around the cabinet table hamper clear decision making.
• Too many members make it difficult to maintain meaningful
collective responsibility.
• Large cabinets lack the necessary strategic vision.
• Ministers get locked into complicated struggles for resources
with lots of other ministers and see no further than departmental
interests.
Discussions on the relative merits of small as opposed to large cab-
inets are important. The debate is about the constitutional role of
what the Cabinet is supposed to be and do, not purely about the tech-
nical details of departments, responsibilities, and the relationship
between civil servants and ministers. Denis Kavanagh neatly sums up
the dilemma surrounding ideal cabinet size:
Decisions about Cabinet size and composition have to balance the
needs of decision making and deliberation against those of repre-
sentativeness. It has to be small enough to allow ministers the oppor-
tunities to discuss, deliberate and coordinate major policies, yet it
must also be large enough to include heads of major departments and
accommodate different political views in the party.1
Prime ministers have, on and off, expressed the wish to experiment
with smaller cabinets. Leo Amery, a cabinet member in the Bonar
Law and Baldwin administrations, argued that government would be
much more effective through a ‘Policy Cabinet’ of around six or
seven members who would have no departmental ties and who
would be able to bring an overarching and strategic perspective to
the full range of policy concerns, not just the vested interests of indi-
vidual department briefs. In 1951 Winston Churchill experimented
with a Cabinet of sixteen that included three ‘overlords’ – ministers
who sat in the House of Lords, free from constituency or depart-
mental duties, and who had the responsibility for the co-ordination
of policies in related departments. This was a major political experi-
ment and a major failure. The ‘normal’ structure of the Cabinet was
back in place after less than two years when it became clear that
it was very difficult to separate the co-ordinating responsibilities
of the three ‘overlords’ in the upper chamber from the duties of
ministers formally answerable to the Commons. As Kavanagh has
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 37

commented: ‘it is easier to separate policy from administration in

theory than it is in practice’.2
In recent years the concept of the ‘inner cabinet’ has been dis-
cussed in relation to the debate on the relative merits of size. The
phrase ‘inner Cabinet’ is often used interchangeably with ‘kitchen
Cabinet’ even though the two have considerable differences.
‘Inner cabinets’ tend to be very much political creations that
exist just beneath the outer veneer of the Cabinet and consist of
four or five key ministers closest to the Prime Minister who meet
independently of the full Cabinet. The Labour cabinet minister
Richard Crossman, who claimed that during the Wilson government
he had been a member of such a group, first described the existence
of these inner cabinets in the 1960s. Patrick Gordon Walker, who
served in the Cabinet under both Attlee and Wilson, used the phrase
‘partial cabinets’ to describe what was essentially the same phenom-
enon: frequent meetings, designed to suit Downing Street, that take
place between departmental ministers and the Prime Minister in such
a way as to leave out ministers who have no responsibility for action.
According to Richard Rose, these ‘partial cabinets’ now have their
formal expression in many cabinet committees.3 Nevertheless, the
existence of inner cabinets is seen by some observers to be a threat to
the nature of genuine collective cabinet government. Other com-
mentators have balanced this view, however, by making a more prag-
matic and realistic case for what is in essence the informal evolution
of ‘policy cabinets’ of the kind that Churchill experimented with in
the early 1950s.
The existence and functioning of these inner ‘policy cabinets’
remains, for some people at least, an unresolved problem of the suc-
cessful separation of policy and administration of the kind alluded to
earlier by Kavanagh. In his 1984 Reith Lectures, the ex-joint head of
the Civil Service, Douglas Wass, questioned the principle that strat-
egic policy making could be separated from day-to-day procedural
matters by making the point that he found it virtually impossible to
think constructively about general policy issues without the opportu-
nity beforehand to have been involved in particular practical cases.
These meetings can often include individuals from outside the
Cabinet, such as key back-benchers, certain key public officials or
leading public figures, and may even include private citizens.
38 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Kitchen cabinets tend to differ from inner cabinets in that those

who become ‘members’ of this type of group are drawn from a much
wider and personal group of prime ministerial confidants than the
mostly political grouping that characterises the inner Cabinet. The
phrase was first used to describe the small group of individuals sur-
rounding Harold Wilson as his closest political advisers. Marcia
Williams (later Lady Falkender), who was Wilson’s Political Secretary,
and Joe Haines, his Press Officer, were the key ‘members’ of this
kitchen Cabinet who may, on the face of it, have held fairly lowly
positions, yet wielded enormous influence on Wilson himself. If the
Cabinet occupies some vague aspect of the Constitution in a darkened
corner of the sitting room, and if the inner Cabinet lurks somewhere
at the back of the dining room, then the kitchen Cabinet really is
hidden away somewhere in a makeshift constitutional loft as a kind of
lagging on the prime ministerial pipes: completely unofficial, wholly
unaccountable, yet almost indispensable.
The kitchen Cabinet offers the Prime Minister an informal
support network. Margaret Thatcher’s kitchen cabinets were largely
reckoned to be based around her private office and almost certainly
included her foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, a civil servant
transferred to her private office (and probably responsible for encour-
aging her to push forward a strategy that distanced the United
Kingdom from the European Union), her Press Secretary, Bernard
Ingham, and in the later years her Parliamentary Private Secretary,
Ian Gow.
In common with his recent predecessors, Tony Blair has formed
around himself a kitchen Cabinet through which a small number of
select and trusted advisers and friends have passed since the general
election victory in 1997. In those early years people like Alastair
Campbell (Press Secretary until 2001), Jonathon Powell (Chief of
Staff), Nick Brown (Chief Whip) and David Milliband (Head of the
Policy Unit) combined with senior cabinet ministers, such as Gordon
Brown, Robin Cook, Ann Taylor and John Prescott, to form a close-
knit circle of advisers. The role of Peter Mandelson is particularly
interesting. In an eventful political career that has seen him play a
key role in the ‘project’ of modernising the Labour Party, manage
the 1997 election victory, take an early role in government of ‘co-
ordinating policy’, resign twice and then be appointed Commissioner
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 39

for Trade in the European Union, Mandelson may well be, along with
Cherie Blair, one of the constant sources of advice and support to the
Prime Minister, either in or out of whatever ‘structure’ the kitchen
Cabinet may currently have.
‘Inner’ or ‘kitchen’ – the criticism remains that a system which allows
both these unofficial ‘policy’ or ‘partial’ cabinets to coalesce around a
Prime Minister who already dominates an unwieldy and overlarge
Cabinet is hardly likely to be beneficial to the health of effective and
efficient collective government. As we shall see in Chapter 3, however,
when we discuss the current debate on collective cabinet government,
and again in Chapter 8, where we discuss the concept of the core exec-
utive, it will become fairly clear that the size of the modern Cabinet is
not the only problem that some commentators choose to highlight in
the workings of the central committee of the British executive.

Cabinet ministers: how to be appointed

In 1989, from a background in banking and Lambeth Council, fol-
lowed by ten years in the House of Commons as the Conservative MP
for Huntingdon, Margaret Thatcher appointed John Major Foreign
Secretary. Major’s stay at the Foreign Office was brief. In less than a
year he had been moved to the Treasury as Chancellor of the
Exchequer where his tenure was as brief as his stay in the Foreign
Office. In 1991 he was elected leader of the Conservative Party after
the fall of Thatcher and thus became the Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom. The qualifications for particular ministerial posts
are not always obvious.
The political journey of John Major is not the only example we
could use of the seemingly random and ad hoc appointment and
shuffling of ministers of the Crown. If we use the present govern-
ment as an example, we are able to see that expertise in any given
field of policy is frequently the least desirable quality in those called
upon to serve.
If we look at the previous Conservative administrations then
similar patterns occur. As well as the political odyssey of John Major,
we could track the journey of Ken Clarke from Health in 1998,
Education in 1990, Home Office in 1992 and finally to the Treasury
as Chancellor in 1993. The movement of a Conservative minister in
40 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 2.3 The movement of ministers

Robin Cook – Foreign Secretary in the first Blair government but had
been moved to the position of President of the Council and Leader of
the Commons by 2002. Resigned from government over the war in Iraq
in March 2003. Died, August 2005.

David Blunkett – In 1997 Blunkett was in charge of Education and

Employment. By 2003 he had been moved to the Home Office, a
position from which he was forced to resign in 2004. He re-entered
government in 2005 as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Alistair Darling – Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1997, Transport in

2002, Secretary of State for Transport and Secretary of State for
Scotland in 2005.

John Reid – not in government in 1987. Minister without Portfolio and

Party Chair in 2002, Health in 2004, Defence in 2005.

Charles Clarke – Education in 2002, Home Secretary 2005.

the 1980s from Agriculture to Education is a particularly good illus-

tration of the random nature of British ministerial appointments:
farmyards one day, classrooms the next. Clearly, expertise coupled
with a deep and detailed knowledge of a given policy area are not the
key factors in determining ministerial appointments. So how do min-
isters get themselves appointed?
It is worth noting that, while the number of cabinet positions has
remained relatively stable for over 100 years, the number of appoint-
ments to government positions outside the Cabinet has risen sub-
stantially. Research has shown how Clement Attlee was able to hand
out ninety-five government appointments in 1950. This figure had
risen to 123 by the second year of the Thatcher period in 1980. The
number of government appointments in 2005 is somewhere around
the 130 mark. Most of these positions are non-cabinet ministers of
state, junior ministers and the lowly parliamentary private secretaries
in the House of Commons (who are, nevertheless, bound by the doc-
trine of collective cabinet responsibility.) This represents political
patronage on a huge scale and is a major advantage to any Prime
Minister. Those who benefit from this patronage will usually need to
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 41

be able to place ticks against all or some of the following criteria for
appointment:

• Time served on the slippery pole – in other words, most

appointments (especially to the higher positions) will be of those
people who have put in the appropriate amount of time ascend-
ing the ministerial hierarchy. These people will have begun their
ministerial careers as PPSs (parliamentary private secretaries) and
will have looked to progress through time spent as a junior minis-
ter then as a minister outside the Cabinet and then, they hope, a
full Cabinet position. The new Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster (Minister for the Cabinet Office) is a good example of
this. John Hutton entered Parliament in 1992 and, in 1998, was
appointed PPSs to Margaret Beckett at the Board of Trade from
where he followed her to her new position as Leader of the
Commons in 1999. He presumably impressed those around him
in this role and was soon ‘shuffled’ to the Department of Health
where he rose through the ranks to become Minister of State for
Health in 2001. Hutton was appointed as a full cabinet member
as Minister for the Cabinet Office in May 2005. If, at any point in
this journey Hutton had given the impression of ‘not being up to
the job’, then he would have risen no higher (probably no higher
than his position as PPS) and would have found himself on the
back benches once again.
• Time served in the House of Commons – this is perhaps
less important than was once the case. Research continues to show
that the average time spent in the House of Commons before
becoming a cabinet minister is fourteen years. The career of John
Hutton, as outlined above, reflects this fairly accurately. There are
examples, however, especially in the current government, of min-
isters with far less parliamentary experience. Ruth Kelly, the
Secretary of State for Education did not enter the Commons until
1997, and David Milliband was made Minister for Communities
and Local Government having only been elected in 2001. Time
served in the Commons was once felt to be the necessary ‘appren-
ticeship’ for those who aspired to high office. The fact that this is
not now necessary probably says more about the position of the
Commons than it does about ministers in general.
42 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• Time served in opposition – this is one factor that many of

the more established members of the current government are able
to lay claim to. Labour was in opposition from 1979 to 1997 and
could field only one minister with past ministerial experience
upon its return to power. Most cabinet members in a government
returning to office after a period in opposition will have been
members of the opposition ‘Shadow’ Cabinet where front-bench
spokespeople will ‘shadow’ the government minister for their par-
ticular area. Membership of the Shadow Cabinet is therefore
seen as a useful preparation for the ‘real thing’ once the party
returns to power. Both of the main parties use the shadow system
although the process is much more formalised in the Labour Party
where the Shadow Cabinet is chosen by the National Executive
Committee and where a Labour leader who has just become
Prime Minister is required to choose his or her first Cabinet from
this NEC-selected group.
• Time served in the party is probably another factor that is less
important than it once was. It does improve the chances of an
individual being appointed to the Cabinet, however. Current
examples could include John Prescott’s long tenure as the Deputy
Prime Minister and Margaret Beckett’s equally long career on the
front bench. The relatively short-lived cabinet careers of Mo
Mowlam and Clare Short are also examples of individuals who,
while no doubt possessed of genuine political ability, could also
look to their standing in the Labour Party as a factor in their ele-
vation to the Cabinet.
• A safe pair of hands – ‘steady’, ‘dependable’, ‘safe’, just three
of the adjectives used to describe a current member of the
Cabinet by his constituency secretary during a conversation as
part of the preparation of this book. It is certainly the case that
those individuals with proven track records of effective depart-
ment management will be regarded as good choices for one of the
‘higher’ cabinet positions.
• The right faction – those prospective ministers who have posi-
tioned themselves in or around the prime ministerial grouping
may be more likely to be elevated to the Cabinet than those indi-
viduals who are more associated with the ‘court’ of a key rival.
This type of ‘court’ politics is becoming an increasingly important
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 43

factor in the current Cabinet composition and was particularly

noticeable in the aftermath of the 2005 election when a handful
of ministers appeared to be able to influence the decisions being
made by a Prime Minister faced with a much-reduced majority in
the House of Commons. It is also the case on occasions that the
Prime Minister will appoint a political ‘enemy’ to the Cabinet in
order to buy his or her silence and pacify a particular group or
wing in the party.

Cabinet ministers: how to get sacked

Being removed from the Cabinet appears to be considerably easier
than getting there in the first place. In both instances it is the Prime
Minister who will make the decision and, for most people who leave
the Cabinet (with one or two notable exceptions, as we shall see), it
usually signifies the end of a political career at the highest level.
Occasionally, ministers may resign from the Cabinet, often with spec-
tacular political consequences and fall-out.
The Cabinet is regularly ‘shuffled’. This involves the movement of
individuals in and out of the system and also involves a brief burst of
musical chairs around the coffin-shaped table of the Cabinet Room
as ministers move from Defence to NATO (George Robertson, 2003)
or from Education to the Home Office (Charles Clarke, December
2004).
There is a number of reasons for reshuffling a Cabinet. The Prime
Minister may feel that a particular policy area is not performing well
and would benefit from a new approach by some other person, or it
might be felt that an individual minister is simply not up to the job –
for a variety of reasons. In recent years Cabinet reshuffles have
become part of larger restructurings of government departments. It
is interesting to note that, although we have explained how the
number of people in government is steadily rising, the actual number
of departments is in decline. There were thirty departments in 1950,
nineteen in 1993 and seventeen in 1997. Blair has been particularly
active in this restructuring process. He has created the Department of
the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in place of the old Ministry
of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and he has also created a new
Department of International Development.
44 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

If we move on to look at the sacking of ministers, then a fairly clear

set of criteria emerges. Public (and therefore high-profile) sackings are
actually quite rare. Many ministers likely to be despatched by the
Prime Minister engage in the traditional exchange of letters before-
hand and usually resign. What follows is a list of the kind of behav-
iour that is almost guaranteed to leave a minister back on the back
benches and/or spending more time with his or her family.

• Failure to comply with the doctrine of collective cabinet

responsibility is the most obvious reason for a cabinet minister
either to resign or be sacked. Recent examples already discussed
elsewhere in this book include Michael Heseltine and his dis-
agreement with the Cabinet over the sale of Westland Helicopters,
and Clare Short and her somewhat protracted process of resigna-
tion over her opposition to the war in Iraq. Robin Cook resigned
his position as Leader of the House for similar reasons. This is not
to say, however, that transgressions of collective responsibility will
always result in dismissal or resignation. The problems faced by
Major in his Cabinet after 1992 were largely to do with attitudes
to Europe and the lack of a collective Cabinet position. Several
ministers, including Michael Portillo and John Redwood, were
clearly briefing against the government and would ordinarily have
been forced to resign or be sacked. Under these particular circum-
stances, Major felt it better to have them where he could see them
as opposed to the greater set of problems of finding them com-
pletely free from all notion of collective responsibility.
• Policy problems of the kind experienced by Norman Lamont
(Britain’s crash out of the European Monetary System in 1993),
and Edwina Currie (who in 1983 correctly claimed that most
British egg production was contaminated with salmonella) are two
examples of where cabinet ministers have been responsible for
major policy disasters and have had no option but to resign rather
than wait to be sacked. The current government has had a slightly
better track record than most in this particular respect. Large-
scale errors and policy disaster areas, such as the Millennium
Dome, the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the 2005 problems
with overpaid Family Tax Credits have required few ministerial
sacrifices. It is noticeable that the conventions that govern minis-
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 45

terial sacking and resignations over policy issues have shifted

somewhat. It is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances now
similar to those that brought about the resignation of Sir Thomas
Dugdale over the Crichel Down affair in 1954. Even the more
recent resignation of Lord Carrington in 1982 because of his
failure to heed warnings of an Argentinian invasion of the
Falklands looks to be from some quaint and older age. The resig-
nation of Stephen Byers in 2002 may look like a minister falling
over major policy problems yet the affair was drawn out and
lengthy and may have had more to do with pressure from Labour
back-benchers than any particular crisis of honour for Byers
himself. When we turn to our next category, however, we will find
ourselves on much richer ground as far as the potential for sack-
ings and resignations is concerned.
• Personal problems of either a financial or sexual sort have
accounted for a large number of ministerial resignations in
recent years. Cecil Parkinson (1985), David Mellor (1992), Tim
Yeo (1994), Lord Caithness (1994), Robert Hughes (1995) and
Ron Davies (1998) are all examples of ministerial resignations
necessitated by events far away from the cabinet table and depart-
ments of state.
• Issues of ministerial responsibility tend to be those types
of happening where the minister has acted in a way that is not
entirely conducive to his or her role as a government minister and
yet may not be entirely ‘personal’ as explained in the previous
paragraph. Examples of this are to be found in Leon Brittan’s res-
ignation over leaking documents relating to the Westland affair,
Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton’s acceptance of ‘cash for questions’
in 1994, and David Willetts’s secret direction of Conservative
members of the Privileges Committee while still a government
whip. Occasionally, these issues of ministerial responsibility merge
murkily with the personal problems listed above. David Blunkett’s
fast tracking of a passport for the nanny of his married lover is a
particularly good example from the present government.

Given the examples we have used here it should come as no sur-

prise to realise that, in choosing and managing a Cabinet, the Prime
Minister has a difficult job. Nor does the Prime Minister have an
 46 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

entirely free hand in the selection of those who will serve. For a start,
all members of the Cabinet must be drawn from either the Commons
or the Lords, and a Cabinet must always contain at least two peers, the
Leader of the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellor. Having made
that point, there have been in recent years examples of peers appointed
to Cabinet with relatively short party political careers. Margaret
Thatcher appointed Lord Young as Secretary of State for Employment
between 1985 and 1987 and then as Secretary of State at the
Department of Trade and Industry in 1987. Lord Cockfield had an even
wider-ranging political career starting in the Department of Trade,
moving to the Duchy of Lancaster, before ending up as a European com-
missioner. More recently, Tony Blair has created a number of life peer-
ages for individuals and then given them ministerial posts. The most
notable of these appointments is Lord Falconer, a lawyer friend of the
Blairs, who now finds himself Secretary of State for Constitutional
Affairs and Lord Chancellor.
Having looked in some detail into the role, functions and compo-
sition of modern cabinets, we can move on to Chapter 3 and examine
the support systems of modern cabinet government – cabinet com-
mittees and the cabinet secretariat.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

Chapter 2 has begun to add more detail to our knowledge of the
structure, origins and role of the Cabinet. It should now be clear how
the Cabinet evolved from the constitutional arrangements agreed
around the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and how the role of
the monarchy in Cabinet was gradually altered during the political
reforms of the nineteenth century.
We have also examined the changing nature of the Cabinet in British
politics and have highlighted discussions on cabinet hierarchies and
the relative merits of large as opposed to smaller cabinets. By looking
in more detail at the composition of the Cabinet we have noted the
various factors that determine how any individual might be promoted
to the Cabinet, and we have also looked at those factors that will
require a minister either to resign or be sacked. Our discussion of
the Cabinet so far is revealing a very complex and complicated
organism. We will move on to look at the internal structures in more
depth in Chapter 3.
 The Cabinet: Origins, Role and Structure 47

Glossary of key terms



Cabinet hierarchy The clearly defined hierarchy of posts within the

Cabinet based on the Prime Minister, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and
Home Secretary. Hierarchies are often reflected in the membership of key
cabinet committees or in the membership of ‘inner’ cabinets.
Deputy Prime Minister The role has no constitutional definition and the
role varies according to the wishes of the Prime Minister. In recent years
the position is often linked with attempts to co-ordinate the work of
government.
Inner cabinets Smaller groups within the Cabinet that meet with the
Prime Minister to discuss specific policy areas and issues.
Interest groups Pressure groups that represent the interests of particular
economic or occupational groups, especially business organisations,
professional associations and trade unions.
Kitchen cabinets Similar to inner cabinets but will involve the presence
of people from outside the Cabinet.
Prime ministerial patronage The posts, promotions, resources and
connections that the Prime Minister has the ability to give and remove
from individuals or groups within or connected to government.
Reform Acts – 1832, 1867, 1884–5 The series of political reforms in the
nineteenth century that gradually increased the size of the electorate and
was therefore partly responsible for the growth of mass parties and
increased the need for cabinet discipline.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe what is meant by the term ‘Cabinet’.
Briefly describe the origins of the cabinet system of government.
Describe the role of the Prime Minister in relation to the rest of the Cabinet.
Describe the key functions of the Cabinet.
Briefly describe the criteria for a successful promotion to Cabinet.
Explain the reasons why cabinet ministers are almost always ‘ex-cabinet’
ministers at some point in their career.
Essay questions
Use examples you are familiar with to discuss the changing roles of the
modern Cabinet.
To what extent would you agree with the suggestion that smaller cabinets
function better than larger cabinets?
 48 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Revision task
Use this chapter to produce a two-sided leaflet explaining the role and
functions of the Cabinet.

 Helpful websites

www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
www.civilservice.gov.uk
www.parliament.uk

 Suggestions for further reading

Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice Hall).
Coxall, B., Robins, L. and Leach, R. (2003) Contemporary British Politics,
4th edn (Palgrave), chapter 12.
Jones, B. (ed.) (2004) Politics UK, 5th edn (Longman Pearson), chapter 19.
Jones, B. and Kavanagh, D. (1998) British Politics Today, 6th edn
(Manchester University Press).
Kavanagh, D. and Seldon, A. (1999) The Powers behind the Prime Minister
(HarperCollins).
Kingdom, J. (1999) Government and Politics in Britain (Polity Press).
McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder), chapter 2.
McNaughton, N. (2001) Success in Politics, 2nd edn (Murray), Unit 8.
Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).
Sampson, A. (2004) Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the
21st Century (Murray), chapter 7.
Thomas, G. (1998) Prime Minister and Cabinet Today (Manchester
University Press).
Thomas, G. (2002) ‘The Prime Minister and Cabinet’, Politics Review,
vol. 11.4, 2002.
CHAPTER 3

The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy

Contents
Introduction 50
Cabinet committees 50
The Cabinet Office 60

Overview
In this third chapter, we continue to look at the workings of the Cabinet.
Having looked in detail at the origins, structure and functions of the
Cabinet, it is now necessary to analyse the structures around the Cabinet
that allow the workings of cabinet government to continue in what is now a
very complex and layered central government system. We will examine the
organisation and functions of cabinet committees and will look in some
detail at the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet Secretariat.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• The development of cabinet committees
• The use of cabinet committees by recent prime ministers
• The effectiveness of cabinet committees
• The structure and role of the Cabinet Office
• The structure and role of the Cabinet Secretariat
• The Cabinet Office and Secretariat under Tony Blair
• Recent reforms to the workings and structure of the Cabinet Office
50 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Introduction
Modern cabinet government requires a substantial substructure and
organisation for it to continue to fulfil its functions in accordance with
what people feel is the ‘proper’ way for the system to work. The
two main parts of the system that we shall discuss in this chapter are
not particularly new innovations. Cabinet committees and the
Cabinet Office may be traced back to the reforms introduced by
David Lloyd George in order to re-structure a government in such a
way that it would be more capable of co-ordinating what was, by
1916, war on a scale that had never before been witnessed by an
industrial society. The debates and discussions that will be outlined in
this chapter cut across several of the key themes in the book. The
nature of the Prime Minister’s handling of Cabinet and the chang-
ing role of the Cabinet Office are two highly contentious issues that
will be examined from different perspectives in later chapters. We will
begin our discussion by focusing on cabinet committees.

Cabinet committees
We have already given a brief overview of the history of cabinet com-
mittees in Chapter 1 so we will begin immediately to analyse them in
more detail. Cabinet committees are the responsibility of the Prime
Minister. It is the Prime Minister who will establish the committee,
give it its terms of reference and appoint its chair and members.
Cabinet committees were introduced, and have developed along-
side, the massive growth in the volume and complexity of modern
government. Before the 1970s government regularly denied the exist-
ence of these committees. It was not until the publication of ministe-
rial diaries in the 1970s that cabinet committees became common
knowledge outside the confines of Whitehall and Parliament. Even
then, an official announcement on the number and nature of these
committees had to wait until 1992 when John Major finally went
public and published details of the whole structure.

Why cabinet committees exist

Cabinet committees are at the very heart of the British executive. The
use of the word ‘heart’ is a common metaphor when describing these
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 51

particular elements of government, and we will soon get an impres-

sion of this ‘heart’ of government as a fairly crowded place. This real-
isation should strengthen the view we are developing here of a cabinet
‘system’ of government that embraces many more actors and institu-
tions than would have been involved in 1916.
The majority of the decisions taken ‘by the Cabinet’ are, in effect,
taken by cabinet committees. Cabinet committees provide a frame-
work for collective consideration of, and decisions on, major policy
issues and issues of significant public interest. They ensure that there
is a proper discussion of issues that are of interest to more than one
department and that all relevant ministers have their views consid-
ered. Committees will meet physically to resolve disputes and to make
difficult decisions, yet may use correspondence to deal with less con-
tentious issues.
The Cabinet Office website summarises the main business of
cabinet committees in three broad spheres:
• The co-ordination of particularly complex government business
such as the legislative programme, constitutional issues and public
expenditure.
• Consideration of major issues of policy or issues likely to lead to
significant public comment or criticism.
• Questions where there is an unresolved disagreement between
departments.
Cabinet committees provide a useful overload facility for the full
Cabinet by settling business and disputes in a smaller forum and at a
lower level. They have an important link with collective responsibil-
ity in the way that they allow decisions to be considered fully by those
ministers most closely concerned. It is this aspect of their function
that ensures government as a whole can be expected to accept respon-
sibility for the decisions that emerge.
If we turn to the role of cabinet committees in the decision-making
process, then their importance becomes even clearer. Even in those
instances where the committee has not taken a decision itself, it is
highly likely that the crucial debates prior to a higher-level decision
will already have taken place in the committee. Cabinet committees
are shadowed by committees of civil servants and prepare papers for
their discussion, and it is now largely accepted that decisions taken in
52 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

cabinet committees have the same status as Cabinet decisions. This sit-
uation has been formalised by allowing all cabinet committees to act
by a device known as ‘implied devolution’. This means they are
given their authority and legitimacy by the full Cabinet and that
their decisions have the same formal status as those taken by the full
Cabinet. Only on those occasions when the committee has been
unable to reach a decision will the issue find its way on to the higher
Cabinet agenda. While committee chairs are allowed to take disputes
to the full Cabinet (though they are discouraged from doing so),
Treasury ministers defeated in committee over public spending have
had, since 1975, automatic right of appeal to the Cabinet.

Structure of cabinet committees

When John Major finally threw back the veil from around the cabinet
committee system, he did no more than reveal what political journal-
ists and academics had been able to work out for themselves: a system
of committees of various kinds, some with subcommittees that tend
to focus on narrower issues than those dealt with by the full commit-
tee. We can now identify four types of cabinet committee:
• Standing – permanent for the duration of the Prime Minister’s
term in office.
• Miscellaneous, or ad hoc – set up to deal with particular
issues.
• Official committees – consist only of civil servants.
• Ministerial groups – a new addition to the committee system
in 1998. These tend to be less formal and have a wider member-
ship that is not exclusive to cabinet members. Recent ministerial
groups have chosen to focus on Food Safety and Rural Issues,
Genetic Modification and Crime Reduction. These types of
group were a response to the desire of ‘new’ Labour in the late
1990s to produce ‘joined-up’ and more co-ordinated government.
In May 2005, the Cabinet Office website was also referring to
the existence of consultative committees where matters are
discussed with others outside the British government. Examples
provided by the Cabinet Office included the Joint Consultative
Committee with the Liberal Democrats and the Joint Ministerial
Committee with the devolved administrations. The relationship
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 53

between these two committees and the rest of the cabinet committee
structure is not clear. Neither of them appears on the Cabinet Office
web-pages that list the committees of the cabinet. The main focus of
the website is on the ministerial and the miscellaneous/ad hoc com-
mittees and provides links to their terms of reference. A full list of
cabinet committees as they appeared in the summer of 2005 will
be reproduced later in this chapter. You should also note the large
number of subcommittees that the system has now produced.

The role of cabinet committees

In research published as part of the ‘Whitehall Programme’,1 Brady
and Catterall suggest that cabinet committees have two main pur-
poses. The following table is a summary of their key arguments:
Brady and Caterall go on to point out that the familiar division of
cabinet committees along the lines of those set out above do not cor-
respond to the roles in Table 3.1. The difference between those

Table 3.1 The purpose of cabinet committees

Political purpose – to provide Administrative purpose – to co-

political support to the Cabinet, ordinate policy and clear the ground
particularly on Sensitive on for legislation. Committees have
controversial issues four main administrative roles
• Cabinet does not have to • To advise Cabinet on scenarios,
discuss everything. Not all options and technical detail.
issues are equally • Policy formulation – preparing
important. Committees can policy or legislation.
deal with these ‘lesser’ • Executive decision making –
issues. this may not involve approval
• Controversy and from the Cabinet.
confrontation may be ‘side • Implementing policy and
tracked’ out of the Cabinet. overseeing the introduction
• A newly set-up committee into departments.
can achieve the twin tasks
of doing the preparatory
work for a new policy while
satisfying the public demand
that ‘something should be
done’.
54 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

committees considered to be ‘standing’ and those considered to be

‘ad hoc’ are usually decided by how long the committee will be
required to sit and what breadth of reference it is given. As we shall
see when we examine the cabinet committees under Blair, crises fre-
quently generate ad hoc committees that may or may not evolve into
the standing variety. This is a strength rather than a weakness of the
system. The distinction between ad hoc and standing and between
official and ministerial suggests a very flexible and responsive set-up
that can adapt to a quickly changing political atmosphere. The fact
that a special committee for consultation with the Liberal Party on
Constitutional Reform was set up after 1997 illustrates the fluid and
positive aspects of the cabinet committee system that is capable of
‘accommodating so many different inputs’. Ian Budge refers to this
joint cabinet committee as a ‘harbinger of important change for all
sorts of reasons’.2 These changes associated with this unique experi-
ment in British government included:

• Showing a break with the constitutional convention of majority

party dominance and total confrontation with the opposition.
• Keeping constitutional reform firmly on the political agenda.
• Providing a political device for the Prime Minister to put pressure
on traditionalists within the Cabinet who oppose change.

Cabinet committees and policy

Having established the fact that cabinet committees have become
central to decision making in the years since 1945 and that much of
what cabinet committees decide does not need formal Cabinet
approval it is nevertheless important to consider their role in the
policy-making process in more detail. As we have already seen, a
cabinet committee is able to fulfil a number of tasks. Once these tasks
are complete, and at the end of the process a decision emerges, it is
the job of the Cabinet Office to distribute these decisions to the rele-
vant departments in government. It is the departments that must then
implement these decisions. The role that a cabinet committee takes
in the policy-making process depends very much on the way that
different prime ministers use the system yet also allows considerable
flexibility to the ministers who chair these committees and those min-
isters who sit on more than one of them. According to Burch, deci-
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 55

sions reached in cabinet committees may represent what he refers to

as ‘the points at which major policies are determined and decided’.3
It is possible to draw attention to a number of policies which,
although considered in committee, required a decision in full
Cabinet. These include:
• Reform of the National Health Service (1988–9).
• The replacement of the local Poll Tax by the new Council Tax
(1991).
• The incorporation of the European Convention on Human
Rights into British law (1997 – although final implementation was
later).
• The introduction and level of a national minimum wage (1998 –
but again, implemented later).
Occasionally, Cabinet will ask committees to look again at the rec-
ommendations that they are making or may refer the issue further
back down the policy-making line. We can highlight two examples to
illustrate this point:
• The Freedom of Information Act (1998). Both Prime Minister
and Home Secretary were unhappy with the recommendations
from committee.
• Plans to privatise the Post Office (1993). Major and the majority
of his Cabinet felt that Heseltine’s proposals would not be
approved by Parliament.

Cabinet committees under Thatcher and Major

Margaret Thatcher appears not to have favoured cabinet committees
and, as a result, created relatively few of them. Compare Attlee’s use
of the committees with that of Thatcher:
• Attlee, 1945–51: 148 standing, 313 ad hoc.
• Thatcher, 1979–87: 35 standing, 120 ad hoc.
Full Cabinet fared little better under Thatcher to the extent that
almost 50 per cent fewer cabinet meetings were being held in 1990
than in 1970. Rather than utilise the full cabinet system, Thatcher pre-
ferred instead to seek ‘bilateral’ meetings with ministers and officials
or would set up a ‘working party’ to tackle a particular problem.
56 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 3.2 Ministerial (standing) committees of the

Cabinet (May 2005)

Committee Subcommittees
Antisocial Behaviour
Asylum and Migration
Civil Contingencies
Constitutional Affairs Electoral Policy
Freedom of Information
Parliamentary Modernisation
Intelligence Services
Defence and Overseas Policy International Terrorism
Protective Security and Resilience
Iraq
Conflict Prevention / Reconstruction
Domestic Affairs Ageing Policy
Children’s Policy
Communities
Legal Affairs
Public Health
Economic Affairs
Energy and the Environment Sustainable Development
European Policy
European Union Strategy
Housing and Planning
Legislative Programme
Local and Regional Government Local Government Strategy
NHS Reform
Public Service and Expenditure Electronic Service Delivery
Public Services Reform
Regulation, Bureaucracy Regulatory Accountability
and Risk Inspection
Schools Policy
Science
Serious and Organised Crime
and Drugs
Welfare Reform

Under Major, both the Cabinet and the cabinet committee system
were restored to something resembling the ‘normality’ of the pre-
Thatcher savaging even though the general trend away from the
Cabinet continued. In an attempt not to repeat wholesale the mistakes
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 57

of his predecessor, Major tried wherever he could to include as many

ministers as possible in the relevant discussions and key decision-making
moments. Major also tended to make better use of ministerial standing
committees even if the ad hoc committees were used even less frequently
than they had been under Thatcher. The consequence of this fall in the
number of committees and the frequency of their meetings is not nec-
essarily a negative development as it has led to a more streamlined and
regularised cabinet committee system. The system has continued to
exist and evolve under Tony Blair, to whom we may now turn.

Tony Blair and cabinet committees

As we are able to see from the following table, the number of cabinet
committees under Blair has increased. In June 2005, the following
ministerial cabinet committees could be viewed in detail on the
appropriate government website.
Table 3.3 shows the ad hoc or miscellaneous committees.
It has been pointed out that, under Blair, though the number of
committees has increased, the use of them has tended to be somewhat
erratic. In the first Blair government, key cabinet committees met
regularly to discuss policy themes central to the original ‘New’ Labour
programme. These issues included devolution legislation, incorpo-
ration of the European Convention, freedom of information and
House of Lords reform. They were also set up to deal with military
issues in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq. In his biography of Blair,
Seldon attributes part of Blair’s lack of enthusiasm for cabinet com-
mittees as an illustration of his general lack of trust in the Civil
Service machine as a whole.4 One senior adviser confided to Seldon
that Blair had no time for cabinet committees because he felt ‘they

Table 3.3 Ad hoc/miscellaneous committees (May 2005)

Restructuring of the European Space and Defence Industry

Animal Rights Activists
Universal Banking
Olympics
London
Efficiency and Relocation
58 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

just went round and round in circles and did nothing’. Other
members of the government made more use of them, especially
Brown and Prescott. According to James Naughtie, however, Brown
ultimately had less time for the committee system than Blair, even
though the Prime Minister had given his Chancellor the chair of the
‘prize’ Committee on Economic Affairs. This large committee, which
includes all the ministers with the big Whitehall budgets, is one of the
two most important sub-Cabinet groups, alongside the Defence and
Overseas Policy Committee. The significance of Brown being given
the chair of this committee is important only in the recognition that
no Chancellor had been allowed to do so since Wilson took control of
it for himself in 1966. Although this arrangement appears to have
been part of the infamous ‘deal’ struck between Blair and Brown in
opposition, the Chancellor has never developed or strengthened the
committee. Like Blair, Brown appears to prefer to do his business else-
where: ‘Gordon at his grumpiest’ is how a member of the committee
described the Chancellor to Naughtie, ‘He can’t wait to get it over.
Maybe that’s why he’s so rude to us.’ A picture thus emerges of a man
who would really rather be somewhere else, who prefers to listen to
advisers rather than committee members and who spends most of his
time in the meetings ‘scribbling on piles of papers’.5
For Seldon, this attitude at the very top of the government towards
cabinet committees is something of an irony. For an administration
that has attempted to make a virtue of its intention to have ‘joined-
up’ government, it has actually shunned some of the very mecha-
nisms that have been ‘ensuring joined-up government for a hunded
years’. From within the Blair court itself, the view of cabinet com-
mittees has been slightly less critical. While acknowledging that bilat-
eral and ad hoc meetings serviced by Number 10 staff are a ‘good idea
because they are small and manageable and bring together those with
real interest and weight, who can reach decisions more rapidly’, Peter
Mandelson has argued that this style of government ‘can happily
coexist with the more formal cabinet committees’.6

How effective are cabinet committees?

When discussing the effectiveness of cabinet committees, we are
drawn back to a consideration of the leadership style, approach and
attitude of the Prime Minister. If a prime minister wishes to develop
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 59

a strong and well-resourced structure of cabinet committees that then

beats away at the crucial heart of the government machine, then there
is really nothing to stop him or her doing so; this was certainly the
intention of David Lloyd George when he introduced them in 1916.
As we have seen, attitudes towards the committee system differ from
prime minister to prime minister. In recent years, the appointment of
cabinet ‘enforcers’, who have generally tended to sit on the major
committees, is another indicator of their general importance in the
wider system of government. According to Brady and Catterall, the
effectiveness of cabinet committees rests upon two requirements:
• The more effective committees display a clear relationship between
the committee and the departments which actually implement
policy.
• Secondly, effective committees will have a clear sense of political
direction concerning the policy goals towards which the commit-
tee is working.
If these conditions are missing, then there is a real possibility that the
committee, however important it might be, will either ‘operate in a
vacuum or degenerate into a talking shop’.7 The description of
Brown’s chairing of the Economic Affairs Committee may well illus-
trate this particular point.
Other criticisms of the cabinet committee system include:
• Most major committees, both standing and ad hoc, are chaired by
the Prime Minister. This simply adds fuel to the arguments that
Blair can use committees as an extra means of political patronage
and as yet another device with which to dominate Cabinet.
• The large number of committees makes it increasingly difficult for
ministers to check effectively everything that is being decided prior
to the decisions being ratified by Cabinet.
• A badly organised system of cabinet committees can lead to overlap
and duplication of effort. This can lead to ‘policy fragmentation’.
• Committees can become the venue for ‘turf wars’ between com-
peting departments.
• It is not always the case that those people charged with the man-
agement and direction of the committee are always in charge.
Brady and Catterall write of ministers who are not formal members
60 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

of a committee turning up more regularly, and making more of a

contribution, than those who are supposed to be there.
• The Prime Minister is not always able to supply sufficiently clear
political direction to committees. Without this, they are likely to
be less successful.
• Regular restructuring of government departments and central
government mechanisms frequently leave cabinet committees
confused and adrift in a system that changes rapidly around them.
Irrespective of the above criticisms and shortcomings of cabinet
committees, they remain an integral part of the government machin-
ery. There are several key points to make in their favour by way of
concluding this section:
• They allow small groups of ministers to focus on very specific and
specialised decision making.
• They provide the opportunity to invite outsiders with specific
knowledge or critical opinions into the decision-making process.
• They provide a fail-safe mechanism for policy/decision making in
the event of the Prime Minister not being up to the job.
It might be useful at this point to review your notes on cabinet com-
mittees or attempt some of the questions at the end of this chapter
that will test your understanding and knowledge of this key element
of cabinet government. We can now move on and look in more detail
at the real bureaucracy that underpins the functioning of cabinet gov-
ernment as a whole by assessing the origins and functions of the
Cabinet Office.

The Cabinet Office

If the Cabinet and its various committees are at the heart of the gov-
ernment machine then the Cabinet Office represents the valves and
chambers of the heart in the way that it directs crucial information
and paperwork throughout the arteries of central government. The
modern Cabinet Office has three key functions:
• To prepare the agenda of the Cabinet.
• To record Cabinet decisions and proceedings.
• To check and monitor appropriate actions.
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 61

Evolution of the Cabinet Office

The Cabinet Office was established by Lloyd George in 1916. Prior
to this, Cabinet would meet and take decisions yet have no record of
what it had discussed or decided nor did it have any real idea as to
how and when the decisions would be acted upon. From the outset, a
major part of the Cabinet Office has been the Cabinet Secretariat
which is headed by the Cabinet Secretary and has a staff of around
2,000.

Structure of the modern Cabinet Office

The Cabinet Office is headed by the Cabinet Secretary and is situ-
ated at 10 Downing Street. It is appropriate to think of the Cabinet
Office as being organised and structured on two levels – the adminis-
trative and the political. This is an important distinction and we will
return to it shortly.
Modern government requires a huge administrative backup. We
have already discussed the size of the Cabinet and the number of
cabinet committees and subcommittees, and it should be clear that
this system generates large numbers of meetings which, in turn,
require agendas, papers for discussion, minutes of meetings, and
must then process the decisions that are made. The whole system
will also require huge numbers of memorandums and other forms
of communication to keep all key ministers, committees and groups
informed of the formulation, general direction, and implementa-
tion of government policy. We have also noted in the section earlier
in this chapter how every cabinet committee is shadowed by an
official committee of civil servants who do much of the preparatory
work on which ministers will rely to make their final decisions.
These official committees have specialist knowledge of complex
policy areas (especially those relating to Europe) and are also organ-
ised by the Cabinet Office. Most of this administrative work is done
by assistant secretaries. An assistant secretary is a fairly senior
official who will be temporarily seconded to the Cabinet Office
from other departments. They normally stay at Number 10 for
approximately two to three years. These administrative and secre-
tarial posts are also referred to as the Cabinet Secretariat, and
form a major part of the Cabinet Office. According to the Cabinet
Office website:
62 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

The Cabinet Secretariat is non-departmental in function and

purpose. It services the Cabinet itself together with its Cabinet
Committees and subcommittees. The Secretariat aims to ensure that
the business of government is conducted in a timely and efficient way
and that proper consideration takes place when it is needed before
policy decisions are taken.
The role of the Cabinet Secretariat is crucial to the general organ-
isation of the government. It is not the case, however, that the work
of the Secretariat can always be considered politically neutral.
Agendas drawn up by the Secretariat can be written and organised in
such a way that can influence the length and nature of the discussions
that will take place. This type of influence could also be extended
to the preparation of minutes that may be written in such a way as to
prefer one line of discussion to another. This may be an attempt to
influence the final decision towards a particular policy when discussed
at a higher level. The minutes of cabinet meetings themselves are a
particularly good example of this as they are written by the Cabinet
Secretary in consultation with the Prime Minister and form the
official policy decisions of the government.
We have already mentioned that the Cabinet Secretary is the
head of the Civil Service, and it is worth taking some time now to
consider this point in more detail. As head of the Civil Service, the
Cabinet Secretary is in charge of the conduct and conditions of
service for Whitehall as a whole. This aspect of the post means that
he or she will be the person to preside over all reforms to the Civil
Service. Although we shall soon concentrate on reforms under Tony
Blair, it is worth mentioning that the Civil Service was also subjected
to considerable reforms in the 1980s. Some of these reforms
were unpopular and controversial; many of those instigated by
Thatcher, for instance, fundamentally changed the structure and
working practices of Whitehall. The high-profile nature of such
reforms has frequently thrust the Cabinet Secretary into a degree of
public exposure that holders of the post have not always found
comfortable.
It is not just internal reforms, however, that have raised the profile
of the Cabinet Secretary. Sir Robert Armstrong, for instance, was
forced into the open during the 1980s to deal with an attempt by the
government to ban the publication of Spycatcher, a book written by an
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 63

ex-MI5 agent, and Armstrong was also drawn into the Westland
Helicopters dispute that we have explained in some detail elsewhere.
It was suggested in the introduction to this section that the Cabinet
Office and Secretariat are best viewed as being organised and struc-
tured on two levels – the administrative and the political. We have
already given examples of how the workings of the Cabinet Office
could be interpreted in a covertly political manner but we should now
move on to discuss the more overt political role of both Office and
Secretariat.
One of the key arguments that is being developed through this
book is that the organisation and functions of the central executive are
determined to a large extent by the style and direction of the Prime
Minister. The extent to which the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet
Secretary and the Secretariat act in a political way will vary from gov-
ernment to government. It is important to remember, of course, that
none of the individuals or groups under discussion should have any
political role at all. The Civil Service, you will recall, is expected, con-
stitutionally to be politically neutral. The reality, as we shall see, is
somewhat different.
While a minister such as Richard Crossman in the 1960s felt that
Harold Wilson and his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, spent far
too long ‘massaging’ the minutes of cabinet meetings, it was the
period of government under Margaret Thatcher when concerns
began to be raised on a regular basis over her use of the Office to help
her control both the Civil Service and the Cabinet. Speculation about
the political role of the Cabinet Office and Secretariat has increased
substantially in the Blair administrations. The nature of the Cabinet
Office under Blair will be considered in the following section. To sum-
marise the key arguments and criticisms, however, we could say that
Blair has used the Cabinet Office as follows:

• It has become his direct instrument of control over government.

• He has used it to modernise the government machine.
• He has placed it at the centre of a new machinery of committees,
commissions and working groups which are developing policy on
current issues that are not the individual responsibility of depart-
ments. You can check this by looking again at the list of ‘ministe-
rial’ cabinet committees in the table earlier in this chapter.
64 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• It has become an extension of the Prime Minister’s Office, espe-

cially where it is concerned with policy presentation.

In essence, the Cabinet Office undertakes a huge and complicated role

of co-ordination. In recent years, the nature of the Cabinet Office has
come under much scrutiny, and claims have been made that it has now
become a ‘Prime Minister’s Department’ in all but name.

Blair and the Cabinet Office

Following the election of the Labour government in 1997, the
Cabinet Office was divided into four smaller secretariats:

• Economic and Domestic Affairs

• Defence and Overseas
• European (European Union)
• Constitution

These four secretariats were accountable to the Prime Minister

through the Cabinet Secretary and to ministers who chaired commit-
tees. The Economic and Domestic Secretariat dealt with legislative and
parliamentary matters. The Constitution Secretariat co-ordinated
work on constitutional reform including devolution to Scotland, Wales
and the English regions and the incorporation into British law of the
European Convention on Human Rights.
When Sir Richard Wilson was appointed as Cabinet Secretary in
January 1998, Blair asked him to draw up plans to strengthen the
Cabinet Office. His report was completed by Easter 1998 and then
delayed to coincide with Blair’s first cabinet reshuffle. When the
reshuffle was finally announced in July 1998 Blair took the opportu-
nity to announce his changes to the Cabinet Office. The changes took
place in seven key areas:

• The Cabinet Office was placed under the control of a cabinet

minister – Jack Cunningham – who was given the ‘strategic’
responsibility to drive Blair’s agenda in Whitehall. The press
immediately used the term ‘Cabinet Enforcer’ to describe this new
post.
• A Performance and Innovation Unit was set up inside the
Cabinet Office – this was a particularly powerful innovation.
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 65

• The head of Government Information and Communications

Service and the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser were to be
based inside the Cabinet Office.
• The Women’s Unit was to be relocated and based inside the
Cabinet Office.
• A Centre for Management and Policy Studies was to be set
up to ensure that officials were trained in the latest management
techniques.
• Staff from the seventeen existing Cabinet Office buildings were to
be moved to the Cabinet Office in Downing Street.
• The Office of Public Service was to be merged with the rest of the
Cabinet Office.

Two of these reforms are worth looking at in more detail. The

‘Cabinet Enforcer’, placed in charge of the Cabinet Office,
reflected some of Blair’s frustration experienced during his first year
in office – ‘one of the most frustrating things about coming into gov-
ernment is the time it takes to get stuff moving through the system’.8
Cunningham went to some length to send a clear message to the Civil
Service that it was the intention that he would work with Sir Richard
Wilson as a ‘joint partner’. According to Cunningham, the Cabinet
Office had to adapt to being more than just the ‘powerful engine of
government’. In future, thought Cunningham, the Cabinet Office
would be involved in ‘key policy initiatives . . . if problems are
looming, it’s my responsibility to make Blair aware of them’.
The Performance and Innovation Unit was staffed by civil
servants and experts recruited for short stints to review specific poli-
cies. The first priorities handed down from Blair included the devel-
opment of policies on older people, cities and the regions. Some
observers have interpreted the setting up of this unit as one of the first
signs of tension between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The
Treasury already monitored departmental programmes and provided
an overview of government policy. John Rentoul, one of Blair’s early
biographers, interpreted this as an ‘unacknowledged tussle . . . Brown
as the Chief Executive under ‘chairman’ Blair’.9
After the 2001 general election the Cabinet Office was placed
under the control of the Deputy Prime Minister, and a number of
new special offices and units was brought within it. These included:
66 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• The Office of Public Service Reform was set up to oversee

the implementation of the government’s reform programme.
• The Delivery Unit was set up to monitor and improve policy
delivery. This was to be regarded by most observers as the most
successful of the post-2001 election reforms.
• The Forward Strategy Unit was designed to give a clear focus
on working up policy from first principles (‘blue sky thinking’) and
was largely the brainchild of John Birt who had stressed to Blair
the importance of strategic thinking.
To a large extent, the 2001 reforms mark Blair’s ‘last chance’
(Seldon) to ‘get things right’. In the context of that particular ambi-
tion, the Delivery Unit would prove to be Blair’s main control mech-
anism to ensure that improvements happened as promised in the
second term. Taken as a package, the reforms constituted nothing less
than a revolution in the workings of Number 10 and in the relation-
ship between Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.
Following the appointment of Sir Andrew Turnbull as the new
Cabinet Secretary in 2002, a further reorganisation brought together
these reform and delivery units that started in the Cabinet Office into
a single integrated structure. The reorganised Cabinet Office was to
focus its work on four key objectives:
• To support the Prime Minister in leading the government.
• To support the Cabinet in transacting its business.
• To lead and support the reform and delivery programme.
• To co-ordinate security and intelligence.
We shall look at the significance of these reforms more closely in
Chapter 6 when we consider in detail the significance of the struc-
tural changes to the Cabinet Office made since 1997. To give some
indication of the direction of our discussion on this particular issue,
it is worth noting that Peter Hennessey has argued that, under Blair,
there has been a fusion of the Prime Minister’s Office and the
Cabinet Office as resources for the Prime Minister, and that this has
rendered obsolete the debate over a Prime Minister’s Department.10
We will also mention elsewhere the continued reorganisation of the
Cabinet Office after the 2002 reshuffle caused by the resignation of
Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary. The Deputy Prime Minister
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 67

was moved from the Cabinet Office into a separate and expanded
Deputy Prime Minister’s Department. The Cabinet Office, under
Lord Macdonald, reported directly to Tony Blair, thus providing
extra evidence to support the views of observers like Hennessey who
argue that the Cabinet Office is now a resource for the Prime Minister
rather than for the Cabinet as a whole.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

The bureaucracy and support mechanisms of the modern Cabinet are
complex and subject to a gradual process of reform and change.
Some of these reforms have raised concerns about the nature of the
support systems now available and in particular the possible
politicisation of the offices involved. A number of the themes and
issues that have been raised here will be revisited when we consider
the powers and role of the Prime Minister in more detail.

Glossary of key terms



Bilateral meetings A device favoured by Margaret Thatcher and Tony

Blair that involves one-to-one meetings on specific issues with relevant
ministers as opposed to discussing the issue in full Cabinet.
Cabinet committees Appointed by the Prime Minister to deal with items
of government business. Discussions in committee are supposed to
inform decisions in full Cabinet. In June, 2005, including subcommittees,
there were around forty-two cabinet committees.
Cabinet enforcer The term first used to describe the Labour MP Jack
Cunningham who was given control of the Cabinet Office in an attempt to
streamline the delivery of policy.
Cabinet Office Prepares the agendas and minutes of the Cabinet. Plays
an important role in co-ordinating the work of government.
Cabinet Secretariat The administrative and secretarial posts that form a
major part of the Cabinet Office.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe the origins and functions of cabinet committees.
Identify and describe four types of cabinet committee.
Explain the role of the Cabinet Office.
Describe the key functions of the Cabinet Secretariat.
 68 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Briefly describe the reforms to the Cabinet Office introduced by Tony

Blair.
Essay questions
To what extent would you agree with the suggestion that cabinet
committees have replaced collective cabinet government?
‘Cabinet committees are an effective means of organising modern
government.’ How far do you agree with this suggestion?
To what extent and in what ways has Tony Blair changed the role and
structure of the Cabinet Office?
‘The Cabinet Office is now the Prime Minister’s Department.’ Discuss.
Revision task
Use an A3 sheet of paper to draw a diagram that shows the following:
• The current structure of Cabinet Committees.
• The current structure of the Cabinet Office.
• You could also attempt to show the links between the two.

 Helpful websites

www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
Make good use of this in the revision task.
www.civilservice.gov.uk

 Suggestions for further reading

Brady, C. and Catterall, P. (2000) ‘Inside the Engine Room: Assessing
Cabinet Committees’, Talking Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
Budge, I. (ed.) (2000) New British Politics (Longman).
Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice Hall).
Hennessy, P. (1998) ‘The Blair Style of Government’, Government and
Opposition, winter 1997–8.
Jones, B (ed.) (2004) Politics UK, 5th edn (Longman Pearson), chapter 19.
McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder), chapters 2 and 3.
 The Cabinet: Support and Bureaucracy 69

McNaughton, N. (2001) Success in Politics, 2nd edn (Murray), Unit 8.

Mandelson, P. (2002) The Blair Revolution Revisited (Politico’s).
Naughtie, J. (2002) The Rivals (Fourth Estate).
Rathbone, M. (2003) ‘The British Cabinet Today’, Talking Politics, vol. 16.1,
September 2003.
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Seldon, A. (2004) Blair (Free Press).
Thomas, G. (1998) Prime Minister and Cabinet Today (Manchester
University Press).
Thomas, G. (2002) ‘The Prime Minister and Cabinet’, Politics Review,
vol. 11.4, 2002.
CHAPTER 4

The Cabinet: Collectively Dead?

Contents
Introduction 71
Collective cabinet responsibility 71
The case of Robin Cook and Clare Short 81
Is cabinet government in decline? 84
Cabinet government: alive and well 86
Concluding points 89

Overview
In this chapter, we move on to examine the current state of the Cabinet. In
recent years the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility has received
substantial scrutiny from politicians, political commentators and academics
alike. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, the British cabinet system has
been subjected to some particularly close criticisms that have been
illuminated by the spotlights offered by the Iraq war in general and the
related issue of the Hutton Inquiry in particular.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• Definitions and traditional views of how the doctrine of collective
responsibility came into being and is supposed to work
• The impact of recent events, especially those surrounding the war in Iraq,
on the condition of cabinet government
• The debate surrounding the ‘decline’ of cabinet government
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 71

Introduction
Collective cabinet responsibility refers to the accepted conduct of
government ministers as part of the Cabinet. Under this doctrine,
ministers are bound to support publicly the decisions made by
Cabinet as a whole and will show no disagreement with these deci-
sions outside of the cabinet room. The doctrine has evolved as a
means of maintaining the appearance of Cabinet unity and party dis-
cipline and showing that the government is firmly behind the policies
it promotes and seeks to pass through Parliament.
A more critical definition of the doctrine may be offered, however.
The doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility evolved as a means
of giving a public appearance of Cabinet unity and genuine collect-
ive decision making. The notion that ministers all accept the con-
straints of this doctrine, and are therefore bound by it, is increasingly
difficult to accept. There are, in recent years, examples of cabinet
ministers willing to break free from the constraints of a doctrine that
binds them to decisions they do not agree with. The doctrine also
requires review given the ongoing debates surrounding the nature of
prime ministerial government and the relationship between the first
minister and those appointed to ministerial positions.
In a recent (November 2004) House of Commons research paper
on the collective responsibility of ministers, Gay and Powell began
their analysis by stating that the convention of collective Cabinet, or
ministerial, responsibility is at the heart of the British system of par-
liamentary government yet, like individual responsibility, it is a concept
that is not regulated by statute, although some guidance has been for-
malised in the Ministerial Code. They went on to say that: ‘Collective
responsibility serves to bind the government together so that it faces the
monarch, Parliament and the public united. Yet, as with individual
responsibility, the operation of this concept must depend as much, if
not more, on political reality as on constitutional convention.’1 The
notion of collective cabinet responsibility is clearly a debatable issue in
British politics and one that this chapter will seek to investigate in detail.

Collective cabinet responsibility

The doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility is not unique to poli-
tics. Most people who join together in pursuit of some shared goal or
72 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

aim – sports clubs, for example – have to be prepared to accept the

rules and regulations of the groups, especially if they serve on the
organising committees. When promoted to the Cabinet, ministers are
given a document, Questions for the Procedures of Ministers, which, among
other things, sets out the rules for the workings of collective responsi-
bility. All prime ministers produce a version of this document which
will cover all aspects of ministerial procedures, including everything
from collective responsibility to the publication of memoirs. The orig-
inal version, first drawn up by Attlee in 1945, consisted of four pages
and twenty-three paragraphs. In his book Arguments for Democracy
the ex-Labour minister, Tony Benn, referred to the 1976 version of
the document recently released under the thirty-year rule that had
grown to twenty-seven pages and included a separate minute relating
to travel. These documents are not submitted to the Cabinet for
approval and the Prime Minister is able to prevent any discussion of
their contents.2 For critics such as Benn the rules regarding the appli-
cation, or non-application, of collective responsibility are entirely
within the personal discretion of the Prime Minister, as some of the
examples we shall use here will show.
While the debate over collective cabinet responsibility is not par-
ticularly new, the concept itself has a much longer history. Collective
responsibility was developed among groups of Ministers in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries as a way of seizing political control
from the monarch. Once again, Walpole provides us with our starting
point. Having established the principal of cabinet government, the
first prime minister recognised that, for the system to work effectively,
there had to be the acceptance of group discipline among the group
of ministers chosen collectively to run the country. Collective cabinet
responsibility may therefore be traced back to the early eighteenth
century and has been a key part of the British Constitution ever since.

The three strands of the convention

Geoffrey Marshall has highlighted three individual strands within the
convention of collective responsibility.3 The table below summarises
these three strands:
Gay and Powell use these broad principles to suggest four key ways
in which the three strands may be applied in practical circumstances,
albeit with varying degrees of constitutional certainty:
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 73

Table 4.1 Three strands of collective responsibility

Confidence Unanimity Confidentiality

• Government will • All members of the • Discussion in

only remain in government speak Cabinet must
power for as long and vote together be confidential
as it retains the in Parliament – if open and
confidence of the unless where an frank exchanges
House of Commons. exception is made. of views are to
take place.
• Confidence is always • The universal • Unanimity may
assumed unless a application of be a ‘fiction’, but
confidence vote is unanimity may well confidentiality
lost by the be a ‘constitutional must be
government. fiction’. maintained.

• Ministers must not vote against government policy –

without this, it could be argued that a government has lost the
right to exist, and is therefore the most fundamental part of the
whole doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility. When a minis-
ter votes for his or her government, he/she is giving a public
expression of support even though, in private, he or she may be
less enthusiastic for the measure. Even an abstention would be
seen as breaking the convention – it is not enough simply not to
vote against, but a positive display of support is required.
• Ministers must not speak against government policy –
voting against or abstaining are fairly clear breaches of the con-
vention, yet speaking against the government is less clear-cut. In
the age of spin, press briefings and leaks, a minister may always
find a way to communicate his or her dissatisfaction with a par-
ticular government position. Given what we shall shortly discuss
when we consider the case of Clare Short, it is fair to say that the
situation has changed considerably from the days when it was safe
to assert that ministers who were not prepared to defend a cabinet
position had no alternative but to resign.
• All decisions are decisions of the whole government –
and a minister should not brief or leak against a cabinet colleague
74 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

in order to attack the position of an individual or group within

Cabinet or to place distance between themselves and the policy.
One of the more obvious examples of this particular flaw in the
convention may be observed by a closer examination of the
Westland Helicopters affair of 1986.
• A former minister must not reveal cabinet secrets –
although there are certainly ways of working around this. It has
become the tradition in recent years that ministers who resign
make resignation speeches in the Commons. These can have an
impact of varying degrees. Sir Geoffrey Howe, for instance, was
able to deliver a devastating resignation speech with significant
implications for Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Robin Cook was able
to deliver a similarly devastating resignation speech in 2003. The
reasons for resignation that are set out in these speeches often come
close to revealing cabinet secrets and have serious consequences for
the Prime Minister and government as outlined in the two exam-
ples here. The formal exchange of resignation letters can be simi-
larly revealing. The other issue relating to this fourth application
includes ministerial memoirs and autobiographies. The majority
of senior politicians can now expect to be tempted with generous
publishing deals soon after their departure from office. The nature
of the Crossman diaries in the 1970s provided one of the first tests
of this application, and the published diaries, memoirs and auto-
biographies of former ministers continue to do so.

Challenges and breaches

Having established some clear definitions of the doctrine of collec-
tive cabinet responsibility, it should be apparent that it is not the case
that the principle has never been challenged or that exemptions have
never been allowed. This section offers a brief summary of those
occasions when the doctrine has been the subject of both. Challenges
and breaches may be summarised under five key subheadings:

• Agreements to differ
• Free votes
• Splits and resignations
• Leaks
• Memoirs
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 75

We shall begin by providing examples of ‘agreements to differ’.

These, along with ‘free votes’, represent the formal mechanism of sus-
pending collective cabinet responsibility:

The national government and tariff policy – 1932

This particular example illustrates what we may refer to as an ‘agree-
ment to differ’. In 1932, during a period of coalition ‘national’ gov-
ernment between the Conservative Party and its partners, a major
disagreement arose around the issue of tariff reform. During the 1931
general election campaign, coalition candidates made an agreement
not to stand in opposition to each other even though there were clear
splits over tariffs. After the election, four members of the Cabinet
refused to accept the decision to impose a general tariff, and made it
known that they would resign. The Labour leader and Prime Minister,
Ramsay MacDonald, made the four members an offer that they
would be allowed to disagree with the tariff reform in public if they
would stay in the Cabinet. The four rebels went one step further and
demanded they be given the freedom to speak against and vote against
any tariff proposals and that MPs be given the same freedom. They
also demanded that government whips be warned off applying any
pressure to ministers to get them to support the government line.
MacDonald agreed to this and the Cabinet was therefore freed
from usual practice. This ‘modification of usual ministerial practice’
allowed those members of the Cabinet who could not support the
‘conclusions of the majority’ to express their views by speech and vote.
The whole ‘agreement to differ’ was justified on the grounds that, in
difficult times (it was the height of the Depression), such a departure
from the norm allowed for the best means of ‘interpreting the will of
the nation and the needs of the time’.
Views on the ‘agreement’ were mixed. Those opposing it pointed
out that there could be no such thing as a ‘collective conscience’
while others took the view that the British Constitution was a ‘living
organism’ capable of change and flexibility. Stanley Baldwin came
to the rather neat conclusion that ‘we have collective responsibility
for the departure from collective action’. It should be noted here that,
under a national government, the accepted constitutional conven-
tions were sometimes difficult to apply. The national government was
not ‘party’ government in the way we understand the term in
76 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

‘normal’ circumstances, and therefore contemporary commentators

recognised what was happening in 1932 was very much a product of,
if not unique to, the certainly unusual political circumstances.

Labour and the EEC referendum – 1975

Wilson’s Cabinet was removed from the constraints of collective
responsibility during the 1975 referendum on continued British
membership of the European Economic Community. Labour came
to power in 1974 with a pledge to renegotiate the terms of the United
Kingdom treaty and to allow the outcome to be voted on by the
people, either in a general election or a referendum. The need for an
‘agreement to differ’ was raised by three senior members of the
Cabinet – Peter Shore, Michael Foot and Tony Benn – who pointed
out to Harold Wilson that the strength of views in the Cabinet was
such that the these ‘deep convictions cannot be shelved or set aside by
the normal process of Cabinet decision-making’. Wilson announced
on 23 January 1975 that a referendum would be held before the end
of June that year; his statement to the Commons explained how the
government would make its position on continued membership
known when the outcome of the renegotiations was clear. The state-
ment went on to say, however, that:

The circumstances of the referendum are unique, and the issue to be

decided is one on which strong views have long been held which cross
party lines. The Cabinet has, therefore, decided that, if when the time
comes there are members of the government, including members
of the Cabinet, who do not feel able to accept and support the
Government’s recommendation; whatever it may be, they will, once
the recommendation has been announced, be free to support and
speak in favour of a different conclusion in the referendum campaign.

At this point, the uproar in the House is reported in Hansard by a

simple ‘Oh!’

Labour and the European Assembly direct elections – 1977

Wilson’s policy in 1974 was repeated by his successor, James
Callaghan, in 1977. Once again, Europe was the issue. The events of
1977 would prove to be much more complex than either 1932 or
1975, mainly because two issues were at stake: first, the principle of
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 77

direct elections and, second, the voting method to be used. The situ-
ation was also confused because of the drawn-out nature of events
that covered two parliamentary sessions and two bills.
In 1976, the United Kingdom had promised its ‘best endeavours’
to comply with an act of the Council of Foreign Ministers stating that
member states should agree to try to implement legislation for direct
elections to the European Assembly in spring 1978. The government
did little to keep its promise and it was not until the events of March
1977, when Callaghan was forced into the ‘Lib–Lab Pact’ with the
Liberals in order to preserve the Labour Party in office, that the issue
resurfaced. As part of the deal with the Liberals the government
restated its promise to legislate on direct elections and later promised
that the issue would be the subject of a free vote in both houses of
Parliament. Callaghan then announced to the Cabinet that there
would also be a free vote for cabinet ministers on the issue. Callaghan
will not be remembered as one of the most quotable of prime minis-
ters, yet his response to Margaret Thatcher’s questioning in the
Commons about the suspension of collective cabinet responsibility is
certainly worth repeating: ‘Collective cabinet responsibility . . . I cer-
tainly think that the doctrine should apply, except in cases where
I announce that it does not.’
Six cabinet ministers, along with twenty-five other members of the
government, voted at the second reading against the bill to introduce
a regional list system of voting. When a similar bill was introduced in
the next session, the same six cabinet ministers now abstained from
the vote, as did twenty other members of the government. The bill
was finally passed as a guillotine motion even though four cabinet
ministers defied a two-line whip.
The two examples cited in 1977, along with the ‘agreement to
differ’ over tariffs in the 1932 national government represent the only
occasions when the principle has been formally suspended. It is also
worth mentioning free votes at this point. ‘Free votes’ are those
occasions when there is no clear or stated government policy on the
issue and, as a consequence, ministers cannot really be seen to dissent
from any adopted policy. The most common use of free votes tends
to be on questions with strong religious, social or moral connections.
These kinds of issues have included abortion, capital punishment and
gay rights. Free votes can often be much more than simply a device
78 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

to give ministers the freedom not to compromise their consciences.

They may be used when the party is split over an issue or wishes not
to have to put forward a government line. The lack of government
policy is the main distinction therefore between ‘agreements to differ’
and ‘free votes’. We may turn now to those examples of the more
unauthorised ‘breaches’ of collective responsibility. First, splits and
resignations:

The Westland affair – 1986

This particular example could also be discussed in relation to cabinet
‘leaks’ (see below). In 1986 the then Conservative Defence Minister,
Michael Heseltine, resigned from government over the issue of the
purchase of helicopters. The British-owned Westland helicopter
company was in severe financial difficulties and looked to be on the
point of collapse. In the spirit of the time, this would normally have
been seen as yet another company unable to manage itself effectively.
Westland, however, was the main supplier of helicopters to the British
armed forces and therefore its difficulties constituted a major crisis.
Heseltine argued strongly that Westland could be saved if it amal-
gamated with a European company. His cabinet colleague, Leon
Brittan, the Secretary for Trade and Industry, however, argued instead
that Westland should join with Sikorsky, an American company. At
stake were a large number of British jobs and the principle of whether
Britain should have closer defence links with America or with Europe.
It also became clear to Heseltine that the Prime Minister, Margaret
Thatcher, supported Leon Brittan and the American option. Unable
to accept responsibility for a decision he did not feel had been prop-
erly discussed in Cabinet, Heseltine left the cabinet meeting to
announce to the waiting press exactly what he had done. It was cer-
tainly one of the more theatrical illustrations of collective responsibi-
lity. At the same time, the Department of Trade leaked a letter from
the Solicitor General that was very critical of the position taken by
Michael Heseltine on the issue of how best to save the ailing helicopter
company. This was a clear breach of ministerial confidentiality and
one for which Brittan was eventually forced to resign.
Peter Dorey suggests that Heseltine’s resignation is a prime
example of the ‘weakening’ of collective responsibility through a
much less stringent application of the doctrine.4 Dorey goes on to
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 79

suggest that Helseltine’s claim that he was forced to resign was essen-
tially a pretext to remove himself from government in order to make
his bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party, not something he
would have been able to do from within the Cabinet.

Geoffrey Howe and Europe – 1990

In a 1989 cabinet reshuffle, Geoffrey Howe had been demoted from
the post of Foreign Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister. Rather than
accept the demotion, Howe resigned and used his resignation speech,
now free from the constraints of collective responsibility, to criticise
the lack of genuine debate in Cabinet on Europe. The timing may
also have been a pretext to force the Conservative Party into a serious
leadership contest later that year.

The ‘bastard’ years – 1992–7

John Major headed a government that was in the process of tearing
itself apart over the issue of Europe. The eurosceptics in the Cabinet,
John Redwood, Peter Lilley, and Michael Portillo, all briefed against
Major on European issues. When asked why he didn’t simply sack
them (they were clearly in breach of the doctrine of collective respon-
sibility) Major made his famous reference to the problems caused by
ex-ministers and did anyone really think he wanted ‘three more of the
bastards out there?’

Malcolm Chisholm – 1997

Chisholm resigned his position as a Scottish Office minister over the
proposals by the Labour government to cut the lone-parent supple-
ment to child benefit. This was unusual. A minister rarely finds it
difficult to accept the first decision they do not agree with, certainly
not to the point where they feel the need to free themselves from the
collective responsibility and speak publicly. On this occasion,
Chisholm was certainly reflecting the disquiet of many back-
benchers in the Labour Party.

War in Iraq – 2003

British involvement in the war to topple the regime of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq provides us with the most recent examples of ques-
tions surrounding the health of collective cabinet responsibility.
80 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

At the time of writing, the issue appears to have been responsible for
several resignations, including two senior cabinet ministers – Robin
Cook and Clare Short – and the criticism of an ex-minister on the
back-benches, Mo Mowlam. These resignations will be the focus of a
case study later in this chapter. Leaks and ministerial memoirs are the
last two aspects of breaches of collective cabinet responsibility that
we need to consider:

Leaks
To ‘leak’ information from the Cabinet is to pass unauthorised infor-
mation to someone outside the Cabinet; more often than not, this
person will be a journalist. Cabinet leaks break the convention of
confidentiality that we outlined above. Leaks can often destroy the
appearance of ministerial unanimity and can also compromise the
secrecy of government. The ‘unattributable leak’, however, has now
become established as a ‘complement to the rigid precepts of collec-
tive responsibility’, and leaks are the ‘inevitable concomitant of col-
lective responsibility’.5 In other words, they are bound to happen and,
even when they do (apart from two examples of budget leaks in 1936
and 1947), they rarely give away ‘true’ state secrets involving security,
defence, devaluation or other budgetary matters. The Westland affair
illustrates how ministers can avoid the rules of collective responsibi-
lity by leaking their views to the press and then denying any know-
ledge of the leak.

Memoirs and diaries

Should the restrictions of collective cabinet responsibility extend
beyond the time served as a cabinet member? It is generally thought
to be the case that the confidentiality of the Cabinet is a convention
that does indeed extend into retirement. So, where does this leave the
publication of ministerial memoirs?
Richard Crossman had been a member of Wilson’s Cabinet in
the 1960s and had kept a very detailed diary of his experiences.
When extracts were published posthumously in the Sunday Times the
Attorney-General sought injunctions against the newspaper to stop
any further publications, even though the Cabinet Secretary had seen
the extracts and made various deletions beforehand. After much legal
wrangling, the case accepted the principle of a legal obligation of
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 81

cabinet secrecy but that the application would depend on the time
period involved between the cabinet meeting or decision and its
eventual disclosure. Three rules eventually emerged from the 1976
Committee of Privy Councillors (‘Radcliffe Report’, 1976) which was
established to consider the issue of ministerial memoirs:
• Ministers can describe and account for their opinions and actions
but not those of others.
• Advice given by fellow cabinet ministers on civil servants should
not be revealed.
• Judgements (favourable or otherwise) should not be made on those
who served under the minister.
All former cabinet ministers who now wish to publish diaries or
autobiographies are required to submit a typescript to the Cabinet
Secretary first and to make sure that they stick to the three principles
established by the ‘Radcliffe Report’. For some observers, the growing
number of ministerial diaries and memoirs is yet further evidence
that cabinet confidentiality is no longer as secure as it once was.

The Case of Robin Cook and Clare Short

Robin Cook had been Foreign Secretary in the Labour government
between 1997 and 2001. As Shadow Foreign Secretary he had
promised that a Labour government would add an ‘ethical dimen-
sion’ to the conduct of foreign policy. It was never entirely clear what
Cook meant by this even though he unveiled his intentions in a major
speech in May 1997 that attempted to use the managerial and organ-
isational language, that would become synonymous with ‘New’
Labour, to explain his ‘ethical’ approach. The speech was swiftly fol-
lowed by the unveiling of a short film made by the film-maker, David
Puttnam, designed to ‘speak directly of our new goals and direction’.
Cook’s stay at the Foreign Office was not a great success. His term
was marked by British interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, with
the latter proving particularly controversial when allegations were
made that a British company had supplied arms to supporters of the
deposed president in contravention of a United Nations embargo.
Cook was also embarrassed when his apparent offer to mediate in the
dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir was rebuffed. In
82 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

2001, Cook was moved from the Foreign Office to be Leader of the
House of Commons in what was widely seen as a demotion. He ini-
tially appeared to relish the prospect of reforming the practices and
procedures of the Commons, however, and it was not until Britain
became drawn into the moves to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his
regime in Iraq that Cook decided to oppose openly the government
of which he was a part.
By early 2003 Cook had become one of the key opponents in the
government to the possibility of British military intervention in Iraq.
On 17 March 2003 Cook resigned from the Cabinet at the height of
what had become a crisis for Blair’s government. His resignation
statement set out the main reason for his departure: ‘It is twenty years
ago that I first joined Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. It is with regret
I have today resigned from its Cabinet. I can’t accept collective
responsibility for the decision to commit Britain now to military
action in Iraq without international agreement or domestic support.’
This was followed by the usual exchange of letters between outgo-
ing minister and Prime Minister before Cook delivered his resignation
speech in the House of Commons later that day at which the House
gave a standing ovation. Cook said that he could not back a war that
did not have international or domestic support, nor could he be per-
suaded that there was ‘an urgent and compelling reason for this action
in Iraq’. The BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, called Cook’s per-
formance ‘without doubt one of the most effective and brilliant resig-
nation speeches in modern British politics’. Although the government
went on to survive the subsequent vote (even though 139 Labour MPs
voted against war), Cook’s resignation turned the spotlight on the
International Development Minister, Clare Short, who was also a
major opponent of military action from within the Cabinet.
The issue was raised the following day during a briefing from the
Prime Minister’s Office on Iraq. Clare Short, while openly critical of
the government, had decided to stay in the Cabinet, (she would not
resign for another two months), and the question was raised as to the
extent that Short remained bound by the principle of collective
cabinet responsibility. The response to this was ‘yes’, Short did, indeed,
remain bound by the principle. When journalists pressed the point
about the extent to which Short could continue ‘agonising’ while
remaining a cabinet minister, the Prime Minister’s spokesperson said
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 83

it was ‘still possible to have concerns’. In the case of Short, these much-
expressed concerns were in relation to the reconstruction of Iraq and
the broader Middle Eastern peace process.
The example of Clare Short is particularly revealing in terms
of the current state of collective cabinet responsibility. As we have
already shown, Short remained in the government for two months
after she had first voiced her concerns in public over the prospect of
war in Iraq, especially after the failure to secure a second United
Nations resolution. Short made her first public breach of collective
cabinet responsibility on Radio 4’s ‘Westminster Hour’ on 9 March
2003. At some other time, Short would have been expected to resign
or would have been sacked. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph on
11 March 2003, the Labour MP Graham Allen wrote: ‘In permitting
Clare Short to keep her Cabinet job, the Prime Minister has shown a
willingness to put aside the longstanding convention regarding col-
lective responsibility.’
As we are about to see, the debate surrounding the nature of prime
ministerial power and the health of collective cabinet responsibility is
a particularly lively one. Having eventually resigned in May 2003,
Short touched upon the subject of collective cabinet responsibility in
her resignation speech:

In [Labour’s] second term, the problem is the centralisation of power

into the hands of the Prime Minister and an increasingly small
number of advisers who make decisions in private without proper dis-
cussion. It is increasingly clear, I am afraid, that the Cabinet has
become, in Bagehot’s phrase, a dignified part of the constitution, it’s
gone the way of the Privy Council. There is no real collective respon-
sibility because there is no collective; just diktats in favour of increas-
ingly badly thought-through policy initiatives that come from on high.

Following the end of the war, the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord
Butler, was asked by the government to conduct a review of the intel-
ligence coverage available on programmes of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. More significantly for us, he was also asked to
make recommendations to the Prime Minister on the workings of the
machinery of government, particularly the Cabinet.
Butler’s overview of the government decision-making process
had some significant points to make about the nature of collective
84 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

ministerial decision making. For the political commentator, Peter

Hennessey, Butler’s criticisms on this specific issue were more funda-
mental than those criticisms directed at the intelligence community.6
Butler concluded that:

• Government decision making was informal.

• Not enough use was made of established cabinet committee
machinery.
• On the specific issue of intelligence relating to Iraq, the Cabinet
Secretary was effectively removed from the ‘chain’ through which
intelligence reaches the Prime Minister and that the Cabinet
Secretariat was not part of various meetings on security and intel-
ligence that would have helped cabinet ministers in ‘discharging
their collective responsibilities in defence and overseas policy
matters’.
• Changes to two key posts in the Cabinet Secretariat (Defence and
Europe) switched their roles to increase their responsibility to the
Prime Minister rather than to the Cabinet as a whole.
• Cabinet had the opportunity to discuss Iraq in the year before the
war. As war became more likely, however, smaller meetings of key
ministers, civil servants and the military provided the framework
for discussion and decision making in the government. Butler said:
‘One inescapable consequence of this was to limit wider collective
discussion and consideration by the Cabinet.’

Is cabinet government in decline?

It should become apparent from the discussion of collective cabinet
responsibility that there are major questions on the status and ‘health’
of modern cabinet government. In this section we shall summarise
the arguments for and against the suggestion that cabinet government
is in decline.

Cabinet government is unwell

The evidence in support of this argument is starting to look fairly com-
pelling. Cabinet meetings are now held only once a week, they are
short (some lasting only twenty minutes according to one former min-
ister), and are often nothing more than information-giving exercises or
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 85

an opportunity to rubber-stamp decisions already taken. These

developments, alongside Blair’s leadership style, are often used to
support the marginalisation theory of Cabinet and add to the general
view that cabinet government is to all intent and purposes dead. As we
shall see, the discussion on the health of cabinet government is closely
linked to the debate on the ‘presidentialism’ of the Prime Minister and
is something we shall cover in detail in the following chapter. The fol-
lowing points may all be used to support this argument that cabinet
government is unwell:

• Shortened and less frequent cabinet meetings are increasingly

used by the Prime Minister to gather the final collective seal of
approval for decisions that are taken elsewhere. This particular
approach to the Cabinet was clearly evident under Margaret
Thatcher, and Blair has pushed the model further. The role of the
modern Cabinet is therefore very restricted in terms of its tradi-
tional and expected role in the policy-making process.
• Power is increasingly centralised around the Prime Minister and
a few senior ministers. The use of specialist advisers further mar-
ginalises the role of cabinet members. The increase in prime min-
isterial power has been augmented by the growing powers of the
Prime Minister’s Office that have allowed him or her more closely
to oversee government strategy and monitor departmental work.
It also allows the Prime Minister to initiate more policy from the
center, with policy proposals passing backwards and forwards
between Prime Minister’s Office and departments in a way that
increasingly cuts Cabinet out of the loop.
• Ministers may sometimes complain about the marginalisation
of Cabinet, yet they do little themselves to promote genuine
collegiality. According to this argument, ministers are interested
only in their own departments. In this ‘departmentalist’ view of
government the Cabinet becomes nothing more than the battle-
ground on which struggles with the Treasury and other depart-
ments take place. This attitude adds to the general concerns about
the health of the Cabinet.
• The modern media now focus largely on the Prime Minister as
the key individual in the political system. In response, the Prime
Minister must always be giving the impression of party control,
86 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

government leadership, and clear strategic and political vision com-

bined with personal charisma and television ‘presence’. It is the
demands of a twenty-four-hour news media that have caused
modern prime ministers to focus increasingly on the presentation
of policy through the increasingly significant roles of press officers
and ‘spin doctors’. This concentration on the packaging and pre-
sentation of policy is particularly associated with the premiership
of Tony Blair. A great deal of the modern packaging of British pol-
itics has been carried out at the expense of old-fashioned and tra-
ditional cabinet government.
• Continued membership of the European Union has a major
impact on top-level decision making in such a way as to have
strengthened the power of the Prime Minister while weakening
the Cabinet. As the leading British negotiator in EU treaty
making, the Prime Minister must be given considerable freedom
to make deals in Britain’s interests. Also, when other ministers
are involved in policy making in the European Union, it is the
Prime Minister who usually consents to any negotiating positions.
Chairing important international meetings, such as the G8
summit in Scotland (July 2005), also greatly enhances the position
of the Prime Minister, mostly at the expense of the Cabinet.
• As we have already seen, the application of the doctrine of col-
lective responsibility has changed significantly in recent years,
with a wider application applied in a much less stringent manner.
This, taken with the other developments listed above, all point to
a substantial collection of arguments that suggest cabinet govern-
ment is not particularly healthy.

Cabinet government: alive and well

The first point to make about the modern Cabinet is that it is in a state
of change and transition. Those arguments that seek to illustrate the
‘decline’ of cabinet government tend to base their analyses on a strict
and unbending application of nineteenth-century conventions and
agreements that overlooks the wholesale changes to government and
policy making in the twentieth century. It is therefore not unreason-
able to acknowledge that government by Cabinet is different now
from the way it would have been in 1906. This is not automatically to
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 87

assume, however, that the basic principles of cabinet government are

on the critical list.
Mark Rathbone has put forward some key arguments in defence
of the well-being of cabinet government.7

• Taking major policy decisions without bringing them to

Cabinet is nothing new – Gladstone’s conversion to Home
Rule for Ireland was a personal decision about a major political
issue and one that was thought through and introduced largely in
isolation of any members of his Cabinet. Clement Attlee (Prime
Minister 1945–51) quickly developed a style of managing the
Cabinet that discouraged detailed discussions and stifled any dis-
senting voices. Rathbone quotes Kavanagh and Seldon’s observa-
tion that ‘every Prime Minister from Gladstone onwards has been
accused of being ‘dictatorial’ or ‘presidential’.
• Short cabinet meetings do not necessarily mean the
Prime Minister is ignoring the views of ministers –
long, detailed and regular cabinet meetings, which involve more
than twenty ministers and various officials, may not really be the
most efficient way of conducting government business. It is
difficult to imagine Blair allowing the two-day cabinet meetings,
which occasionally happened under Labour governments in the
1960s, to disrupt the flow of government business.
• Is it really so surprising that prime ministers do not like
being defeated in cabinet meetings? – Given the leaks and
rumours we have already discussed, it is difficult to imagine a prime
minister suffering a defeat in Cabinet and for that defeat to remain
a secret. Even if confidentiality was maintained, it is difficult to see
how that prime minister could continue to head the government fol-
lowing a humiliating defeat by his or her colleagues. Prime minis-
ters are therefore unlikely to bring any policy to Cabinet unless they
are sure that their ministers will support it. In doing so, a prime min-
ister will have assessed likely opposition and modified any aspects of
the policy that may attract criticism. As Rathbone points out, this
does not mean that the Cabinet does not have any power, merely
that the constraints exercised by Cabinet tend to be informal.
• Less frequent meetings of the full Cabinet do not mean
the institution is in terminal decline – viewing Cabinet in
88 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

this way is to cast too narrow a focus on the issue. Cabinet com-
mittees now make up the greater part of the work of the cabinet
system. It has been accepted for many years that decisions of
cabinet committees have the full authority of cabinet decisions.
Some critics of the system have seen cabinet committees as a means
of increasing prime ministerial power; it is also true that terms of
reference and membership of cabinet committees are decided by
the Prime Minister. There are also examples of prime ministers,
however, who have sought to use cabinet committees to avoid dis-
cussion and to steamroller their own policies through, but paying a
high price for doing so. Rathbone uses Thatcher’s cavalier treat-
ment of Cabinet in the 1980s, and the high-profile resignations of
senior ministers, as setting up the circumstances of her own down-
fall when, in 1990, she looked to her Cabinet for support against a
leadership challenge and the support was not forthcoming.
• Cabinet committees do not just bypass Cabinet, they
are a means of managing it effectively – if an issue is dis-
cussed at length by the most appropriate cabinet committee and
its decision is merely reported to a full cabinet meeting, this is not
necessarily an indication that cabinet government is in decline, it
is more a sign that the Cabinet is functioning effectively. Critics of
Blair’s style of government have accused him of ignoring formal
cabinet committees and choosing instead to hold ‘bilateral’ meet-
ings on a one-to-one basis with individual ministers in order to
arrive at a decision and there by to bypass wider discussion. Under
Blair, however, the number of cabinet committees has risen con-
siderably since 1997. Bilateral meetings may take place but this
does not mean that cabinet committees are undermined.

George Jones of the London School of Economics has written

extensively on the subject of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. He
encourages observers to avoid thinking of the Cabinet in its narrow
sense. To do so, he argues, makes the Cabinet appear a very limited
body. Far better, he writes, to think of the Cabinet as a complete
system that has at its heart the senior ministers of the Cabinet around
which all the other elements of cabinet government revolve. These
satellites of the central Cabinet include the cabinet committees, the
Cabinet Office and the Cabinet Secretary, all the various units that
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 89

now make up the Prime Minister’s Office together senior government

members of all government departments and the Treasury. This view
will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9 when we outline the
theory of a ‘core executive’.

Concluding points
In his biography of Blair, Rentoul referred to the ‘new low’ in the
history of cabinet government. Brief meetings, decisions taken else-
where, business conducted in cabinet committees and the increased
use of bilaterals all point to a style that is ‘hub and spoke rather than
collegiate’.8 Mo Mowlam was also highly critical of Blair’s style, espe-
cially the ‘centralising tendency and arrogance of No.10’.9
It would appear that cabinet government in its current manifesta-
tion is not functioning entirely in accordance with the classic and
traditional understanding of its role in government. The extent to
which this situation is terminal, however, is less clear. Rathbone uses
a famous Monty Python sketch to illustrate the potential that still
remains in the cabinet system of government as its supporters wish to
view it. For much of the 1980s, argues Rathbone, cabinet government
appeared to be dead but, in reality, it was just stunned and, in the end,
awoke to give its owner a savage pecking. Whether cabinet govern-
ment will ever reassert itself completely is another matter. For better
or worse, we now have a system of government focused largely on the
Prime Minister. The Cabinet may on occasions have the opportunity
to exert itself over the Prime Minister in brief and dramatic shows of
‘pecking’ yet, between these times, it is difficult to imagine a return to
a genuinely collegiate cabinet style of government that may never
have existed anyway.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

At the start of this chapter we discussed the definitions and traditional
views of how the doctrine of collective responsibility came into being
and how it is supposed to work. We then went on to examine the
doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility by looking at recent events
and the impact of these events, especially those surrounding the war
in Iraq, on the condition of cabinet government. The discussion in this
 90 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

chapter was concluded by an overview of the debate on the ‘health’

of cabinet government: is cabinet government ‘unwell’ or are reports of
its death exaggerated? There are strong arguments for both sides of
the debate. It is certainly the case that the leadership styles of recent
prime ministers may be interpreted as a marginalisation of Cabinet,
and the very vocal denunciations of recent ex-ministers support this
view. Alternatively there are arguments that suggest modern cabinet
government is ‘different’ owing to the changing wider political context
but this is not to say it is incapable of reasserting itself at some point in
the future.


Glossary of key terms

Agreement to differ This is where the doctrine of collective cabinet
responsibility is relaxed to allow cabinet ministers to disagree in public on
a specific issue.
Collective cabinet responsibility The doctrine stating that all members
of the government are collectively responsible for its decisions. In recent
years it has been suggested that the application of the doctrine has
undergone considerable change.
Confidence Government will remain in power only for as long as it retains
the confidence of the House of Commons. Confidence is always assumed
unless a confidence vote is lost by the government.
Confidentiality Discussion in Cabinet must be confidential if open and
frank exchanges of views are to take place. Unanimity may be a ‘fiction’
but confidentiality must be maintained.
Free votes When cabinet ministers are freed from the requirement to vote
with the government. Usually on moral or controversial social issues such
as the death penalty or abortion.
Leaks When information confidential to Cabinet finds its way into the
public domain.
Unanimity All members of the government speak and vote together in
Parliament – unless an exception is made. The universal application of
unanimity may well be a ‘constitutional fiction’.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe what is meant by the term ‘collective cabinet responsibility’.
Briefly describe those occasions when collective responsibility has been
breached.
Explain why events in Iraq have had a major impact on the doctrine of
collective responsibility.
 The Cabinet: Collectively Dead? 91

Describe the key functions of the Cabinet.

Briefly summarise the arguments that can be used to support the claim
that ‘cabinet government is in decline’.
Briefly summarise the arguments that can be used to support the claim
that ‘cabinet government is alive and well’.
Essay questions
‘The Cabinet is dead.’ Discuss.
The doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility no longer exists. To what
extent do you agree?
To what extent would you agree with the suggestion that smaller cabinets
function better than larger cabinets.
How far have the Blair governments since 1997 contributed to the
downgrading of Cabinet?
Revision task
Research and produce a revision table of two columns. Label one ‘Cabinet
government is dead’ and label the other ‘Cabinet government is alive’.
Use bullet points to list key pieces of evidence in each column.

 Helpful websites

www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
www.civilservice.gov.uk

 Suggestions for further reading

Allen, G. (2001) The Last Prime Minister (Politico’s).

Benn, T. (1981) Arguments for Democracy (Penguin).
Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice
Hall).
Dorey, P. (1991) ‘Cabinet Committees’, Talking Politics, vol. 4.1, autumn
1991.
Ellis, D. (1980) ‘Collective Ministerial Responsibility and Collective
Solidarity’, Public Law, 367.
92 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Gay, O. and Powell, T. (2004) ‘The Collective Responsibility of Ministers’

(House of Commons Research Paper, Nov. 2004, 04/82).
Hennessy, P. (2002) ‘The Blair Government in Historical Perspective’,
History Today, Jan. 2002.
Hennessy, P. (2004) ‘Systems Failure at Heart of Government’,
Independent, 16 July 2004.
Jones, B (ed.) (2004) Politics UK, 5th edn (Longman Pearson), chapter 19.
Kavanagh, D. and Seldon, A. (1999) The Powers behind the Prime Minister
(HarperCollins).
Magee, E. and Garnett, M. (2002) ‘Is Cabinet Government Dead?’, Politics
Review, vol. 12.1, Sep. 2002.
Mowlam, M. (2002) Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the
People (Hodder).
Rathbone, M. (2003) ‘The British Cabinet’, Talking Politics, vol. 16.1, Sep.
2003.
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Sampson, A. (2004) Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the
21st Century (Murray) chapter 7.
Thomas, G. (2002) ‘The Prime Minister and Cabinet’, Politics Review, vol.
11.4, 2002.
CHAPTER 5

The Prime Minister: Power

Contents
Introduction 94
Origins and history 94
The role of the Prime Minister 95
The powers of the Prime Minister 101
Checks on prime ministerial power 106

Overview
The focus here will be on the Prime Minister and prime ministerial power. In
May 2005 Tony Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister to win three
consecutive elections. Like Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister who
dominated the last years of the twentieth century, Blair has done much to
provoke major appraisals of what it now means to be Prime Minister of
Britain. The roles and powers of the office have been the subject of much
debate. This chapter will examine these key areas and point the way to the
next section of the book that will deal with the bureaucracy and support
systems available to the Prime Minister.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• The role and powers of the modern Prime Minister
• The internal and external constraints on the powers of the Prime Minister
94 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Introduction
Since 1979 only three individuals have held the office of Prime
Minister. Even by the relatively stable standards of western liberal
democracies, this is a remarkable achievement. This focus of power
in the hands and personalities of a small élite says much about the
nature of the office of Prime Minister and the political system that
upholds and maintains the position. For the larger part of the period
since 1979, two individuals – Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair –
who between them illustrate significant factors relating to the modern
position of the chief executive, have held the position of Prime
Minister. In looking at these two individuals, there are also major
points to be made in terms of key differences and, perhaps more
interestingly, key similarities. Moreover, since the events surrounding
the war in Iraq from 2003 onwards, there has been in Britain a height-
ened sense of a debate relating to prime ministerial power.

Origins and history

As we have already explained, the origins of the office of Prime
Minister may be traced back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
the development of cabinet government during the reign of William III
and the subsequent reign of the Hanoverian kings, George I, II, and III.
It is generally agreed that Sir Robert Walpole was the first person
to hold the office that we now recognise as ‘Prime Minister’. Although
George III would wrestle back some of the powers of the monarch
from the Prime Minister, the essential functions of the office had been
established. The British political system may have undergone sub-
stantial change between Walpole and Blair, but the fundamental
prime ministerial characteristics remain. The Prime Minister:

• May exercise prerogative powers delegated by the monarch.

• Will largely determine the composition of the Cabinet.
• Will be expected to maintain and lead a unified Cabinet capable
of presenting a coherent programme and confident face to
Parliament.
• Must command the support of the majority of Parliament –
especially the House of Commons.
 The Prime Minister: Power 95

• Must be able to display sufficient political authority and ability to

become chief policy maker across the whole range of government
business.

It is difficult to imagine a situation now where a Prime Minister

could be a distant and largely unknown figure but it is worth pointing
out that Robert Peel was probably the first modern holder of the office
to have a personal profile and recognition that went beyond the
enclosed world of Parliament and party. This widespread public
recognition of the Prime Minister took further leaps with the two great
titans of nineteenth-century politics, Gladstone and Disraeli, and con-
tinued through to the twentieth-century in the shape of Salisbury,
Asquith and Lloyd George. In this sense, the personalised nature of
the office, which has reached the almost forensic personal scrutiny of
the likes of Thatcher and Blair, is merely the product of long-term his-
torical trends in the evolution of the post. Having looked at the origins
and history of the Prime Minister, we may discuss the position in terms
of roles and powers. The following text box will be useful in setting out
in detail the discussion we are about to have.

The role of the Prime Minister

The development of the modern Prime Minister and the modern
relationship between Prime Minister and Cabinet is due primarily to
the work of the Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George and a
senior civil servant, Maurice Hankey.
The reforms introduced by Lloyd George and Hankey are essen-
tially those that govern the organisation of the British Cabinet today.
They are summarised in the table below.
There is one other aspect of the 1916 reforms that has been devel-
oped and refined by subsequent premiers. In order to meet on a more
informal basis with specialist advisers and civil servants, Lloyd George
took over one of the garden sheds at the rear of 10 Downing Street
and established a private secretariat – probably the first example of
what we now refer to as kitchen cabinets – and specialist advisers, the
type revealed by the Hutton Inquiry meeting with Blair in the Prime
Minister’s ‘den’ and taking key unminuted decisions while draped
across sofas and easy chairs.
96 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Box 5.1 Prime ministerial roles and powers: an overview

The roles and powers of the British Prime Minister are notoriously dif-
ficult to set down in a clear and unambiguous way. This text box will
introduce you to some of the key concepts, themes and distinctions
in the order that we shall cover them in the following pages:

Role of the Prime Minister

When we refer to the ‘role’ of the Prime Minister, we refer to the ‘parts’
that the Prime Minister plays as if he or she were an actor in a film.
The roles we will discuss here include: leader of government, leader
of foreign policy, leader of a political party and communicator-
in-chief. We will also see how the Prime Minister is also required to
play two roles in the same film, as it were, as head of state and head
of government. You may wish to look again at chapter 1 to remind
yourself of these particular distinctions.

Powers of the Prime Minister

The powers of the Prime Minister are the visible and legitimate
means by which he or she is able to play the role. This is strongly
linked to the idea of Prime ministerial authority which is where the
powers actually come from and that are accepted as being legiti-
mate sources of power. We will refer to the powers of the Prime
Minister as being constitutional/formal and informal/fluid.

Constitutional/formal powers
Those powers that were historically performed by the monarch and
are known as prerogative powers. We will look at these powers of
the Prime Minister as head of state and head of government.

Informal/fluid powers
As the phrase suggests, these are much more flexible powers and the
way in which they are exercised reflects greatly on the style and lead-
ership of the Prime Minister. The powers here are mostly those linked
with government and include the political leadership of a party, speak-
ing on behalf of the government and determining government policy.

The constitutional position of the Prime Minister is unclear. To

put it bluntly, there is no constitutional definition of a Prime
Minister’s role. Looking at statutes does little to clarify the issue as
there are no statutory references to the office of Prime Minister before
 The Prime Minister: Power 97

Table 5.1 Cabinet government: the 1916 reforms

Before After

Cabinet meetings and decisions Minutes were taken of discussions

were not minuted or circulated. and decisions. These minutes were
circulated to other main areas of
government.

Cabinet was attempting to deal A cabinet committee system was

with all policy issues. The established that would consider the
increased workload meant that specialised areas of policy and report
Cabinet was not always able back to the full Cabinet with specific
to give specialised areas of recommendations. Ministers from
policy due consideration. outside the Cabinet sat on these
sub-committees and allowed those
with specialist knowledge to
contribute to the policy-making
process. Lloyd George chaired the
more important cabinet committees.

The Cabinet had no specific Hankey became the first holder of

bureaucracy to organise and the office of Cabinet Secretary.
structure its work. Hankey therefore became the most
senior civil servant in Whitehall and
helped organise cabinet business
and maintain cabinet unity.
A Cabinet Secretariat was also
established. This was headed by
the Cabinet Secretary and was
charged with ensuring that all parts
of government understood and
worked towards achieving all
Cabinet decisions.

1937. Nevertheless, the role and powers of the Prime Minister are
now central to the workings of the entire British system of govern-
ment, and it is to these considerations that we shall now turn. We shall
look first at the different roles of the Prime Minister and then go on
to discuss the powers available to the Prime Minister to execute his or
her various roles.
98 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Leadership of government
In terms of the origins of the office, this is the key role and official
function of the British Prime Minister. It is the central aspect of
everything else the Prime Minister does. In this role, the Prime
Minister is effectively the head of the executive and is in charge of
controlling the Cabinet, overseeing the Civil Service and government
agencies, and will be ultimately answerable for all the decisions the
government makes.
In leading the government the Prime Minister must control the
Cabinet. When a Prime Minister fails to control the Cabinet then it
is unlikely that he or she will be an effective leader of government. In
these situations the Prime Minister will probably be replaced, either
by an electorate that recognises the weakness of their position or by
their own party which will remove him or her from power and choose
a replacement.
As head of the executive, the Prime Minister is also the head of
government policy. Most policy in modern government is a product
of departments and party policy-making machinery, yet the Prime
Minister retains a key influence over the election manifesto and the
annual Queen’s Speech outlining the legislative programme of the
government for the new parliamentary session. It is at this point that
the Prime Minister may choose to highlight certain policies as central
to the aims of the government in the coming months. A good example
of this may be seen in the 2005 Queen’s Speech where the notion of
‘respect’ was singled out as a crucial factor in the direction of gov-
ernment policy in the third Labour term. Street crime, attendance at
school, even the ‘hoodies’ menace were emphasised to the media as
being central to what the government saw as its key priorities. Tony
Blair was happy to push this agenda as a response to the decline in
Labour support during the 2005 election and as a means of diverting
attention from himself and issues of trust as dominant political issues.

Leadership of foreign policy

The Prime Minister is now the senior representative of the United
Kingdom overseas. Prime Ministers represent the United Kingdom
at meetings of the United Nations, the G8 group, European Councils
(in a heightened role when the Britain has the Chair of the European
Union, as it had most recently from June to December 2005) and in
 The Prime Minister: Power 99

the twice-yearly meetings of the Commonwealth heads of govern-

ment. Alongside these examples of regular and structured meetings,
modern Prime Ministers have found themselves increasingly called
upon to react and formulate policy to wider world events. All three
recent Prime Ministers have committed British forces to armed
conflicts, and all of them spent varying amounts of time and enthu-
siasm on seeking to achieve broad agreement to peace proposals in
Northern Ireland.
Foreign policy may prove to be the key motif of Blair’s time as
Prime Minister. In his time in office, Blair has committed British
forces to five wars in the space of six years, the most controversial, and
potentially the most politically damaging, being British involvement
in the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. This,
according to John Kampfner, is ‘some feat’ especially for a man who
came to office in 1997 ‘knowing precious little about foreign affairs’.1

Leadership of a political party

The Prime Minister is now always leader of the majority party in the
House of Commons. As such, he or she is the principal figure in the
business of the House of Commons, especially during the weekly glad-
iatorial conquest known as question time. Performances during these
thirty-minute sessions are now analysed and picked over in a similar
way to reviews and reports of the performances of actors or singers
on stage. This has become particularly emphasised since the televising
of Commons business in 1989, although the instant analysis of ques-
tion time on the BBC’s Radio 5 Live is closer to the judging on Pop Idol
than it is to sober analysis of the issues that have just been debated.
As leader of a political party, the Prime Minister must also ensure
that the party is disciplined and organised enough to win elections
and retain power. In this role, the Prime Minister also represents the
public face of the party of which he or she is leader. In elections, the
voters will be less likely to see the Prime Minister as somehow sepa-
rate from the party as they might do in a presidential-type election.
Blair’s personal unpopularity must therefore be seen as a key factor in
the substantial reduction in the Labour vote during the 2005 general
election. His role as Prime Minister did little to save him from the
wrath of voters who turned away from the Labour Party as a protest
around issues relating to his ‘trust’.
100 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Communicator-in-chief
BBC REPORTER. Would you like to explain Labour’s plans for the elec-
tion campaign?
CLEMENT ATTLEE. No.
This 1955 exchange between Prime Minister and a BBC reporter
illustrates the medieval period of political television. It is now an
essential requirement that the holder of the post of Prime Minister
be an expert communicator and polished media performer. In an era
of twenty-four hour rolling news channels, of televised Parliament
and the instant political fix of the world wide web the Prime Minister
must be comfortable in front of the camera, be ready to joust with the
likes of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, and be ready to
respond to national and international events with little time for prepa-
ration. He or she must gauge the public mood exactly.
Recent Prime Ministers have performed the role of communicator-
in-chief in various ways. At the height of her powers, Margaret
Thatcher could be forceful and magisterial, and was frequently
capable of overpowering her interlocutors by the sheer force of her
personality. She also developed a particularly effective combination of
incredulity and outrage when it became clear to her that someone was
in the process of daring to disagree. It is noticeable on occasions that
Blair gives signs of a similar sense of dismay as he leans forward, open
palmed, and explains something for what seems like the tenth time
to people who really should be paying more attention. In a deliberate
move to offer a different style form that of his predecessor, John
Major adopted a much more conciliatory mood in his style of com-
munication. The hectoring ‘I knew I was right all along’ approach
of Thatcher was replaced by a more mild and gentle tone of forced
familiarity. Of the three, Tony Blair is probably the most accom-
plished political communicator. While his clashes in the Commons
lack some of the punch and sheer enjoyment of the Thatcher era, he
showed himself to be an adept manipulator of political communica-
tion during his first term of office. His response to the death of the
Princess of Wales appeared to capture perfectly the extraordinary
mood of mourning and grief that characterised the following week.
Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings of July
2005, he was able to tap into the national mood using the appropriate
 The Prime Minister: Power 101

tone even though, in the words of one of his biographers, it is

little more than an ability to ‘pick up and reflect back the banality of
majority’.2

The powers of the Prime Minister

Having established the key roles of the Prime Minister, we can now
move on to discuss the sources of power and authority that give him
or her the means by which the various roles may be exercised.

Authority of the Prime Minister

If the Prime Minister is legitimately to use the powers we are about
to discuss, it is necessary for the holder of the office to be able to claim
to have the authority to do so. Prime ministerial authority is best
summed up in the four-part table below:

Case study: prime ministerial authority

In 1990 the Conservative Party in Parliament voted to remove
Margaret Thatcher from power and quickly chose John Major to
replace her as leader of the party. Major therefore became Prime
Minister having been elected only as leader of the Conservative Party
by Conservative MPs. There was no general election. Thatcher had
clearly lost the support of her party – both within and outside of
Parliament – and with that loss of support there was the accompany-
ing loss of authority. There were also clear indicators in 1990 that
Thatcher had lost the popular support from the people that she had
most appealed to throughout most of the mid-1980s, and she could
therefore not claim to have the authority derived from three of the
four sources listed in the table above.
In 2005 questions are being asked about the nature of Tony Blair’s
authority. With a much reduced parliamentary majority on top of a
public announcement that he has fought his last election as leader,
and with voters expressing major doubts on the issue of his personal
integrity, it could be argued that Blair is dangerously close to losing
the same three bases of power that Thatcher lost in 1990 and which
caused her downfull.
The powers we are about to discuss are substantial, as are the bases
of authority on which those powers are constructed. It is always worth
102 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 5.2 Sources of prime ministerial authority

Crown Parliament

• The Prime Minister is appointed • The largest party in

by the monarch who asks him/her Parliament, of which the
to form a government after a Prime Minister is usually
general election. the leader, confers
authority on this person.
• The process may be largely • Irrespective of the other
ceremonial, but does confer some powers the Prime
legitimacy on the outcome of the Minister may enjoy, if
election and the position of the the holder of the office
Prime Minister. loses the respect and
goodwill of his or her
party in Parliament, then
authority is lost at the
same time and he or she
will be remove from
office by the party.
d from office by their party.
People Party

• Voters appear to see general • The Prime Minister is

elections increasingly as contest almost always the leader
between leaders. of the largest party in
• Prime Ministers may use the Parliament.
doctrine of mandate to declare • To secure the leadership
they have the authority of the of his or her party and
people to govern. to then go on to win a
• Recent election results – especially general election and
in 2005 – have caused some be offered the position
commentators to question how of Prime Minister
valid the notion of ‘authority from requires the continued
the people’ is when based on such blessing of authority
a small proportion of the population. from the party.

noting, however, how the four-square model of authority may shift

significantly to the point where all the powers of the Prime Minister,
either constitutional or evolutionary, can do little to save him or her
from being removed from office.
 The Prime Minister: Power 103

We have already made the case that the position of the British
Prime Minister is not clearly stated in any written parts of the
Constitution. The office has evolved in such a way, however, that we
may refer to certain powers of the Prime Minister as being constitu-
tional in that they are essentially permanent, have a status almost
equivalent to the formal laws of the United Kingdom and have been
exercised by Prime Ministers for more than 300 years.
Balanced alongside these constitutional powers are those powers
that a Prime Minister may enjoy at any particular point in history given
the particular circumstances and events associated with his or her
period in office. These evolving or ‘fluid’ powers may be decided by the
difference between peace and war and the differences between periods
of economic growth and recession. These powers may also owe much
to the nature of the government that the Prime Minister leads. The
evolving/fluid powers of Tony Blair, for instance, may be fewer now, in
the aftermath of the 2005 general election, than they were in 1997 fol-
lowing the first Labour victory under his leadership. Finally, this second
set of powers may be very closely linked to the personality and style of
individual leaders. The direct and often confrontational use of these
evolving powers as used by Margaret Thatcher, for instance, contrasted
markedly with the more conciliatory approach of John Major.

Constitutional powers
Often referred to by writers as the ‘formal’ powers of the Prime
Minister, the key to these powers is contained in those functions his-
torically performed by the monarch and known as prerogative
powers. These prerogative powers fall into two separate categories:
• those where the Prime Minister acts on behalf of the monarch as
the head of state;
• those that are carried out as head of government.
Because, as we have already stated, the distinction between ‘state’ and
‘government’ is notoriously blurred in the United Kingdom, the two
formal constitutional roles of the Prime Minister are equally con-
fused. It is often pointed out that only in the United States is a similar
dual role accepted though, in America, it is usually made clear by the
President in which capacity he is acting. The British Prime Minister
is rarely as helpful. The following chart, adapted from McNaughton,
104 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 5.3 The formal constitutional powers of the Prime

Minister

As head of state As head of government

Military and intelligence Chair of Cabinet – here, the

powers – the Prime Minister is Prime Minister acts as chief
in charge of the overall conduct executive in the key committee
of the armed forces and of the government.
controls all branches and
operations of the intelligence
services.
Foreign Treaty powers – the Hiring and firing – it is important to
Prime Minister negotiates all note that this power of patron-
foreign treaties with other age is exclusively in the of the
powers and with international Prime Minister and has
organisations such as the expanded to the point where it
United Nations, NATO and the covers something approaching
European Union. 150 government posts.
Control of the Civil Service – Dissolving Parliament – a
although the administrative significant power, one that is
control of the Civil Service is in not always available in
the hands of the Cabinet presidential systems. The
Secretary, it is the Prime Prime Minister decides when
Minister who shoulders the Parliament is to be dissolved in
responsibility for the overall order to call a general election
conduct and organisation of at any point before the full
the UK bureaucracy and who five-year period when an
has a major say in the election would have to be held.
appointment of senior civil
servants.
Senior appointments – covers Senior appointments of public
senior judges and archbishops bodies – not the same power as
/bishops of the Church of the one opposite and should not
England. In this function the be confused with it. The bodies
Prime Minister is called upon here are typically public bodies
formally to approve or quangos, such as the Arts
suggestions put forward by the Council or the BBC. The Prime
Lord Chancellor’s Department Minister may also be called upon
and the Archbishop of to make appointments to
Canterbury. some university posts.
 The Prime Minister: Power 105

attempts to summarise the formal constitutional powers of the Prime

Minister in both roles.3
To the powers and roles listed above we could add that the Prime
Minister is also the leader of a national political party and must also
lead and represent that party in Parliament. It is also essential that
modern Prime Ministers develop the role and necessary skills of chief
government communicator, never missing the opportunity to defend
and represent the work of the government. In recent years, com-
mentators such as Foley have noted how Prime Ministers have
increasingly come to personify the actions of their government, espe-
cially in their dealings with, and handling of, the media.4

Informal and fluid powers

Broadly speaking, the informal and fluid powers of the Prime
Minister are associated mostly with his or her role as the leader of the
political party in power. The powers are best described as informal
and fluid for two main reasons:
• the Constitution is equally as vague on this set of powers as it is on
the more formal powers, and they are likely to change and evolve
over time and in response to any particular set of circumstances –
hence the use of the phrase ‘fluidity’;
• the informal/fluid powers are very much a reflection of the ways
in which they are used by specific Prime Ministers.
There are three key informal powers. They have already been out-
lined at various points in this chapter, and a brief summary of them
will suffice at this point:
• Leader of the majority parliamentary party – without the support and con-
tinued goodwill of his or her party, it is difficult for a Prime Minister
to claim the greater political authority of governing the country.
• Chief spokesperson for the government – these powers are exercised
mainly in the Commons during question time, and outside
Parliament as the main focus of media attention. The party in
power will look to the Prime Minister to give the best impression
of party policy, in the Commons and to the mass media.
• Head policy-maker for the government – this particular power is very
much an index of individual prime ministerial style and power
106 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

and will reveal much about the particular ways in which a Prime
Minister chooses to manage the Cabinet.

Are the powers of the Prime Minister increasing?

The larger debate on this question will take place in the following
chapters. For now, we will satisfy ourselves with giving a brief
overview of the key arguments surrounding the nature of prime min-
isterial power in the early twenty-first century.
Richard Crossman and Tony Benn, two former cabinet ministers
in Labour governments, have argued variously that the powers of the
British Prime Minister have increased, particularly at the expense of
the Cabinet. In more recent studies, writers such as Foley and Johnson5
have commented extensively on the powers of the British Prime
Minister, especially in terms of what they perceive to be the increas-
ingly ‘presidential’ nature of prime ministerial power. This is not to
say that everyone necessarily agrees with these arguments. Jones and
Burch, both writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, have advised
caution when comparing Prime Ministers with Presidents, making the
point that a Prime Minister is only as powerful as his or her colleagues
allow him or her to be.6 The fall from power of Margaret Thatcher,
and the possibility of a slow re-emergence of something approaching
cabinet government following the May 2005 general election, suggest
that, while the Prime Minister undoubtedly has substantial powers
and that those powers have indeed grown in recent decades, it may not
be entirely accurate to refer to a ‘British presidency’ in a way that
implies a direct comparison with the American system.

Checks on prime ministerial power

However much one may make the case for the impressive collection
of powers available to the Prime Minister, it is important to balance
this against a collection of significant constraints. We may summarise
these constraints as being ‘internal’ and ‘external’.

Internal constraints
Internal constraints focus almost exclusively on the nature of the rela-
tionship between the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and invariably
 The Prime Minister: Power 107

include some discussion on prime ministerial style and personality. No

matter how ‘strong’ a Prime Minister may be, he or she is in a difficult
position if a majority in the Cabinet is determined to oppose a major
issue. Prime Ministers may attempt to subvert these revolts by attempt-
ing to keep issues off the cabinet agenda. Margaret Thatcher’s deci-
sions regarding American attacks on Libya, for instance, were taken
independently of Cabinet and there were no cabinet discussions. It
may be possible for a Prime Minister to act in this way over a relatively
isolated incident, such as the bombing of a country in North Africa by
a third party, but it is rather more difficult to prevent crucial and long-
term domestic issues, such as health, education or the economy, from
appearing on the cabinet agenda for too long.
Cabinet may defy the Prime Minister. Thatcher faced several
climb-downs in the early 1980s and was almost certainly restrained
from pushing ahead with some of her more radical industrial relations
and privatisation plans by more circumspect members of her Cabinet.
It is also highly likely that the decision to join the European Exchange
Rate Mechanism in October 1990 was more to do with pressure from
a determined majority in Cabinet rather than with any great enthusi-
asm from Thatcher herself. Other examples of this type of constraint
include Thatcher’s defeat in Cabinet over the proposed sale of Land
Rover to General Motors, and John Major’s reluctant acceptance of
the second round of VAT on domestic energy supplies in the budget
of 1994 (a measure defeated in the Commons later that year).
In reality, Prime Ministers do not bring to Cabinet any of their
policies unless they have already ensured that they will be endorsed
by ministers. This leads to the situation that constraints exercised by
Cabinet are largely informal. It may also be the case that Blair is the
most effective manager of the cabinet agenda as well. Rentoul quotes
Peter Hennessey who has written that the usual agenda for cabinet
meetings was:
stunningly unrevealing . . . consisting only of three regular items,
Next Week’s Business in Parliament, Domestic and Economic Affairs,
and Foreign Affairs (for the first two years there was a fourth, ‘Europe’
which was subsumed in the second and third items from mid-1999)
and an attachment known in New Labour language as The Grid – a
plan drawn up by the Strategic Communications Unit of events and
ministerial announcements for the coming week.7
108 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

External constraints
The external influences the internal. While the Prime Minister may
go to considerable lengths to control the nature of his or her rela-
tionship with the Cabinet, there is little that can be done effectively
to control external factors. These same factors may be as significant
a constraint on prime ministerial power as anything that passes
between chief executive and ministers around the cabinet table.
Parliament is the first external constraint that we need to discuss
before going on to look at party, public opinion and the media.

Parliament
The size of the majority in the Commons is the key factor in deter-
mining the effectiveness of Parliament as an external constraint. It
was unlikely, for example, that any back-bench rebellion could have
been successful during the high years of Thatcher’s governments
between 1983 and 1987 when the Conservatives had a majority of
almost 150 seats. Similarly, Blair’s 1997 majority of 179 and his 167
majority in 2001 were equally unlikely to result in any government
defeat in the Commons. Compare those examples, however, with
the Major government after 1992 with its small majority of twenty-
one. Here, the likelihood of defeat from the back benches was much
more real and is illustrated by his difficulties with the ratification
of the Maastricht Treaty in 1994 which was settled only by his tactic
in making Maastricht a vote of confidence, thus raising the issue
of dissolution and election. The position of Blair in relation to
Parliament after the 2005 election is interesting. The majority after
2005 no longer represents the largest infantry of any post-war Prime
Minister yet does not recreate the tiny platoon behind Major after
1992. The make-up of that majority is very different from Blair’s
two previous governments, however. The fresh-faced ‘new’ Labour
intake of 1997 and 2001 has been largely dissipated. What Blair
feels behind his back after May 2005 is a much more traditional,
much older and much more potentially hostile collection of back-
benchers than he has previously had to deal with. It is unlikely, under
the circumstances, that a back-bench revolt would be successful,
yet it is interesting to ponder how ‘close scrapes’ from the previous
administration – top-up fees in particular – would have been
handled with such a small majority. We may therefore be entering a
 The Prime Minister: Power 109

period when the potential constraint of Parliament is greater than

at any time since 1992.
On the whole, however, provided they do not lead a minority or
weak coalition government, Prime Ministers need not become unduly
concerned about the nature of parliamentary constraints. Blair may
well be subjected to a slightly rougher ride at Prime Minister’s ques-
tion time than used to be the case, and a larger and partially revi-
talised opposition under a new leader may seek to ‘damage’ the Prime
Minister, yet it is highly unlikely that any mortal blow will be struck.
One final point to note in this discussion on Parliament, and one that
we unfortunately do not have enough space to go into in greater
detail, is the potential constraint that may be exercised by the House
of Lords. We tend to focus our analysis on the Commons alone and,
in doing so, forget that, for Thatcher and for Blair, irrespective of
their huge Commons majorities, it has often been the upper chamber
that has been able to provide the government with its sternest oppo-
sition and obstruction. We must now turn to the second external con-
straint: the party.

Party
The fact that the Prime Minister is also the leader of a political party
is often overlooked. Blair, in particular, has been less than enthusias-
tic about portraying himself as a purely ‘party’ leader and, as a con-
sequence, his relationship with the party is often strained. In this
respect, his position is similar to that of Margaret Thatcher: a power-
ful Prime Minister capable of delivering large parliamentary majori-
ties yet, in many ways, an outsider in, and often at odds with, their
own party.
At the time of writing (summer 2005), the Conservative Party is
currently reviewing the means by which it chooses its leader; the
system in the Labour Party is unlikely to change. In short, both
leaders are elected by a larger constituency than used to be the case,
and they must therefore show sensitivity to this fact. The prime min-
isterial use of patronage, already discussed elsewhere, is a key factor
here. Factions or groups in the party must be seen to be acknowledged
in ministerial appointments, as should the rewards to party
‘favourites’ or those with party power bases – John Prescott is a good
example here. We must be careful not to overstate the case however.
110 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

The modernising project of ‘New’ Labour has substantially eroded

the power of the constituencies and the trade unions. The National
Executive Committee of Labour, essentially its elected leadership
group, is no longer the power in the party it once was. The annual con-
ference once offered highly entertaining opportunities for the ritual
‘calling to account’ of the party leadership and cabinet ministers
(when in government) but such opportunities are no more.
The Conservatives have never had to contend with a genuine mass
membership organised along democratic lines and laying any kind of
claim to an input into the policy-making process of the party. Even
recent attempts by William Hague to introduce internal party democ-
racy have not been a huge success and may even have been responsi-
ble for encouraging the leadership to push its policies increasingly to
the right, something the electorate as a whole appears not to have
appreciated. Conservative leaders must also find ways of dealing with
the influential 1922 Committee which is made up of all back-bench
Conservative MPs. This group occasionally made life difficult for
Margaret Thatcher and more so for John Major who found himself
being challenged frequently over his European policies. Having made
these points about the Conservatives, it is important to stress that the
power in that party flows essentially from the top to the bottom.
Ministerial teams, election strategies and manifestos are all deter-
mined by the leadership. The party may no longer give the impres-
sion of unity that it once did, and it certainly gets through leaders on
a more regular basis than was once the case, but the constraints on
the power of a Conservative Prime Minister from his or her party
should not be overstated.
The power of the Prime Minister, then, is not to be underesti-
mated when discussed in relation to the party membership. In office,
a Prime Minister is usually able to call on much bigger battalions than
those available to party members and, as long as the party continues
to win elections (Thatcher being the obvious exception), the Prime
Minister should be more than capable of dealing with any trouble or
dissent from his or her wider party membership.

Public opinion
Public opinion, especially when expressed in terms of unpopularity,
may exert constraints on the Prime Minister by framing the attitudes
 The Prime Minister: Power 111

of Cabinet and of Parliament. The best example of this is Margaret

Thatcher. In 1990, when it appeared that Thatcher had lost public
respect and that the Conservatives were in danger of losing the next
election, the party moved quickly and ruthlessly to get rid of her, three
general election victories in a row notwithstanding. In the 2005
general election, the popularity of Blair became an electoral issue.
Public unease about his personal role in the run-up to the war in Iraq
began to be seen and discussed as an issue of ‘trust’ and was certainly
one of the key reasons for the slump in Labour Party support at the
general election. This was a far cry from Blair’s 90 per cent public-
approval rating during the later part of 1997, a figure that could only
enhance his standing and authority in the party, Cabinet and
Parliament.
Public opinion and popularity may not be the most crucial con-
straints on the power of a Prime Minister but they should not be com-
pletely ignored either. The personal attacks and questions surrounding
Blair’s integrity in 2005 have resulted in a somewhat chastened and
wiser Prime Minister desperate to focus the political agenda on domes-
tic, rather than foreign, policy issues while plotting his exit strategy
from the centre stage of British politics.

The media
The media are the means and the measurement of public opinion
and popularity. According to Richard Rose, Blair is the third Prime
Minister of what he refers to as the ‘new style television generation’
alongside Thatcher and Major. Now, more than ever, politics is a
wholly televised aspect of public life and requires its practitioners to
be polished and accomplished media performers. Again, the con-
straint here is less through the media directly but rather more through
the impact of the media on the nature of the relationship between
the Prime Minister and Cabinet. If a Prime Minister is ceaselessly
attacked by the media, and is unable to handle these attacks
effectively, then he or she is very likely to be weakened in his or her
relations with the Cabinet.

Case study: Richard Rose and ‘intermestic politics’

In his hugely readable and thought-provoking study The Prime Minister
in a Shrinking World, Richard Rose examines the power of the British
112 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Prime Minister from a slightly different perspective.8 Rose argues

that the powers and responsibilities of the Prime Minister are increas-
ingly shaped and constrained by subsidiarity and by globalisation.
According to Rose, some powers of the Prime Minister are being
devolved downwards while, at the same time, other powers are being
drawn upwards, outwards and even overseas. This is mainly due, Rose
explains, to the speed at which globalisation has accelerated and the
way in which economic, military and political decisions are often taken
by a growing number of multinational intergovernmental and supra-
national bodies.
Rose goes on to argue that modern British Prime Ministers now find
themselves in a strange situation. They may well command huge par-
liamentary majorities at Westminster yet, in an age of devolved assem-
blies and regional models based on the European Union, the Prime
Minister may well find it difficult to exert political authority across the
whole country. Here, Rose is restating an observation made by other
commentators: the British constitution may well have evolved in such
a way as to give the Prime Minister substantial powers but what it has
not done is to bestow the kind of powers whereby he or she can be
certain that prime ministerial plans and policies are turned into actions
that actually achieve anything. This leads to Prime Ministers becoming
increasingly occupied with the co-ordination of strategy and political
management rather than concentrating on policy development. At this
point, Rose is able to make the distinction between what he refers to as
the ‘old school’ of Prime Ministers from Churchill through to Attlee
and the new-style ‘television generation’ of Thatcher, Major and Blair.
Sandwiched between these two groups are what Rose refers to as
the ‘transition generation’ of Prime Ministers – Wilson, Heath and
Callaghan – who were ‘schooled by world depression and war … each
raised in a family where pennies had to be counted carefully’. It is this
older generation of politicians, according to Rose, who recognised, like
the writer himself, that ‘policy as well as politics is important’.
Rose goes on to contribute a new phrase to the lexicon of political
science: ‘intermestic politics’. This, he argues, is the intersection of
international and domestic issues and problems that place increased
constraints on the modern British Prime Minister. Examples of this
include the increasingly complex and, at times fraught nature of mem-
bership of the European Union, the development of globalisation and,
 The Prime Minister: Power 113

especially in the case of Tony Blair, the nature of the relationship

between America and the rest of the world. The period between July
and December 2005 serves as a particularly good example of this as
Britain took on the presidency of the European Union at one of the
most critical stages in its history, when Blair hosted the G8 summit in
Edinburgh to the background noise of Live 8 concerts and associated
protests, and as the involvement of British troops in Iraq showed no
sign of coming to an end and bombs began to explode on London
buses and underground trains. Alongside these issues, Blair faced
domestic policy problems with identity cards, a renewal of interest in
the number of refugees in Britain and attempts to deliver a workable
set of policies to combat antisocial behaviour. As Rose points out, the
increased amount of time Prime Ministers are required to spend on
these international and intergovernmental issues makes it all the more
difficult to be effectively in command of the Westminster/Whitehall
policy-making process.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

A careful reading of this chapter will have stimulated debate as to the
nature of the power of the Prime Minister. We have explained how the
debate has been enlivened by the period in office of Tony Blair even
though the larger concerns and discussions may be traced back much
further into recent history.
The chapter has outlined the powers and roles of the Prime Minister
and has also discussed the sources of authority around which these
powers are constructed. To balance the discussion we have also
looked at the considerable constraints on the power of the Prime
Minister and we have listed these constraints in some detail. To
illustrate the nature of prime ministerial power we have also
summarised the views of Richard Rose and his concept of ‘inermestic
politics’ as an added tool of analysis. Having examined prime
ministerial power in some detail, we can now turn our attention to the
bureaucracy and support that is available to the holder of this complex
and complicated office.

Glossary of key terms



The terms in this glossary refer specifically to the discussion of prime

ministerial power. Their meanings may change subtly when applied to
other aspects of political study.
 114 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Authority The source of prime ministerial powers.

Constitutional/formal powers Those powers historically performed by
the monarch and are known as ‘prerogative powers’ (see below).
Head of government In the United Kingdom – the Prime Minister.
Head of state The person who represents all the people of the state. In
the United Kingdom, sometimes it’s the Queen, on other occasions it’s
Tony Blair. This situation has arisen because of the prerogative powers of
the Prime Minister.
Intermestic politics A concept developed by Richard Rose. The
intersection of international and domestic issues and problems that place
increased constraints on the modern British Prime Minister.
Informal/fluid powers As the phrase suggests, these are much more
flexible, powers, and the way in which they are exercised reflects greatly on
the style and leadership of the Prime Minister. The powers here are mostly
those linked with government, and include the political leadership of a party,
speaking on behalf of the government and determining government policy.
Prerogative powers The main source of the formal powers of the Prime
Minister and derived from those once held by the monarch. Prerogative
powers fall into two categories: those performed on behalf of the monarch
as head of state and those performed as head of government.
Prime Minister The head of the British government. Since 1997, this
position has been held by Tony Blair.
Primus inter pares The belief that in Cabinet, the Prime Minister is ‘first
among equals’.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe the origins of the office of Prime Minister.
Briefly describe the formal/constitutional powers of the Prime Minister.
Briefly describe the informal/fluid powers of the Prime Minister.
Describe the main constraints on prime ministerial power.
Explain the difference between external/internal constraints.
Essay questions
‘The powers of the Prime Minister are restricted by significant constraints.’
To what extent do you agree?
Discuss the main reasons for the increase of the powers of the Prime
Minister in recent years.
How far would you agree with the claim that the Prime Minister is too
powerful?
 The Prime Minister: Power 115

Discuss the importance and meaning of prime ministerial power.

Revision task
Research and produce a ‘prime ministerial power balance sheet’. For each
of the powers that you are able to list, attempt to make a link with one or
more constraints on that power.

 Helpful websites

www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
www.civilservice.gov.uk
www.parliament.uk

 Suggestions for further reading

Bagehot, W. (1867, but see also the 1963 edition with Crossman’s
introduction) The English Constitution (Fontana).
Barberis, P. and Carr, F. (2002) ‘Executive Control and Dominance under
Tony Blair’, Talking Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
Benn, T. (1981) Arguments for Democracy (Penguin).
Buckley, S. (2004) ‘The Hutton Inquiry’, Talking Politics, vol. 17.1,
September 2004.
Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice Hall).
Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).
Foley, M. (2002) Major, Blair and a Conflict of Leadership: Collision Course
(Manchester University Press).
Johnson, R. W. (1990) ‘The President has Landed’, New Statesman, 30
November 1990.
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).
CHAPTER 6

The Prime Minister: Support and

Bureaucracy
Contents
The bureaucracy of the Prime Minister 117
The Prime Minister’s Office: Policy and Government 119
The Prime Minister’s Office: Communication and Strategy 125
The Prime Minister’s Office: Government and Political Relations 126
Wider dimension of support for the Prime Minister 128
Case study: Lord Birt and blue sky thinking 131
Trends in prime ministerial support 134
Should there be a Prime Minister’s Department? 135

Overview
It has already been established that the modern Prime Minister operates as
part of an increasingly complex government machine. The position of the
British Prime Minister has evolved in such a way as to allow the holder of
the office relatively few administrative and bureaucratic resources; it is up to
each individual Prime Minister to arrange his or her resources as best they
can. Originally, the debate tended to centre around the desirability or
otherwise of a ‘Prime Minister’s Department’. As this now exists in all but
name, critics have begun to question the extent to which recent reforms
may have compromised sections of Number 10 that were previously
intended to be ‘non political’. It is these very precise changes within
Number 10 itself that we shall focus on in this chapter. The intention here is
to establish a clear framework of the bureaucracy of the Prime Minister in
such a way as to inform the debates considered in chapters 8 and 9.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• The bureaucracy of the Prime Minister
• The role of Downing Street
• Wider means of prime ministerial support
• Lord Birt: case study
• Trends in prime ministerial support
• Should there be a Prime Minister’s Department?
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 117

The bureaucracy of the Prime Minister

In the British system of government there is no Prime Minister’s
Department. Unlike some foreign political leaders, who are
served by bodies staffed by a mixture of appointments both politi-
cal and administrative, the British Prime Minister is expected to
manage both domestic and international spheres of politics without
an effectively resourced, staffed or dedicated office. This section of
the chapter will examine the complex web of structures that serve
as support system and bureaucracy for the modern Prime Minister.
We will begin by looking at the structure of 10 Downing Street and
the variety of offices contained in that building commonly referred
to as the ‘Prime Minister’s Office’. Following this we will go on to
look closely at the less formal means of support that are available
to the Prime Minister, mainly through the use of private and indi-
vidual advisers. We shall also examine the current thinking on the
well-established debate around the issue of a Prime Minister’s
Department.

Downing Street
Approximately 200 people are employed in the various offices that
make up 10 Downing Street. When journalists refer to Downing
Street they often speak of the ‘Prime Minister’s Office’. This is not
a specific office in the physical sense of the Oval Office in the White
House but is rather a collection of resources and arrangements
that have evolved over time to support the Prime Minister. When
Blair entered Downing Street for the first time in 1997, the Prime
Minister’s Office consisted of four clearly defined and well-
established offices. They were:

• The Private Office – management of official engagements and

relations with the other parts of government.
• The Press Office – management of the relationship between
the Prime Minister, government and media.
• The Political Office – managed the relationship between the
Prime Minister and his or her party and constituency.
• The Policy Unit – created in 1974 to provide medium- to long-
term policy advice to the Prime Minister.
118 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Earlier, we made distinctions between the powers of the Prime

Minister as ‘head of state’ and ‘head of government’. Similarly, it was
once possible to distinguish between the various parts of the Prime
Minister’s Office in Downing Street as either ‘official’ or ‘political’.
One of the criticisms of this definition is that, under recent Prime
Ministers – notably Thatcher and Blair – the distinctions between the
two types of office have not always been clearly defined. This is par-
ticularly the case with Blair, where it is best not to be too precious
about any ‘official/political’ division. If we were to stick rigidly to this
‘official/political’ view and attempt to illustrate it in the form of a
simple diagram we would produce something like this:

Box 6.1 Official and Political Number 10

Official Number 10 Political Number 10

• Private Office • Political Office
• Press Office • Policy Unit

This is no longer satisfactory. As we have already said, the distinc-

tion between ‘political’ and ‘official’ has become less and less clear
over recent decades, and the distinction has blurred even further in
the years since Tony Blair formed his first administration in 1997.
The revised system of secretariats was revealed in June 2001. The
BBC News website reflected the general consensus of opinion on the
changes when it reported that:

In a move set to revive criticism over ‘Tony’s cronies’, three new units
headed by key allies of Mr Blair are to be set up in 10 Downing Street,
while the prime minister’s private office and policy unit will merge
. . . Mr Blair’s official spokesman acknowledged that the changes
would mean a rise in the wage bill and number of advisers for
Downing Street, both of which have been contentious issues in recent
years, but could give neither an overall figure nor individual salaries.

Blair explained the changes as being an essential part of his determin-

ation to deliver better public services. In May 2002, less than twelve
months after the changes of June 2001, further changes were taking
place in the shape of a significant strengthening of the Cabinet Office
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 119

from which John Prescott was moved into a separate and expanded
Deputy Prime Minister’s Department. The Cabinet Office, under
Lord (Gus) Macdonald (who was not a member of the Cabinet) was
henceforth to report back to Tony Blair. Commentators were quick to
recognise that this was a final indication that the Cabinet Office was
now a resource for the Prime Minister rather than for the Cabinet as
a whole. The changes described here are significant to the extent that
they caused the majority of commentators to announce the final
emergence of a Prime Minister’s Department.
It would appear that the Prime Minister’s Office is now clearly
divided into three sections or ‘secretariats’. These are:
• Policy and Government, headed by the Chief of Staff,
Jonathan Powell.
• Communication and Strategy, headed by David Hill.
• Government and Political Relations, headed by Ruth
Turner.
As we examine these three secretariats in turn, we shall continue to
make references to the old system in order to illustrate better the
changes that have taken place.

The Prime Minister’s Office: Policy and Government

This first section of the post-2001 Prime Minister’s Office consists of:
• A combined Private Office and Policy Unit in the single form of
a Policy Directorate.
• Prime Minister’s Strategy Group.
• Delivery Unit.
• Office of Public Service Reform.
• Honours and Appointments.
• There are also roles for senior civil servants with specific policy
briefs in Foreign Policy and European Policy.
The Private Office and its key functions appear to have been
swallowed up by the Policy and Government branch of the Prime
Minister’s Office outlined immediately above. In 2001 the Private
Office was combined with the Policy Unit to form a Policy
Directorate, more of which later. Officials in the old Private Office
120 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

were usually permanent civil servants ‘borrowed’ from other govern-

ment departments, usually for a period of three years. These officials
tended to be mid-career, talented, and regarded as ‘high fliers’. What
was once the separate Private Office continues to deal with the Prime
Minister’s official engagements and also manages his or her relation-
ship with government departments and Parliament. The Prime
Minister’s Principal Private Secretary – civil servant, Ivan Rogers – is
the head of the Policy Directorate and one of the people closest to the
Prime Minister. The position also makes Rogers the third most senior
official in the Civil Service (after the Cabinet Secretary and the
Permanent Secretary to the Treasury). Beneath the Principal Private
Secretary there is a number of other private secretaries who deal with
policy areas such as Parliament, home affairs, economics and several
more to deal with foreign and international affairs.
It is appropriate to think of the Policy Directorate (and the Private
Office that preceded it) as a huge filter of information between the
Prime Minister and every other part of the government system. If the
Prime Minister wished to be informed and briefed as to the formula-
tion and subsequent development of policy initiatives, then it was the
role of the Private Office to provide this information. As we can see,
the workings of the Private Office under Blair have changed consi-
derably. It is clear that Jonathon Powell has a major function as Chief
of Staff and is essentially the principal ‘gatekeeper’ of Downing
Street and therefore highly influential in deciding who has access to
the Prime Minister. His value to Blair is such that it required inter-
vention from the then head of the Civil Service, Sir Robin Butler, to
thwart Blair’s attempt to have Powell installed as the Principal Private
Secretary.
If we turn our attention to trying to understand how and why the
directorate functions, it is first necessary to explain the origins and
workings of the Policy Unit. It is worth reminding yourself at this
point of the very loose nature of the ‘official’/‘political’ distinctions
we are making, and the obvious blurring and merging of some roles
and responsibilities.
The Policy Unit was created in 1974 by Harold Wilson and has
been used in some form by every Prime Minister since. The Policy
Unit is designed to provide a more personal resource for the Prime
Minister. Wilson felt that, because as there was no separate Prime
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 121

Minister’s Department, it was necessary for the Prime Minister to

have some means of acquiring a strategic view of where the govern-
ment was heading. With this type of unit the Prime Minister would
be able to seek advice on particular aspects of government policy that
would help to frame medium-and long-term strategies but would also
be on hand for more immediate advice during times of crisis or policy
failures. The Policy Unit usually consists of specialists from outside
government who are appointed as temporary civil servants normally
for the duration of a government, as a new Policy Unit is convened
by each incoming Prime Minister. Needless to say, the head of the
Policy Unit quickly becomes one of the Prime Minister’s key advisers.
As we have already mentioned above, the Policy Unit and the Private
Office were combined in 2001 to create a Policy Directorate to which
we can now turn to examine in more detail.
The Policy Directorate is evidence of Tony Blair’s frustration with
the way in which the central executive machinery functioned during
his first term of office between 1997 and 2001. As we shall see, when
combined in the shape of the Policy Directorate, the Policy Unit and
the Private Office add another dimension to the debate on the rela-
tionship between civil servants and special advisers and the often
blurred distinctions between the two.
There is a number of reasons why Prime Ministers need some-
thing like that which Blair has in his Policy Directorate and that which
his predecessors had in the Policy Unit.
First, this type of office may give the Prime Minister a slight edge
in his or her dealings with ministers in providing an alternative source
of, and view on, policy issues. As research by Milne has shown, as
between 1997 and 2001 the Policy Unit under Blair developed a
much deeper role, to the extent that ministers will have been aware
that a member of the unit was ‘shadowing’ each particular policy
area.1 This was not entirely a Blair innovation. The Conservative MP
Damien Green carried out a similar function in the Policy Unit of
John Major, earning himself the nickname ‘spy in the cab’ in the
process. The role of the Policy Unit in this sense should be clear: it
was created to make sure that ministers are working in line with the
wishes of Downing Street.
The second reason for the existence and development of this
type of office is that it gives the Prime Minister a much more
122 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

‘immediate’ contact with the policy process. Members of the unit/

directorate will be consulted on a regular basis by the Prime Minister
and will, in some cases, have greater contact with Downing Street than
some cabinet ministers have.
Third, the type of office we are discussing is in a powerful pos-
ition to put forward its own policy initiatives and, in the past, has
even championed ideas and policies from outside the political
system. Under Thatcher, the Policy Unit was closely linked to the
whole philosophical direction of the government through its
support for neo-liberal policies in the economy. In fact, the period
from 1979 through to the late 1990s saw the Policy Unit steered by
a succession of neo-liberal monetarist right wingers – Sir John
Hoskyns, Ferdinand Mount, John Redwood and Professor Brian
Griffiths – who all contributed to the political complexion of
‘Thatcherism’. Had the Policy Unit not existed, then the con-
nections to the Prime Minister may not have been made, especially
by academic outsiders such as Griffiths and the monetarist eco-
nomic adviser, Sir Alan Walters.
The Policy Unit has also acted as a ‘filter’ for political ideas and
philosophies from other political systems. Writing in 1992, in his book
British Cabinet Government,2 James used the moves towards an internal
market in the National Health Service as an example of an idea
filtered into the policy-making process from the Policy Unit which, in
turn, had developed the idea from studies and research in the United
States. Blair was no less closely linked to the Policy Unit after 1997
than his predecessors. The unit was first headed by a close associate
of the Prime Minister, David Milliband, and, under Blair’s direction,
took on an even more central role, signified by its physical place in the
new machinery of government centred in the Cabinet Office. The
creation in 2001 of the Policy Directorate is yet further evidence of a
body that had become the personal instrument of prime ministerial
domination.
The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit was set up in 2002 to bring
together the Performance and Innovation Unit, the Forward Strategy
Unit and parts of the Centre for Management and Policy Studies. The
Performance and Innovation and Forward Strategy Units were created
in 2001 and initially headed by a civil servant, Geoff Mulgan. The
Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit – according to its web pages – exists to
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 123

‘provide the Prime Minister and governmental departments with the

capacity for longer-term thinking, cross-cutting studies and strategic
policy’. Basically, this management unit of the Cabinet Office is tasked
with doing the forward thinking of government. Its loose brief is to
range widely around a broad swath of policy areas in order to begin
the process that may eventually result in legislation and reform up to
ten years from now and to function as a ‘Centre of Excellence’ to
‘enhance strategy across government’.
The working parties that are organised by the unit consist of civil
servants as well as advisers/academics from outside politics, and pro-
duces private reports and strategic audits passed through the Cabinet
Secretary for Blair to consider. Recent areas with which the unit
has been involved include a digital strategy for the United Kingdom
(particularly the exclusion of some groups from the benefits of inter-
net access), a ‘strategic audit’ of the ‘challenges and opportunities
facing the UK today’ and the proposal of an international strategy to
address fragile and unstable countries.
The Delivery Unit is another innovation dating back to the imme-
diate aftermath of the 2001 general election, and was set up under
the direction of the Prime Minister’s Chief Adviser on Delivery,
Professor Michael Barber (who still heads the unit), who was formerly
a special adviser to David Blunkett at Education. The role of the unit
is straightforward: it exists to ensure that progress is being made on
meeting government targets in the improvement of key public ser-
vices. Working closely with Downing Street, the Treasury, the Cabinet
Office and other ‘stakeholder’ departments, the unit assesses the
delivery of, and provides performance management for, key delivery
areas. The unit consists of around forty people who represent a broad
range of public- and private-sector concerns. Beyond its central core,
the unit calls on the expertise of a wider group of ‘associates’ who
have experience in the successful delivery of public, private and
voluntary services.
The success of the Delivery Unit is yet to be fully assessed. Reports
leaked to the Guardian in 2003 suggested that the unit was becoming
concerned that the government would not meet its targets on NHS
reforms although, by 2004, the unit was more upbeat on this partic-
ular issue and briefed journalists that hospitals were now well placed
to meet targets on reduced waiting times for operations. Targets to
124 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

improve the provision of services in transport have been less suc-

cessful, yet increased internal confidence has led the unit to claim
that it is now possible to assess whether individual ministers are doing
their job well or not. The unit is starting to dilineate ever more
sophisticated details of how departments will be judged on whether
they have met targets set out in summer spending reviews, whilst,
under Barber, the unit has grown easily into the more traditional
aspects of the Civil Service and has avoided upsetting the tradition-
alists. By late 2004, the unit was broadening its approach to include
the problem of increasing numbers of drug users and the problems
of child poverty. Irrespective of whatever success the Delivery Unit
was able to measure throughout the various Whitehall departments,
Barber was left lamenting the scepticism of the public in their per-
ception of Labour’s ‘revolution’ in the delivery of public services.
Barber left the Delivery Unit in September 2005 to join the global
consultancy, McKinsey’s, where he is in charge of providing ‘global’
advice on public service reform.
The Office of Public Service Reform also dates beck to the 2001
general election. Under the leadership of an ex-Audit Commission
civil servant, Wendy Thomson, the office was given the task of press-
ing ahead with Civil Service reform. The central aim of these reforms
was to ensure that government departments would be better
equipped to deliver reforms in public services. Like the Delivery Unit
and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Group, the Office of Public
Services Reform is based in the Cabinet Office as part of the Cabinet
Secretary’s Delivery and Reform Team, yet the head of each has an
office within Number 10.
It is important to note at this point that the Office of Public Service
Reform and the Delivery Unit are part of the Cabinet Office. This
confuses their appearance in the Prime Minister’s Office even though
the head of each has an office in Downing Street itself. We shall
return to the current significance of the Cabinet Office in terms of
recent reforms later in this section.
Finally, the Honours and Appointments Secretary deals with all
the appointments (mostly non-political) that the Prime Minister is
required to make. These appointments will include senior positions in
the Church of England along with some university posts and
quangos. This particular office is headed by a civil servant. Having
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 125

looked at the Policy and Government Section of the Prime Minister’s

Office we may now turn our attention to the second section,
Communication and Strategy.

The Prime Minister’s Office: Communication and

Strategy
Created in 2001, the Communication and Strategy section of the
Prime Minister’s Office brings together the
• Press Office
• Strategic Communications Unit and the
• Research and Information Unit
Similarly to the way in which we analysed the earlier section on
Policy and Government we shall make reference to the origins and
history of the three offices that make up the Communication and
Strategy section of the Prime Minister’s Office to illustrate best how
the overall collection of roles and functions have evolved.
Traditionally, the Press Office has been the place where the Prime
Minister’s relationship with the media is carefully controlled. There
have been occasions in the recent past when observers have queried
how influential the head of the Press Office – the Press Secretary – has
been in terms of the formulation of policy. The post is actually part of
the Civil Service yet some Prime Ministers have drawn their Press
Secretaries from the media – Joe Haines under Harold Wilson and
Alastair Campbell under Blair being two particularly good examples.
This is not to say that, when the post has been filled from the Civil
Service, it is necessarily less controversial. Bernard Ingham (1979–90)
held the post during the Thatcher years. A civil servant, Ingham did
much to strengthen the position of the Press Office and was particu-
larly formidable in his handling of journalists and lobby correspon-
dents. While Ingham’s influence on policy was minimal (if it existed at
all), his forthright and, at times, forceful presentation of government
policy frequently gave the impression of someone who had clearly
crossed the line of Civil Service neutrality. While not a civil servant,
Alastair Campbell was equally criticised during his tenure at the Press
Office. With huge influence on the presentation and ‘spin’ of policy,
Campbell had almost unparalleled access to Blair and controlled
126 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

almost all requests from the media for ministerial interviews. Following
the Hutton Inquiry and the subsequent report into the death of the
government weapons inspector, David Kelly, Campbell was moved
from his position of Press Secretary to a newly created post of Director
of Communications and Strategy.
After the 1997 general election, Blair established a Strategic
Communications Unit. This was designed to co-ordinate government
communications across departments and was attached to the Press
Office in Downing Street.
You will recall that, when we were discussing the Office of Public
Service Reform and the Policy Directorate in terms of their appear-
ance in both the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office,
we made the point that this confuses the distinction between the
Cabinet Office and Number 10. A similar situation emerges when we
examine the Strategic Communications Unit. Although the unit is
relatively small (around seven members) the make-up is significant in
that it includes a mixture of civil servants and political appointees.
According to Andrew Turner, this signalled ‘Blair’s desire for central
co-ordination of the government departments’ media relations – an
aspect of what was referred to as “joined-up government” ’. The
Strategic Communications Unit was expanded after the 2001 elec-
tion and was restructured again in early 2004 in line with the recom-
mendations accepted from the Phillis Commission.
By the late spring of 2005 the position now appeared to be split
between two individuals with David Hill as the Prime Minister’s
Director of Communications and Matthew Taylor as Chief Adviser on
Strategy.
The Research and Information Unit provides factual information
and briefing material to the whole of Number 10.

The Prime Minister’s Office: Government and

Political Relations
This third section of the Prime Minister’s Office consists of:

• Political Office
• Events and Visits Office
• Corporate and Direct Communication Units
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 127

Box 6.2 The Prime Minister’s Office (June 2005)

Jonathan Powell – Chief of Staff with direct responsibility for leading

and co-ordinating operations across Number 10. Powell reports
directly to the Prime Minister.
Liz Lloyd – Deputy Chief of Staff.
Ivan Rogers – Principal Private Secretary.
David Hill – Prime Minister’s Director of Communications.
Jo Gibbons – Director of Events, Visits and Scheduling.
John McTernan – Director of Political Operations. Provides political
management and support for the government’s political strategy.
(Salary paid by Labour Party.)
David Bennet – Head of Policy Directorate.
Matthew Taylor – Chief Adviser on Strategy.
Ruth Turner – Director of Government Relations.

The Director of Government Relations is the person responsi-

ble for the third branch of the Prime Minister’s Office – Government
and Political Relations – and was established in 2001. The post
reflects the importance of the devolved administrations in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland. The holder of this post (Ruth Turner in
June 2005) has the job of liaising between central government and the
various devolved arrangements.
The role of the Political Office (you may still see it referred to as
‘Unit’) – is to provide liaison and communication between the Prime
Minister and the organisation of the political party of which he or she
is leader. The office will be in close contact with the headquarters of
the political party in power as well as with MPs and party supporters
in the constituencies. The office is headed by a Political Secretary, one
of the more controversial being Marcia Williams, who worked in
the office from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Her
control of the office and her access to, and influence over, the Labour
Prime Minister Harold Wilson are legendary. Though the impact of
the office on policy is now felt to be minimal, it is still worth noting
how it has been used by some leading political figures as a route into
high-level politics. Nigel Lawson and Douglas Hurd worked in the
office at different times before going on to rise to Cabinet positions
in Conservative governments. Linked to the office is the Prime
128 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPPs) whose job it is to

keep the Prime Minister in touch with what is going on along the back
benches at Westminster. The office now appears to have evolved into
the post of Director of Political Operations and provides, in the words
of the Prime Minister’s website (www.pm.gov.uk), ‘political manage-
ment and support for the development of the Government’s political
strategy. The Labour Party pays the salary of the Director.’

The Cabinet Office

We have already outlined the origins and functions of the Cabinet
Office in Chapter 3. A more detailed discussion of the Cabinet Office
and the Blair reforms will take place in later Chapters.

Wider dimension of support for the Prime Minister

Support mechanisms and sources of advice to the Prime Minister are
not exclusively based in and around the established offices and secre-
tariats within Downing Street. Having discussed inner and kitchen
cabinets earlier, and having just looked at the ‘official’/‘political’
offices of Downing Street, we can now turn our attention to the wider
support networks that a Prime Minister is able to access. Some of
these sources, such as personal and individual advisers, will be famil-
iar while others, such as policy agencies and ‘think tanks’, may be
less so.
Personal and individual advisers have been the cause of
various kinds of controversy in the recent past. The choice and use of
individual advisers are not new. Lloyd George made great use of them
during his times as Prime Minister. In many ways, the use of political
advisers is as old as politics itself, it is only recently, in an age of greater
public knowledge of the individual players in government and power,
that the role of advisers has become an issue, particularly where the
advice appears to be sought and acted upon over and above the
Cabinet (Thatcher), and where the advisers and advice appear to be
overconcerned with the manipulation and ‘spin’ of the political
message (Blair).
Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street with a larger than usual
personal staff of more than twenty people, most of them from his
opposition private office. As we have already said, political appointees
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 129

are nothing new yet the scale and number of advisers attending
Blair and senior ministers were unprecedented. By 2002 Blair had
appointed around twenty-nine advisers, mainly in the Policy
Directorate and the Strategic Communications Unit. Critics point to
the cost of these advisers (£4.4 million in 2002) alongside a total
salary bill for the Prime Minister’s Office of about £10.8 million in
1999. The ‘revolving-door’ nature of some of these appointments has
also been questioned. Former advisers have used their positions at
Downing Street as a springboard to lucrative careers in the city, most
notably Tim Allan (BskyB) and Anji Hunter, Blair’s former ‘gate-
keeper’ and personal secretary, who moved to BP as Director of
Communications. The most sustained criticism of advisers has been
reserved for those closely involved in media relations – the so-called
‘spin doctors’.
It is not uncommon to find the work of ‘spin doctors’ discussed in
terms of ‘black arts’ (Bill Jones), and their influence described as
‘obscuring the language of politics’ (Joy Johnson, former head of
communications for the Labour Party – quoted in Foley). Put simply,
the role of spin doctors, who are usually employed by the political
parties themselves, is to take the basic message of the government and
to make sure it is first ‘suitable’ for public consumption and to then
ensure that the public do, indeed, consume it. For Blair, and this par-
ticular type of ‘special’ adviser, the two individuals who most readily
spring to mind are Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell.
Mandelson was the central figure in the repackaging and sub-
sequent electoral triumph of ‘New’ Labour, while Campbell is
better known for his work as Press Secretary and later Director of
Communications for Blair once the Labour Party was in power.
Unelected, with a not altogether distinguished background in tabloid
journalism and a brief spell as a writer of soft pornography, Campbell
quickly became one of the most powerful people in British politics.
With constant access to Blair and virtually complete control over the
government’s relationship with the media, for a period between 1997
and 2002 many were referring to Campbell as ‘the real Deputy Prime
Minister’. The issue of individuals such as Campbell achieving high-
placed, yet unelected, positions close to the Cabinet was highlighted
by the role that Campbell appeared to play in the chain of events that
resulted in the suicide of Dr David Kelly, a senior government arms
130 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

inspector who had worked extensively in Iraq. The subsequent

Hutton Inquiry, and Campbell’s appearance as a witness before a
Commons select committee, did much to throw the focus on
Campbell as a key player in the Blair government. Even though exon-
erated by the subsequent Hutton Report, Campbell had already
become concerned over his increasingly visible public role following
a television documentary of which he was the subject. By the time of
the Hutton Inquiry he had already stepped down from his daily
briefings to the press and had taken on the more discreet post of
Director of Communications and Strategy.
Rather like Campbell, Peter Mandelson illustrated the value and
dangers of the ‘private adviser’. Though a Labour MP and therefore,
unlike Campbell, elected, Mandelson proved to be a major embar-
rassment for Blair, resigning not once but twice – on the first occasion
because of his failure to disclose a loan from a fellow minister (who
was at the time being investigated by the Department of Trade and
Industry, the minister for which was Peter Mandelson), and secondly
because of his alleged involvement with a plan to assist an Indian bil-
lionaire to gain a British passport. The billionaire was also a major
donor of cash to the Millennium Dome fiasco. Mandelson’s value to
Blair should not be underestimated, however. Not only was he a key
player in the reinvention of the Labour Party after the election deba-
cles of the 1980s, he was also instrumental in successfully managing
Tony Blair’s campaign for the party leadership in 1994. Mandelson
may have made two grave errors of judgement and may well be
beyond any future return to high office in the United Kingdom. He
has recently been appointed as the European Union Commissioner
for Trade, however, and it may only have been his acceptance of this
post that kept him from re-entering the Cabinet for a third time as
part of the messy and unwanted reshuffle that was caused by David
Blunkett’s resignation just before Christmas 2004.
Although the nature of the embarrassments was different from
those experienced by Blair over Mandelson and Campbell, Margaret
Thatcher experienced her own difficulties with individual advisers.
In the 1980s, Sir Alan Walters, a right-wing monetarist economist,
already mentioned earlier in relation to the work of policy units, regu-
larly briefed Margaret Thatcher. By 1989, Walters had become such
an influence on the development of Margaret Thatcher’s economic
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 131

views that the relationship caused the Chancellor of the Exchequer at

that time, Nigel Lawson, to resign. Walters, claimed Lawson, was vir-
tually running the economic policy of the United Kingdom. The issue
here of individual advisers is one that brings us back to our earlier dis-
cussions of collective cabinet and individual ministerial responsibility.
In this case, Lawson clearly felt that his position was being undermined
by Walters and that the processes of cabinet discussion and collective
responsibility were being bypassed.
While individual and private advisers may occasionally be a con-
troversial part of government, they are nevertheless indispensable to
the workings of the higher levels of the executive, and are therefore
unlikely to disappear any day soon. The main issue for critics of the
existence of these individuals, especially under Blair, is the growing
number of them in government (possibly more than eighty in 2000)
and the increasingly significant positions they hold as unelected
players at the highest level of government. In the case of the New
Labour spin doctors, as many have pointed out, these people are
essentially civil servants. They may be temporary civil servants, yet,
none the less, they are free from the rules that regulate permanent
officials and therefore face no requirement to be in any way politically
neutral. In the case of one or two of these advisers – certainly Powell
and Campbell – Blair has, in the words of Richard Rose: ‘leveraged
the influence of political appointees through an Order in Council
giving two of his senior political advisers (Powell and Campbell) the
status of temporary civil servants with authority over career civil ser-
vants and also authorising them to act “in a political context” ’.3
Rose goes on to argue that this expansion of personal advisers
and political staff in Downing Street has created friction, not just
between officials and advisers, but between players at the highest
level of government. We can summarise the involvement of one par-
ticular adviser, Lord Birt, in a way that illustrates the arguments
framed by Rose.

Case study: Lord Birt and blue sky thinking

By early 2005 the British press seemed to be in agreement that John
Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC, had assumed a pos-
ition as the most influential of all the advisers circling around
132 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Downing Street and Tony Blair. In a private memorandum leaked

late in 2004, the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull – the
most senior civil servant in the United Kingdom – told senior civil ser-
vants in every government department to be more ‘strategic’ in the
way they think about policy. These same civil servants were also told
that Lord Birt should be included in discussions about all major pro-
posals for the future.
The memorandum supported the claims being made about the
influence of Birt in Downing Street. Birt appears to have replaced
Campbell and Mandelson as the Prime Minister’s closest confidant on
the by now infamous ‘sofa’. Originally hired in 2000 to work one day
a week, Birt was now a virtually full-time government adviser. The
ex-BBC boss has been given an office in Number 10 alongside his
former personal assistant, Katie Ray, who is now Blair’s diary secretary.
Birt’s political presence is significant. He sits in on most of the key
political strategy meetings held in Number 10, and sits on the
Cabinet Office Strategy and Civil Service Reform programme
boards. He will frequently be part of meetings between cabinet min-
isters and the Prime Minister in discussions about the progress and
delivery of government policy, and has produced unpublished
reports on antisocial behaviour and on the future development of
London. His management style, based on radical, mainly American-
originated, management-theory thinking and consultancy-type lan-
guage (referred to as ‘Birtspeak’ at the BBC), appeals to a Prime
Minister who sees him as someone with the necessary experience of
tackling public-service bureaucracy and who wishes to use similar
theories and practices to reshape the formulation and development
of public services at the highest levels of government. Birt represents
two clear issues with the use of personal advisers in the later stages of
Blair’s premiership.
First, Birt’s position emphasises the concerns that people within
and without government have expressed for a number of years on
the issue of personal advisers. In early 2002, the Guardian newspaper
used Birt’s refusal to give evidence about his ideas on the future of
the railways to Gwyneth Dunwoody’s Commons Transport Select
Committee. In the words of the Guardian, the refusal ‘may seem a
rather petulant dispute between two of the more charm challenged
figures in British politics . . . but his [Lord Birt’s] refusal, abetted by
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 133

Downing Street, is also an important defiance of Parliament’. For

critics of the role of personal advisers, the issue illuminates an
increasingly important confrontation in relations between the legisla-
ture and the executive.
As an adviser to Blair, Birt is not a civil servant, but he is a member
of the legislature by virtue of his seat in the House of Lords and is
clearly involved in policy making at the highest level. This is, there-
fore, a similar (if not exactly the same) issue to that illustrated by
earlier concerns over the role of Alastair Campbell, and it is a
concern based on the lack of accountability. In the system of gov-
ernment that has evolved under Blair, Downing Street advisers now
play such as important part in the policy-making process that certain
policies carry the imprint of their advice and ideas to the extent that
the policies are very different from the originals formulated by gov-
ernment ministers. To use one example, the issue of faith-based
schools is an aspect of education policy widely believed to owe far
more to the intervention of advisers in Downing Street than to those
ideas emerging directly from the Department of Education.
The second issue raised in late-period Blair by the position of Birt
is the extent to which his presence illuminates the Tony Blair/Gordon
Brown fault-line that lies at the centre of government. In March 2005
it was widely reported that Blair was in the process of considering
plans that would involve imposing tighter controls on the Treasury
and the senior Civil Service, in an attempt to drive through radical
reforms in a third Labour term. Blair had asked Birt to consider plans
for the abolition of the Cabinet Office, which has traditionally been
the power base of the Civil Service, and for its functions to become
part of the revamped Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It was also
reported that, as part of his brief, Birt was looking at the idea of
removing key responsibilities from the Treasury as part of a renewed
effort to break the political and administrative resistance to the kind
of radical reforms that Blair feels have been diluted and delayed in
his first two terms.
If the reforms were to go ahead in the way we have outlined, then
it is likely that the Prime Minister would emerge with a much clearer
control over domestic policy, something that he has had to share with
the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, during the first two terms. The plans
are essentially an attempt by Blair to challenge Brown’s political
134 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

stronghold in the Treasury in a way that would reduce Brown’s strong

influence over domestic issues, particularly welfare, civic renewal, the
labour market, energy and transport – all areas that Birt has ‘advised’
on in recent years.
If successfully introduced, the proposals that Birt has been con-
sidering (according to some Number 10 insiders, the ideas were being
discussed as far back as 2000–1) would substantially concentrate
power inside Number 10 and would settle the issue of a Prime
Minister’s Department (see below) once and for all.
Birt’s involvement with this particular aspect of ‘blue sky thinking’
has thrown into focus all the debates and concerns that surround the
use of special advisers. The Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Baker,
wrote to the Cabinet Secretary pointing out that, in addition to his
unpaid work at Number 10, Lord Birt is a paid adviser to the man-
agement consultants, McKinsey. Baker called for Birt to be investig-
ated for potential conflict of interest, and referred to Birt’s role in
government as being ‘entirely improper’.

Trends in prime ministerial support

We now need to make some summary points about the nature of the
bureaucracy and support that surround the Prime Minister. Research
by Kavanagh and Seldon4 has examined the growth of the bureau-
cracy in Downing Street over recent years. We shall return to some of
their findings later in the book when we discuss the ‘presidential’
debate surrounding the Prime Minister but, in the light of what we
have already said on this matter, it will be useful now to highlight the
trends that Kavanagh and Seldon have recorded:

• The number of people in Number 10 has grown significantly –

seventy-one in 1970, 150 in 1999 – this has produced an
‘institutionalism’ and ‘collectivism’ of the premiership: an ever-
increasing number of people are speaking and writing in his/her
name.
• The ‘official’ and ‘political’ offices of Number 10 are starting to
overlap (we have already shown how this has continued apace in the
time since this research was published). This overlap presents
opportunities for the kind of ‘turf disputes’ noted above and, in the
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 135

vivid description of Clare Short, the ‘entourages at war for their

prince’.
• Officials have gradually become more comfortable with political
appointees. The pre-Blair convention of appointing special or
political advisers only to the Policy Unit and Political Office is now
largely forgotten. There is something approaching large-scale
recruitment of political elements in Number 10 with Blair’s
appointments of staff and advisers similar to that of a new US
President introducing a new team to the White House.
• The Prime Minister is increasingly drawn to what Kavanagh and
Seldon refer to as his Number 10 office where his staff work on his
behalf. This pulls the Prime Minister away from Cabinet and
Parliament.

Should there be a Prime Minister’s Department?

The smart answer to this may well be: ‘there already is one’. In this
section we shall examine the debate surrounding the issues of a Prime
Minister’s Department before discussing the arguments for and
against. We shall then make the case that, essentially, Tony Blair has
finished the process started by his predecessors and has, in fact,
created a de facto Prime Minister’s Department.
The argument was once put forward that the Prime Minister oper-
ated at a certain disadvantage when compared to his key colleagues in
the Cabinet and when compared to heads of government elsewhere.
The Chancellor in Germany has a large executive staff and office as
does the Taoiseach in Ireland. The President of the United States has
considerable executive support, as does the French President. The
British Prime Minister, however, is faced with making whatever he or
she may from the collection of offices in 10 Downing Street and the
presence of the Cabinet Office. Those who have argued for the cre-
ation of a Prime Minister’s Department have done so on the basis that
such a development would be of great benefit to central government
because it would give Prime Ministers the support they needed to
speak on behalf of the government on a wide range of issues. Sir Keith
Berrill, a former head of the Central Policy Review Staff has put
forward a similar argument. As we shall go on to argue, however, in the
words of a source close to Tony Blair quoted by Peter Hennessey: ‘it
136 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

[the debate over a Prime Minister’s Department] is largely academic

– we already have one’.5 We can turn first to the arguments for and
against this particular development.
Arguments for:
• The Prime Minister needs more resources to help manage the
growing demands on his or her time. These demands will con-
tinue to grow, so the system should formalise a clear support
network through a Prime Minister’s Department.
• A Prime Minister’s Department would allow the holder of the
office to more effectively to represent the government to the world.
• The increased policy workload of modern government requires a
Prime Minister to be able to give strategic direction and cohesion
to the policy process.
• Cabinet ministers have large-scale administrative support from
their officials, and many appoint their own special advisers. Cabinet
committees may also act occasionally as alternative power bases to
Number 10. On the other hand, support for the Prime Minister
may be considered less permanent and more difficult to control.
• The basis of a Prime Minister’s Department already exists, so why
not simply formalise (and therefore make accountable) what has
happened by default.
Arguments against:
• The Prime Minister may ‘lose touch’ with the rest of government.
• A Prime Minister’s Department may well result in the weakening
of the powers of the Prime Minister because the flexible arrange-
ments of the current system would be lost to the more rigid struc-
tures of a formal and hierarchical bureaucracy.
• How would a Prime Minister’s Department fit into the hierarchy
of Cabinet? What relationship, for instance, would a junior min-
ister in the Prime Minister’s Department have with permanent
secretaries in other departments and with other cabinet ministers?
• The Prime Minister may use his or her department as an opportu-
nity to develop a political agenda that might be different from that
of other cabinet ministers. Because it would be a bureaucratic
structure, it would develop a culture and mentality of its own that
might result in the Prime Minister being offered only one argument
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 137

or one course of action. There would also be the danger here that
one person might come to dominate the Prime Minister in terms of
access and information, as opposed to the loose groups around
Number 10 at the moment.
• The department would simply produce more paperwork that the
Prime Minister would find it almost impossible to deal with.
• A Prime Minister’s Department would be a major revolution in
the structure of the Constitution and could easily be interpreted
as a formal declaration of a move from a cabinet system, based on
individual and collective responsibility, to one based on prime
ministerial government.

In fact, as we have already said, it is possible to argue that a Prime

Minister’s Department does exist in all but name. We can now list the
key pieces of evidence to support this argument.
Perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence can be drawn from
the reforms put into place by Blair in the spring and early summer of
2002, and referred to in various parts of this book. We have already
established that the centralising tendency of Blair had been pointing
in this direction since his entry to government in 1997, yet it was to
be the events of early 2002 that finally revealed the extent of his
reforming ambition. As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of
the 2001 election, Blair established the three secretariats, which them-
selves built on earlier reforms, such as the Strategic Communications
Unit, the expanded Cabinet Office and the proliferation of units and
task forces to help create what some observers were referring to by
2001 as the ‘mosaic’ at the centre of British government.
In May 2002, the Transport Minister, Stephen Byers, resigned
from the Cabinet following a range of problems in his department,
not least the sustained failure to ‘deliver’ in key areas of transport
policy. The reshuffle that followed the resignation of Byers gave Blair
the opportunity to dismantle the huge department of transport, local
government and the regions, handing what the BBC political web-
correspondent described as the ‘poison chalice’ of transport to the
‘capable Brownite, Alistair Darling’. It was to be the reforms to the
Cabinet Office, however, especially the promotion of the Blair loyal-
ist Lord Macdonald, that would, in effect, create a Prime Minister’s
Department in Whitehall that would allow Macdonald to ‘spread his
138 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

tentacles’ [Nick Assinder] into every Whitehall department and

report directly to Blair.
As the dust settled on the hasty reshuffle, it was left to John
Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, to encapsulate the significance
of what had happened. Prescott defended Byers against those Labour
MPs whom he accused of ‘plunging the knife’ into the Transport
Secretary during select committee criticisms of the government’s ten-
year transport plan while admitting at the same time that the gov-
ernment had, indeed, failed to deliver in key areas. Prescott had
emerged as one of the ‘winners’ in the reshuffle. By arranging that the
Cabinet Office could now focus almost entirely on the monitoring of
the delivery of public services, Blair had handed Prescott the depart-
ment functions of the Cabinet Office. Speaking in a radio interview,
Prescott praised Blair’s decision to focus the work of the Cabinet
Office on delivery and welcomed the establishment of a ‘Prime
Minister’s Department’ before going on to say that: ‘the Prime
Minister is a man who likes to be hands-on . . . therefore you have a
department geared to meet those needs’.
Even with this unequivocal endorsement from the Deputy Prime
Minister, Downing Street was still sensitive to the implications of
Prescott’s comments, especially as it had always insisted it would not
breach constitutional convention by setting up a Prime Minister’s
Department.
The reforms did not meet with the approval of everyone. The
Commons Public Administration Committee had already urged Blair
to break with precedent and face questions about the power of
Number 10 staff. Tony Wright, the chairman of the committee, said:
What this confirms is that there is a Prime Minister’s Department in
all but name, with a growing capacity to drive policy from the centre.
We [the Public Administration Committee] will be renewing our
invitation to the Prime Minister to attend the select committee to
account for the structure and operation of the new Downing Street.

Wright renewed his attack in the aftermath of the 2002 reforms and
called for a bill that would sort out the problems between civil servants
and special advisers.
Some observers were slightly less measured in their assessment of
the 2002 changes. Sir Richard Packer, the permanent secretary at the
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 139

Ministry of Agriculture between 1993 and 2000 claimed that

Downing Street was operated along the lines of Nazi Germany.
According to Packer, Blair’s government: ‘. . . reminded me of the
Third Reich where there were overlapping responsibilities and
nobody would know where ultimate responsibility lay’.
Speaking to the BBC’s On The Record, Packer went on to express
concern about the way power had been seized from departments,
and the way in which power was increasingly concentrated at the
centre. Lord Butler, head of the Civil Service between 1988 and
1998, also contributed to the debate by warning that the impartial-
ity of the Civil Service was at risk by the appointment of special
advisers with political affiliations. There have been other views on
the reforms:

• Holliday argued that the increased integration and co-ordination

of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office under Blair
has made them ‘a single executive office’.6
• Blair has significantly strengthened the resources available to the
Prime Minister between 1997 and 1999, again in 2001, and once
more in 2002. The 2002 reforms are particularly significant. As
we have already pointed out, his main aim is to achieve the greater
link between policy and presentation and to achieve the kind of
integration between private office and policy unit in such a way
that delivery will be improved.
• The creation of units on social exclusion and policy innovation
has been designed in such a way as to keep the Prime Minister
fully in the policy loop, and to give clear lines of responsibility and
reporting right back to Downing Street.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

• Although the picture is yet to be thrown fully into focus (and the
aftermath of the 2005 election victory may yet yield further changes), it
is clear beyond doubt that the resources available to the Prime Minister
have undergone a fundamental shift.
• The role of the Cabinet Office has undergone major reform. It exists
now in such a way as to serve the Prime Minister rather than the
Cabinet as a whole.
 140 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• The British Prime Minister is now supported by something similar to

the Executive Office of the President in the United States.
• Under Blair, the various offices in Number 10 and the reformed Cabinet
Office represent something very similar to the official Prime Minister’s
Departments in New Zealand and Australia.
• Further reform may yet be in the pipeline. In March 2005, the Daily
Telegraph was predicting a possible cabinet position for Lord Birt that
would give him the job of shaking up Whitehall departments and the
Civil Service to drive through reform. The article ‘Blair Plans Exit
Strategy to Ensure Reform’ (Helm and Sylvester) also predicted the
emergence of an official Prime Minister’s Department in the shape of a
‘beefed-up’ Cabinet Office with enhanced strategy and delivery units,
giving it greater control over individual departments.

Glossary of key terms



Blue sky thinking The attempt to think beyond the normal constraints of
short-term demands in an effort to plan policies for the future.
Prime Minister’s Department The much-discussed reform that would
give the Prime Minister a department and staff similar to that enjoyed by
other cabinet ministers. Under Blair, a Prime Minister’s Office has
effectively been created, even though it doesn’t ‘exist’ as such.
Spin-doctors Mostly used as a derogatory term to describe political
media managers (or media manipulators, as their detractors would claim).
Thatcherism The term coined to describe the neo-liberal, right-wing and
monetarist philosophies of Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister 1979–90.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Provide brief descriptions of the roles of the following:
Policy Directorate
Prime Minister’s Strategy Group
Delivery Unit
Office of Public Service Reform
Honours and Appointments
Press Office
Strategic Communications Unit
Research and Information Unit
Political Office.
Why are specialist and personal advisers criticised?
 The Prime Minister: Support and Bureaucracy 141

Briefly describe the informal/fluid powers of the Prime Minister.

Describe the role of Lord Birt and the criticisms that he has attracted.
Briefly summarise the arguments for and against a Prime Minister’s
Department.
Essay questions
To what extent, and why, has Tony Blair increased the power of Number
10?
How far would you agree with the suggestion that the Prime Minister has
more resources at his disposal now than in 1997?
‘Tony Blair has delivered joined-up government.’ Discuss.
‘Special advisers are not a welcome addition to the system of
government.’ How far do you agree?
Discuss the claim that the office of the Prime Minister is now served by a
Prime Minister’s Department.
‘A Prime Minister’s Department is unnecessary and unwanted.’ Discuss.
Revision task
Use an A3 sheet of paper to sketch the key components of the three
secretariats in the Prime Minister’s Office. Label the sketch carefully, then
explain the role and function of each part of the structure on a separate
sheet of paper. Use a highlighter pen to indicate those parts of the
structure that have been introduced by Tony Blair.

 Helpful websites
www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
http://news.bbc.co.uk
The BBC website is particularly good for tracking the various changes in
central government.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk
An excellent website for political analysis.
 142 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

 Suggestions for further reading

Barberis, P. and Carr, F. (2002) ‘Executive Control and Dominance under
Tony Blair’, Talking Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
Burch and Haliday (1996) The British Cabinet System (Harvester).
Burnham, J. and Jones, G. (2000) ‘Advising the Prime Minister’, Talking
Politics, vol. 12.2, winter 2000.
Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).
Foley, M. (2002) Major, Blair and a Conflict of Leadership: Collision Course
(Manchester University Press).
Hennessy, P. (2002) ‘The Blair Government in Historical Perspective’,
History Today, January 2002.
Jackson, N. (2003) ‘The Blair Style – Presidential, Bilateral or Trilateral
Government?’, Talking Politics, vol. 15.3, January 2003.
James, S. (1992) British Cabinet Government (Routledge).
Jones, A. (2002) ‘Special Advisers and the Demise of Sir Humphrey?’,
Talking Politics, vol. 15.1, September 2002.
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
Kavanagh, D. (2000) ‘The Power Behind the Prime Minister’, Talking
Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Tony Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review,
vol. 11.1, September 2001.
Milne, K. (1998) ‘The Policy Unit’, New Statesman, July 1998.
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity).
Turner, A. (2003) ‘Is there a Prime Minister’s Department?’, Politics Review,
vol. 12.3, February 2003.
CHAPTER 7

The Prime Minister and Style

Contents
Why is style important? 144
Style as personality 144
Style and skill 149
Style in Opposition 150
The case of Tony Blair as Prime Minister: a ‘tousled efficiency’ 152
The case of Margaret Thatcher: not ‘to be’ but ‘to do’ 157
The case of John Major: the ‘poor general’ 162

Overview
In the previous two chapters we examined the structural and institutional
bases of prime ministerial power. By analysing the ways in which recent
Prime Ministers have used the various official and semi-official support
systems available to them, we have constructed an overview of the
distribution and application of political power at the very highest level of
the British political system. It should be apparent from our discussions so
far that the exercise of political power by the Prime Minister has varied
from administration to administration. A number of longer-term trends
towards centralisation and prime ministerial methods of government may
be becoming apparent, yet it is also important to recognise that the
management of the executive and the use of political power are also
determined to a large extent by the personality, leadership skills and overall
‘style’ of the head of the government. It is to a more detailed discussion of
prime ministerial style that we now turn.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• Why the study of prime ministerial style is important
• The distinction between style and personality
• Political style as political skill
• The Blair, Thatcher and Major styles
144 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Why is style important?

The analysis of leadership style has grown substantially in recent years
as the opportunities to study prime ministerial style have increased.
The increased intensity of the twenty-four-hour rolling-news-fuelled
media speculation of modern politics coupled with the proliferation of
memoirs and published diaries from former ministers and advisers
have allowed much more information about the style of individual
Prime Ministers into the public domain than was once the case.
As we have mentioned elsewhere, Richard Rose has classified the
three most recent Prime Ministers, Thatcher, Major and Blair, as the
‘television’ generation of political leaders.1 This distinction between
earlier holders of the post is significant when examining prime min-
isterial styles, yet also adds a note of caution to the whole exercise.
When analysing ‘style’, it becomes important to be lucid about
exactly what is being discussed under that heading and to make clear
distinctions between ‘style’ and ‘personality’ even though the two
factors will invariably be linked.
When discussing the ‘style’ of recent Prime Ministers, we shall be
looking mainly at the ways in which they have functioned in the role of
Prime Minister. It is the case that each Prime Minister leaves his or her
mark on the exercise of power and that each Prime Minister has at
times subtle, and at other times widely different, approaches to the man-
agement of the executive. Discussions of ‘style’ will therefore include:
• Conduct of and approaches to policy formulation and policy
management.
• Conduct of and approaches to the formal role of head of state, with
particular emphasis on the conduct of foreign affairs and relations.
• Conduct of and approaches to policy presentation and manage-
ment of the media.
• Conduct of and approaches to cabinet management.
• Conduct of and approaches to ideology and party political pro-
grammes.

Style as personality
It should be instantly recognisable that it is difficult to analyse a Prime
Minister in terms of the various conducts and approaches set out
 The Prime Minister and Style 145

above without bringing the personality of the Prime Minister into the
equation. It may be said, for instance, that the political and leadership
style of Margaret Thatcher was framed by a very distinctive person-
ality. Likewise, when observed from the point of view of ‘style’, the
premiership of Tony Blair almost invariably invites discussion of his
personality. The emphasis on personality in recent years may be
explained by a number of factors:

• The impact of television and the need for the Prime

Minister to be a polished and accomplished media per-
former The kind of exposure that a modern Prime Minister can
expect to receive on television has made analysis of, and comment
on, them as ‘personalities’ regular aspects of political discussion.
This is particularly the case during election campaigns when
opinion polls choose to focus certain questions on the electorate’s
perception of individual leaders (see below). This invites judge-
ments on personality and appearance, often at the expense of the
issues.
• The modern cult of celebrity has now enveloped the
political This may not be entirely the modern phenomenon we
think it is. Political figures in the nineteenth century, for instance,
were no less ‘popular’ public figures than those whom we have
today, yet the modern politician can easily expect to be subjected
to far closer scrutiny and forensic-like examination than was ever
the case for Gladstone or Disraeli. Politicians themselves do little
to reverse this trend. Party managers now seek celebrity endorse-
ments as an essential part of any election campaign, and political
leaders are usually eager to appear alongside the same celebrity
figures in an attempt to tap into what may be a reflected ‘glow’ that
characterises celebrity figures. In the early days of Blair’s first
administration, for instance, the brief attempt to repackage Britain
as ‘Cool Britannia’ and weave the government into the general
Zeitgeist of ‘Britpop’ was a fairly cynical attempt to exploit a par-
ticular moment of cultural ‘cool’ for the purpose of emphasising
the essential ‘newness’ of ‘New’ Labour. Inviting Oasis to Downing
Street was therefore an attempt to exploit the cachet of modern
celebrity and invariably invited the media to become focused on
the personalities and private lives of politicians in precisely the
146 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

same way as they were already doing with pop stars, soap actors
and reality TV contestants. In the political sense, the style of a
Prime Minister may well be, among other things, about leadership,
co-ordination and management, but it is also about his or her per-
sonality.
Not all political commentators agree that the study of leadership
styles is significant, nor has there been any systematic attempt to
examine the nature of prime ministerial styles over a sustained
period. Michael Burch has argued that it is difficult to make accurate
assessments of prime ministerial style, and that the central problem
in attempting to put together a generally accepted means of classify-
ing styles and personalities is the lack of genuine evidence. No senior
politician would ever take part in a study by a combination of polit-
ical analysts and clinical psychologists in an effort to produce an accu-
rate personality profile. This does not stop people trying however. In
the run up to the 2005 general election campaign, the opinion polls
often asked the type of question that could be answered only by a
rapid reflection on the personality of the Prime Minister rather than
through any considered and thoughtful analysis of the issues. A
sample of the questions that came under the broad heading of Blair’s
approval rating should illustrate the point:
• Populus: Do you think that the following people have a likeable
personality or not? (Tony Blair: Yes, 49 per cent; No, 44 per cent.)
December 2004.
• ICM: Which of the following statements do you think could
be applied to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair? ‘Has lots of person-
ality’ (Yes, 54 per cent.) July 2004.
• YouGov: Which of these words and phrases apply to Tony Blair?
‘Principled’ (Yes, 28 per cent.) October 2004.
• ICM: Which of the following statements do you think could be
applied to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair? ‘Too Presidential’. (Yes,
62 per cent.) July 2004.
• ICM: Which of the following statements do you think could be
applied to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair? ‘Arrogant’. (Yes, 50 per
cent.) February 2005.
• YouGov: Which of these words and phrases apply to Tony Blair?
‘Arrogant’. (Yes, 39 per cent.) October 2004.
 The Prime Minister and Style 147

• Populus: Do you think Tony Blair has a vision of where he wants

to lead the country? (Yes, 65 per cent; No, 32 per cent.) May 2004.
• YouGov: Which of these words and phrases apply to Tony Blair?
‘Moderate’. (Yes, 21 per cent.) October 2004.
• ICM: Which of the following statements do you think could be
applied to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair? ‘Trustworthy’. (Yes, 30
per cent.) February 2005.
Clearly, the respondents to these types of question are, first and
foremost, more likely to be making immediate responses based on
their perceptions of Blair’s personality. It is also important to point
out that the real picture of whatever constitutes the genuine ‘style’
and ‘personality’ of any given Prime Minister is difficult to assess
accurately for two key reasons:
• There is much information to which we simply do not have access.
• The personality and style traits of the Prime Minister are spun
and distorted by the party and by the media.
In general terms, the classic study of prime ministerial style remains
Norton’s fourfold typology:2
Norton is not providing a definitive model of prime ministerial
styles, more a focus for future inquiry. He points out, for instance, that
the four categories are not mutually exclusive and argues that all Prime
Ministers exhibit a preponderance of characteristics of a particular
type. Thatcher, for instance, provides us with a classic example of the
innovator. Her vision of politics was based on a radical approach: that
she alone instinctively felt that the country needed to move in a new
direction; that a whole new attitude of mind was required; and that she
was the person who would act as the catalyst for this change. So, for
Norton, the typology he offers us comes with a safety warning – we
must bear in mind two key qualifications when we use his model:
• Prime Ministers may appear in more than one of the four parts of
the typology.
• Prime Ministers may ‘drift’ between parts of the typology and
adopt a particular style to suit a particular set of circumstances.
Andrew Heywood has offered a slightly different model in which he has
identified three main leadership styles that Prime Ministers display.3
148 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Box 7.1 Prime ministerial styles (Norton, 1987)

Innovators Reformers
For the innovator, power is the Like the innovator, the reformer
means by which some future seeks to achieve power in order
goal may be achieved. to deliver a future goal.
Most innovators are driven by Like the innovator, reformers
some degree of ideological are ideologically motivated.
motivation.
Unlike the innovator, the
The innovator may not have reformer will have had his or
the support of all parts of their her policy goals formulated and
party. The ideas and policies of agreed by the party.
the innovator may be formu-
Unlike the innovator, the
lated outside the party and may
policies and goals of the
not have the agreement of all
reformer will not necessarily
factions and groups within the
reflect their personality and
party.
style.
Under the innovator, the
main body of party and
government policy is personi-
fied by their personality and
style.

Egoists Balancers
For the egoist political power is Political stability, peace and
an end in itself. continuity are the key goals of
the balancer.
The egoist seeks to gain power
and to then retain and exercise The balancer seeks this stability
that power for as long as in both his or her party and in
possible. society as a whole.
Egoists tend to see the Norton argues that balancers
exercise of power as an fall into two subcategories:
activity that exists in the
1 Those who actively seek
present and with short-term
office in an attempt to bring
goals. The egoist is
some stability to what may
be a volatile situation.
 The Prime Minister and Style 149

less interested in long-term 2 Those who find themselves

planning and future goals. in power usually as a result
of having played the role
The egoist is motivated more by
of a ‘compromise’ or
self-regard and the desire for
‘conscript’ candidate in
power in itself – ideology is
leadership elections.
rarely a major motivating force
for the egoist.

The laissez-faire Prime Minister

The type of Prime Minister who exhibits laissez-faire tendencies is
essentially a ‘hands-off’ manager who allows cabinet ministers to get
on with their departmental responsibilities with little or no interfer-
ence. Sir Alec Douglas Home, the Conservative Prime Minister for a
brief period in the 1960s, is probably the classic example of this type
of approach.

The transactional Prime Minister

This type of Prime Minister sees his or her main role as ‘honest
broker’ between senior colleagues in Cabinet. The main aim of the
transactional Prime Minister is to maintain the unity of the govern-
ment. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister in the 1960s, and
1970s, is usually regarded as the epitome of the transactional leader.

The transformational Prime Minister

If we use the model today, it is possible to make a case for Tony Blair
falling into this category. This type of Prime Minister leads the
Cabinet in a particular direction through some form of ideological
conviction. The other obvious contender for an appearance in this
category is Margaret Thatcher. More of Thatcher later in this
chapter.

Style and skill

When discussing style we are, in fact, making assessments of political
skill. It is likely to be the case that those Prime Ministers who have the
less successful political careers may well be judged as having the least
successful style, and vice versa. When we go on to provide more
detailed analyses of individual Prime Ministers later in this chapter, we
150 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

shall say more about individual skills. As part of this general overview
of style, personality and skill, however, it may be useful to make some
general points on political skill.
In the essay we have already referred to in our discussion of the
fourfold typology, Norton goes on to identify three key skills which
most Prime Ministers will need from time to time.4

‘Impression management’
This is largly what you might imagine. Prime Ministers need to give
the ‘right impression’. This means that they must be convincing in
their role as Prime Minister. Blair appears still to be able to project
this particular quality and skill as did Thatcher for most of her time
as Prime Minister. John Major began to lose this skill fairly quickly
and it is questionable as to whether James Callaghan ever had it.

‘Feel for office’

This skill is all about intuition, about knowing when to use particu-
lar skills in certain circumstances and about knowing where, when
and how to ‘do the right thing’ to achieve whatever aims he or she
may have.

‘Leading and reacting’

This skill is about knowing when to adopt the appropriate role for a
given set of circumstances. These roles may include ‘the comman-
der’, ‘the persuader’, ‘the negotiator’, ‘the manager’ and the ‘manipu-
lator’. The successful ‘leading and reacting’ Prime Minister will also
know when to ‘hide’ at the appropriate time during a policy crisis that
he or she does not wish to be associated with.
If it is difficult then effectively to assess the style and personality of
a Prime Minister in office, might it be possible to gain insight from his
or her behaviour in opposition or earlier in their government careers?

Style in Opposition
Behaviour in opposition does not always indicate how an individual
will behave in power. As leader of the Opposition during Major’s
government, however, Blair appears to have been very aware of
the difference between himself and the Prime Minister in terms of
their relationships with their parties, even going so far as to comment
 The Prime Minister and Style 151

in Parliament: ‘I lead my party, he follows his.’ It is worth noting that,

historically, the Labour Party has been suspicious of this type of lead-
ership since the 1930s when Ramsay MacDonald employed a similar
style to such an extent that the party was very nearly split.
Blair’s style as Prime Minister has almost certainly been condi-
tioned by his own experiences in opposition, and by the larger expe-
riences of the Labour Party during the years 1979 to 1997 and the
four general election defeats that mark this period. The despair in the
Labour Party, especially following the fourth successive election
defeat in 1992 and the sudden death of the new leader John Smith in
1994, was such that Blair was able quickly to dominate the party and
get his own way on the revival and reorganisation of policy and pre-
sentation. In its embryonic phase, Blair’s leadership style was there-
fore as much a product of the contemporary Labour Party as it was
a reflection of his personality and character.
Opposition can also influence leadership style in terms of the his-
torical distance it may place between the potential leader and the
actual exercise of power. When, for instance, Blair became Prime
Minister in 1997, it was on the back of a long period of opposition
for his party (already explained above) and, he had had no experience
whatsoever of government. This has not been the case for most of
Britain’s modern Prime Ministers. Major, Thatcher, Callaghan,
Heath and Wilson all had had opposition and government experience
before entering Downing Street as Prime Minister. When Blair
entered Downing Street himself, therefore, he felt no historical or
party attachment to the traditional structures of power nor did his
observation of Major’s government after 1992 give him any sense that
the same structures and practices were in any way effective.
There is evidence that the Blair style of leadership and attitude to
the exercise of power were well established before 1997. Peter
Mandelson, along with Rod Liddle, who was later to be appointed
by Blair to the Policy Unit, published The Blair Revolution in 1996 and
made no secret of the kind of government that Blair would lead nor
the type of leadership he would exercise in doing so. On the eve of
the 1997 election, Blair could have been no clearer as to his leader-
ship style when he used a speech to make the point that ‘people have
to know that we will run from the centre and govern from the centre’.
Mandelson and Liddle had been saying much the same thing twelve
152 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

months previously when they wrote: ‘He [Blair] has to get control of
the central government machine and drive it hard in the knowledge
that if the government does not run the machine the machine will
run the government.’5 As other commentators have pointed out:
Blair’s style of leadership in government closely resembles that of his
leadership in opposition, and that has been both a strength and a
weakness.
One further factor relating to opposition and style should be men-
tioned here and it connects to the point made above about Blair’s
complete lack of government experience. When Blair appointed his
first Cabinet in 1997, it was as inexperienced as the Prime Minister
himself. A small handful of ministers had had some junior experience
in the Callaghan government before 1979, yet the vast majority was
not even in Parliament at that time let alone in Cabinet. Blair’s min-
isters, therefore, had never had the opportunity to establish for them-
selves any kind of ministerial track record or reputation. It is
understandable to see the likelihood of Blair deciding that there was
no reason to treat his colleagues as cabinet ministers in any way
differently from how he had handled them as members of the
Shadow Cabinet.
Having given a brief overview of some of the key theories and
indicators of prime ministerial style, we may now go on to discuss
specific examples from the careers of the three most recent Prime
Ministers. We will begin by looking at Tony Blair in much more detail.

The case of Tony Blair as Prime Minister: a ‘tousled

efficiency’
One of the earlier studies of Blair’s personality and style was by
Norman Fairclough who described Blair’s leadership as ‘immensely
successful’.6 In his study and in a detailed analysis of Blair’s broad-
cast at the time of the death of the Princess of Wales, Fairclough
made much of Blair’s skills and style as a political communicator.
Fairclough makes the point that, on this particular occasion, Blair’s
style mixed words and ‘bodily performance’ in what was a largely
successful attempt to capture the national mood. This aspect of
Blair’s leadership has been a key factor in analysing his style and has
been employed time and time again, most recently in the immediate
 The Prime Minister and Style 153

aftermath of the terrorist attacks on London in July 2005. Fairclough

asked the question:
Why are these words so effective in ‘striking a chord’ with many
people? One important point is that it was not just his words but his
overall bodily performance, the way he looked and acted, as well as
what he said. But the language was an important factor.

Fairclough goes on to say that:

A crucial part of the success and apparent continuing popularity of
Blair’s style is his capacity to, as it were, ‘anchor’ the public politician
in the ‘normal person’ – the necessary posturing and evasions of pol-
itics are it seems at least partially redeemed by Blair’s capacity to
reassert constantly his normal, decent, likeable personality. In his
speeches and interviews there is always a mix between the vernacu-
lar language of the normal person and the public language of pol-
itics. The sort of ‘normal person’ that comes across is very much
‘middle-class’ and ‘middle-England’ in values, outlook and style.

By 2004, the Blair style of government, as opposed to the more ‘per-

sonality’-based analysis of Fairclough, was facing substantial criti-
cism. The Butler and Hutton reports both highlighted the ‘informal’
style of Blair’s ‘sofa culture’ and informal machinery of government
in less than glowing terms. Criticism of Blair in terms of his leader-
ship style have been particularly vocal in the period since British
involvement in the war in Iraq, and the issue of Blair’s integrity and
trust became key factors in the 2005 general election.
As we have already pointed out, Blair is the epitome of the new-
style, television-age Prime Minister. In the study by Rose already
mentioned, the key features of this type of Prime Minister include:
• Less time spent in the House of Commons.
• Less time spent in long cabinet meetings (the modern Prime
Minister thinks they’re a waste of time).
• Awareness of the power of the modern media and the importance
of the political message.
• More time spent with concentric circles of confidants and advisers.
• At ease with the blurred distinction between civil servant and
appointed political advisers that they themselves have been largely
responsible for.
154 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• A greater role for political staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, and
the relaxed approach to making these appointments ‘temporary’
political servants willing to act in a political context.
As we have seen above, early contributions to the debate surround-
ing Tony Blair’s prime ministerial style focused very much on Blair’s
‘strong’ leadership and communication skills built on what was a com-
manding parliamentary position. We may summarise these views of
the political and leadership style of early period Blair as follows:
• A good communicator with a very good instinct for defining
the national mood. This skill and this style were also evident in
what was a very well-defined charisma based on an even
stronger political foundation than that enjoyed by Margaret
Thatcher.
• A willingness to accept mistakes and to apologise, as in
the case early in the first administration of the money accepted by
the Labour Party from Formula One racing and the subsequent
government exemption for the sport from a ban on tobacco adver-
tising.
• The ability to ‘hide’, as we discussed above, was also evident
in the early years of Blair’s leadership. Even when Blair found it
difficult to distance himself from some of the problems and crises
that beset his government during the first two years of power, his
personal popularity rating suffered very little.
• The air of certainty, the almost palpable ‘I know we are right’
conviction of Blair in the early period of his premiership
reminded observers of Thatcher at the peak of her own political
powers. This sense of conviction and destiny was in sharp contrast
to the uncertainty and lack of direction that characterised Major’s
later years in power.
• A clear sense of ‘being in charge’ – again, similar to
Thatcher but very different from Major, especially in terms of his
relationship with the Cabinet. Some commentators, such as Peter
Hennessey, did not always interpret this facet of Blair’s style as
being necessarily a positive factor. In abandoning the colle-
giate/collective style for one that was primarily ‘command and
control’, he was attempting to develop a populist style whereby the
government was largely identified with Blair personally. As we
 The Prime Minister and Style 155

shall see, this particular argument, along with others, will be a key
piece of evidence in the case against Blair when we move on to
discuss the more substantial debate on his actual methods of gov-
erning.
In an article written before the attacks on the World Trade Center
in 2001, Kavanagh attempted to place Blair in some historical per-
spective. He wrote: ‘Blair has yet to be tested by crises comparable to
those which the outstanding leaders faced, and his long term
influence on the agenda can only be judged when he leaves office.’7 It
is probably fair to argue that, since September 2001, Blair has indeed
been tested by a series of crises that, in the long run, will come to
define his leadership style.
Blair’s leadership style, and very possibly his political legacy, have
been transformed by the events since September 2001. It is fair to
say that Blair was no stranger to war before these events. As John
Kampferer has pointed out, Blair had a remarkable record of
involvement in foreign wars that included Kosovo and Sierra Leone.
His involvement in the ‘war on terror’, however, has eclipsed all of
these. Moreover, the evidence that emerged in the Hutton and Butler
inquiries has revealed much more about the political style and work-
ings of the Blair court than was ever revealed before. The post-2001
Blair style may be summarised as follows:
• The war leader – the events associated with the attacks on
America in 2001 and the subsequent ‘war on terrorism’ will
undoubtedly become Blair’s defining themes as Prime Minister.
For most of his second administration, Blair focused on foreign
policy issues and the war in Iraq. The reasons for Blair’s commit-
ment to these policies are difficult to assess with any accuracy so
close to the events.
• The world leader – this view of Blair is closely associated with
the ‘war leader’ argument and is summarised efficiently by Tony
Judt, Professor of European Studies at New York University:

Tony Blair is an extremely interesting man. He is a man with a set of

beliefs about how the world ought to look, how the world needs to
be run if it is to remain at peace with itself, if poverty is to be
addressed, if disease and environmental difficulties are to be
156 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

addressed. So he has a world picture, which makes him unusual for

most politicians who think much more locally and short term.8

• The man of moral certainty – this is similar to the ‘air of cer-

tainty’ discussed above yet has a stronger resonance since 2001.
Chris Smith, Blair’s Culture Minister from the first government,
attempted to define this aspect of Blair’s character: ‘There are
moments certainly in the past few years when, in terms of foreign
policy, Blair has identified something that he really passionately
believes as a moral purpose. And he’s determined, even if it means
standing alone against the rest of the world, that he’s going to try
and pursue that . . . I think there’s a little bit of that that has come
through in relation to Iraq. He has always seen this as something
that he believes in. He believes in the rightness of the cause, and
even though a lot of the world around him was saying, ‘No, this is
the wrong thing to be doing,’ he nonetheless thought, ‘I think I’m
right and I’m going to stick by it’. It’s what he’s done in the past
and I think he thought that, having been proved right in the past,
he would be proved right on this as well . . .’9
• The aloof leader – this criticism of the Blair style of govern-
ment since 2001 has been discussed at length by a number of
observers, most notably in the 2004 Butler Report on the Review
of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, that criticised
the Blair style of informal government and an overdependency on
political advisers. Government spokespersons dismissed Butler’s
findings on the grounds that good government was about results,
not style. The earlier Hutton Report, however, while exonerating
Blair from most of the accusations levelled at the government,
revealed much about a political style that had indeed become
‘aloof ’.
• The beleaguered leader – this is where we observe Blair gen-
uinely ‘tested by crises’ in the way that Kavanagh thought would
define him as a leader in 2001. There are three distinct periods in
which Blair has had to handle immense pressure. The experience
of this has certainly done much to change his physical appearance
and has also done much to frame what may well be our lasting per-
ceptions of his political style. The first of these periods may be
defined as that period between late summer 2003 and January
 The Prime Minister and Style 157

2004 when the suicide of the weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly,

led to the Hutton Inquiry. The week of the publication coincided
with a less than certain vote in the House of Commons on top-up
fees. The second key period we may highlight is the 2005 general
election when all the public unrest about continued involve-
ment in Iraq and specifically about the trust and integrity of Blair
himself became key election issues. Finally, the extraordinary
events of the second week in July 2005 showed Blair in all the pos-
sible stages of emotion linked to the post of Prime Minister. At the
start of the week, London hosted the Live 8 concert designed to
put pressure on the G8 leaders, when they met in Gleneagles a few
days later, to solve the issue of world poverty, particularly in Africa.
On the Tuesday of that week, Blair flew to Singapore to be part
of the final push in what turned out to be London’s successful
bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games before flying back to
Scotland to host the G8 meeting. On Thursday, 7 July, a series of
terrorist bombs exploded on the London transport network. Ben
Macintyre, writing in The Times (9 July 2005) said that: ‘For
months Tony Blair has plotted and fretted over his legacy, only to
have his historical inheritance set in stone in one tumultuous
24-hour period.’ Even at his most stretched and beleaguered,
however, the Blair skills of rhetoric and language were once again
evident as he spoke first at the Gleneagles G8 summit and then
again later in London. This tumultuous week showed the Blair
style of leadership in almost every facet of its range.
Having looked at the leadership style of Tony Blair, we can go on
to compare it with that of Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister
probably most often compared with Blair.

The case of Margaret Thatcher: not ‘to be’

but ‘to do’
Thatcher was without doubt the most dominant peacetime Prime
Minister of the twentieth century. There are many aspects of her lead-
ership style that bear close comparison with Tony Blair. These include:
• The outsider in the party.
• Willingness to shift significantly from the ‘old’ party ideology.
158 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• Dominated Cabinet and willing to be seen apart from it.

• Willingness to lead from the centre as head of a highly person-
alised government.
• Effective use of ‘hiding’ and giving a sense of distance from gov-
ernment when it suited.
• Conviction and moral certainty of a personal political message as
opposed to collegiality and consensus.
Thatcher’s style may be defined in relation to a turning point in
her time in power in a similar way to that outlined above for Blair.
Having won the general election in 1979, Thatcher found herself as
head of a Conservative government that, unlike Blair’s experience in
1997, still contained many of the old Tory ‘grandees’, and a very high
level of unpopularity in the country. By the end of 1981, Thatcher
faced a worsening situation that included rising unemployment and
inflation, a range of serious economic problems and a Cabinet which
was very much split on how best to manage the government. We
should highlight three developments that saved Thatcher from what
appeared to be certain electoral defeat when viewed from the per-
spective of early 1982.
• The Falklands War – where Argentina misread British inten-
tions towards possession of the Falkland Islands in the South
Atlantic and subsequently invaded. Thatcher’s response was to
send a task force to the South Atlantic to take back control of the
islands and restore British sovereignty in the process. The cam-
paign was daring and audacious, and the potential for military dis-
aster at the end of a very long supply line was considerable. British
forces finally recovered the islands, however, in the face of patchy
resistance from ill-armed and ill-trained Argentinian forces. There
was loss of life on both sides, most notably in set-piece attacks on
shipping, including the Argentinian General Belgrano and the British
ships, HMS Sheffield and Sir Galahad, among others. Thatcher’s
reputation was made by the Falklands war in the way that Blair’s
was tarnished by the war in Iraq. For both leaders, the future
became filtered through the events of war. Thatcher became a
tabloid heroine (as opposed to the demonisation of Blair, espe-
cially in the Daily Mirror), and the Conservatives went on to win an
election in 1983 that looked very much beyond them in late 1981.
 The Prime Minister and Style 159

This was the key turning point in the consolidation of Thatcher’s

premiership and reveals much about her leadership style.
• Sacking the ‘wets’ – the ‘wets’ were those members of the
Cabinet between 1979 and 1982 who were not in favour of
Thatcher’s policies and who actively opposed them. Thatcher
moved against the wets – Jim Prior, Ian Gilmour, Peter Walker –
and established a domination over the Cabinet that would not be
challenged until the late 1980s. Once again, the tabloid version of
these events framed Thatcher as determined and focused rather
than tyrannical and antidemocratic.
• The economy – began to recover. High levels of unemployment
associated with the government’s economic policies began to fall
and the high levels of inflation associated with the government
also began to fall. While these developments owed little to the
political skill of Thatcher, her handling of economic issues cer-
tainly added to the media and popular perception of her as
someone determined to ‘have her way’ with the direction and
policy of the government.
Thatcher won three consecutive election victories – 1979, 1983
and 1987. Her grip on the Conservative Party began to weaken
around the late 1980s and was characterised by her flawed decision to
introduce the Poll Tax and her growing resistance to Britain’s place in
the European Union. More long-term observations of her decline also
point to the 1985–6 Westland Helicopters dispute as a point beyond
which Thatcher began to attract the deep-seated resentment in the
party that would eventually result in her being challenged for the lead-
ership by Michael Heseltine in 1990. Although the party declined to
elect Heseltine in her place, Thatcher’s career as Prime Minister was
over and she was replaced by John Major, more of whom later.
Thatcher’s political and leadership style has been much debated.
Here, we can attempt to draw together some of the defining elements
of this style in terms of the impact that it had on the workings of the
political system in Britain. In short, Thatcher’s leadership style:
• Reduced the number of cabinet meetings and cut down on paper-
work. This trend would be accelerated under Blair.
• Made greater use of the kitchen cabinet and ad hoc committees.
• Allowed intervention in departmental affairs.
160 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Box 7.2 Thatcher’s and Blair’s advantages: a comparison

Thatcher Blair
Her extended tenure in office Blair may be approaching a
meant that, by the 1980s, many similar situation. The press is
holders of senior posts in public certainly fond of regular periods
service had been appointed by of criticism over ‘Blair’s cronies’
her and, in a sense, ‘owed’ her
Consistently large Commons Blair has formed three govern-
majorities ments based on large major-
ities. Even the significant dip in
support for the Labour Party in
2005 gave Blair a larger majority
than that enjoyed by Thatcher
in 1979 and Major in 1992
Determined and forthright per- Blair has a similar approach and
sonality – did not suffer fools or personality, albeit less direct and
opposition gladly confrontational than Thatcher
Widespread public support Blair continues to enjoy public
support (even though the 2005
general election saw a govern-
ment returned with a small pro-
portion of the popular vote and
a decline in his personal popu-
larity ratings)
Highly respected abroad Blair has almost outdone
Thatcher on this one. Playing a
key role in the ‘war on terrorism’
and attempting to play a pivotal
role in the EU
A sense of vision Less strident and direct than
Thatcher, but no less convinced
of his sense of duty, moral cer-
tainty and conviction
Weak parliamentary opposition The Conservative opposition to
Blair has been almost as disor-
ganised and disjointed as the
Labour opposition to Thatcher
was throughout the 1980s
 The Prime Minister and Style 161

• Showed the workings of an odd relationship with the convention

of collective cabinet responsibility. Thatcher was prepared to leak
and brief against ministers when it suited her but, in turn, was
equally forceful in demanding adherence to the same doctrine
from her ministers.
• Showed a preparedness to make major policy decisions without
first consulting Cabinet and to keep some major issues off the
cabinet agenda altogether. Examples include support for the
American bombing of Libya in 1986 and excluding trade
unions from organising in the Government Communications
Headquarters at Cheltenham in 1984. Michael Heseltine would
also claim this as the main reason for his resignation from the
Cabinet in 1986.
• Showed a willingness to appoint weak ministers who could then
be easily controlled.
• Had a distinct approach to cabinet meetings that would begin
with her stating her own views. Major took the more conventional
approach of listening first, then summing up at the end.
• Represented a populist appeal to those who had come to feel mar-
ginalised by the 1970s and developed a style that was highly sub-
stantive in content and directly confrontational in approach.

The extent to which Thatcher’s style has been responsible for per-
manent changes to the nature of central government has also been
debated in detail. Thatcher’s period in office has been synonymous
with discussions on the gradual presidentialism of the office of Prime
Minister, yet many writers argue that Thatcher had advantages at her
disposal that other holders of the office did not, and that many of
Thatcher’s strengths were not permanent. McNaughton’s view of
Thatcher’s advantages are summarised in the box below:10
McNaughton goes on to make the point that, in relation to the
factors we have highlighted in the table, these all work essentially in
the short term. As Kavanagh has pointed out, however, what were ini-
tially considered to be Thatcher’s strengths and assets were far from
permanent. We have already outlined how, by 1900, Thatcher had
lost the confidence of many in her Cabinet and her once instinctive
connection with the mass of the electorate had all but evaporated. It
remains to be seen how many of the factors we have compared
162 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

against Blair in Box 7.2 will also disappear, or if Blair will indeed use
his pre-announced retirement from the post to cheat a particular
judgement of history.

The case of John Major: the ‘poor general’

During the Live 8 campaign in the summer of 2005, the former
Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, revealed in an interview
that he regretted not doing enough for Africa during his time in office
(1990–7). It is this type of reflection, taken alongside his record of
government, that does nothing to distract from the generally held
view of the Major style of leadership and politics as one of basic
failure and disappointment. The complete history of the Major years
has yet to be written yet we can begin to offer an overview of assess-
ments of his leadership style and to make some significant compari-
sons with both Thatcher and Blair.
According to Foley, Major’s problems as Prime Minister stemmed
from the circumstances of his accession to office. In the shadow of
Thatcher’s confrontational and intransigent attitude (especially over
the issue of Europe) Major had been the consensus candidate for the
leadership of the Conservative Party. Following the shell-burst of
Thatcherism, Major represented the ‘fair minded integrity and civil
service attributes of being able to assimilate contrasting positions
within a single brief that allowed him to preside through ambiguity and
nuance’ (Foley). In quoting Allan Massie of the Daily Telegraph of
August 1993, however, even after her departure, the tensions implicit
in Thatcher’s removal had not been resolved and it was because of this
impasse that ‘Major’s position became so problematic’. As Massie con-
cluded, ‘few Prime Ministers have had their leadership qualities so per-
sistently questioned’. There were still almost four years of the Major
premiership remaining and, as Foley points out, ‘What was true in 1993
remained equally valid for the remainder of Major’s premiership’.
This was made even more difficult by Major clearly not being Thatcher
in a party that had got used to the Thatcher style, and by the existence
of a subgroup among the Conservatives which, disciple-like, attempted
to continue pushing the Thatcherite agenda and opposing any attempt
to dilute the political message of their lost leader.
 The Prime Minister and Style 163

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

Leadership style is an important factor in the success or failure of any
Prime Minister, and this chapter has outlined why this is the case. It is
important to remember, however, that the style of a Prime Minister
should not become the main focus of study. Leadership style becomes
truly significant only when measured alongside political structures and
the wider political contexts.

Glossary of key terms



Balancer A prime ministerial style as identified by Norton. The balancer

seeks stability in his or her party and in society as a whole.
Egoist Another prime ministerial style identified by Norton. For the egoist,
political power is an end in itself. The egoist seeks to gain power and then
to retain and exercise that power for as long as possible.
Innovator Norton again: for the innovator, power is the means by which
some future goal may be achieved. Most innovators are driven by some
degree of ideological motivation.
Personality The personal characteristics and character traits of the Prime
Minister.
Reformer Norton’s fourth prime ministerial style: the reformer seeks to
achieve power in order to deliver a future goal.
Style The distinct approach to the position of Prime Minister by its holder,
conditioned to an extent by personality.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Explain why ‘style’ is important in studies of the Prime Minister.
Summarise Norton’s four fold typology of prime ministerial styles.
Briefly compare the political and leadership styles of Margaret Thatcher,
John Major and Tony Blair.
Essay questions
‘The style of the Prime Minister is largely determined by his or her party.’
To what extent do you agree?
To what extent is style the most important factor to consider when
assessing a Prime Minister?
How far would you agree with the claim that Blair’s style sets him apart
from other post-war Prime Ministers?
 164 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Discuss the importance of prime ministerial style.

Revision task
Research the political style of Tony Blair and produce a ‘style profile’ that
shows his similarities and differences with other recent Prime Ministers.

 Helpful websites
www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

 Suggestions for further reading

Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language? (Routledge).
Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).
Foley, M. (2002) Major, Blair and a Conflict of Leadership: Collision Course
(Manchester University Press).
Heywood, A. (1997) Politics (Macmillan).
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review, vol. 11.1,
September 2001.
Mandelson, P. and Liddle, R. (1996) The Blair Revolution (Politico’s).
McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).
Norton, P. (1987) ‘Prime ministerial Power: Framework for Analysis’,
Teaching Politics, vol. 16.3, September 1987.
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).
Seldon, A. (2004) Blair (Free Press).
CHAPTER 8

The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief?

Contents
Introduction 166
Prime ministerial government 167
Presidential government 171
Comparing the Prime Minister and the President 172
President or Prime Minister? The debate 172

Overview
This chapter will address the key question – to what extent does a British
‘President’ now occupy Number 10 Downing Street? The question
acknowledges the dissatisfaction with two earlier claims. The first being that
the British system of government is largely organised around the collective
decisions of the Cabinet, while the second claims that collective
government by the Cabinet has been replaced by prime ministerial
government. To argue that the Prime Minister is now a President is to move
the debate on and to claim that what we are now able to observe comprises
features in the powers of the Prime Minister that make him/her look more
like a European- or American-type President.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• An overview of the debate surrounding the issue of prime ministerial versus
presidential government
• We shall recap on the growing power of the British Prime Minister and
provide examples from the prime ministerial careers of Margaret Thatcher
and Tony Blair
• The arguments for and against presidentialism will be outlined, as will the
key arguments of Michael Foley.
166 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Introduction
It cannot be a coincidence that the debate surrounding the powers of
the Prime Minister should be at its most invigorating when a leader
with a degree of charisma and a sizeable Commons majority occu-
pies the post. Harold Wilson after 1964, Margaret Thatcher for most
of the 1980s, and Tony Blair since 1997 – all have governed with dis-
tinctive styles and approaches that encourage reappraisals of those
powers held by the Prime Minister. In the previous chapters, we set
out the roles and powers of the Prime Minister and highlighted the
sources of this prime ministerial power. We also recapped on the
somewhat ‘loose’ nature of constitutional restraint on these powers.
These are issues worth keeping in mind when entering the ‘Prime
Minister versus President’ debate.

The growing powers of the Prime Minister

It is difficult to argue against the claim that the British Prime Minister
now has at his or her disposal more power than was the case in the
immediate post-war era, and that these powers are both consequence
and cause of the changing nature of the British cabinet system.
The basic powers of the Prime Minister, which have evolved since
the late eighteenth century, are fundamentally the same as they ever
were. What has changed, however, is the nature of the exercise of
these powers and, in particular, the increased concentration of power
in the office of the Prime Minister and subsequent ‘systems of per-
sonal rule’, as highlighted by critics of these developments. The arena
in which these powers are exercised has also changed dramatically
and has had a huge impact on the role of the Prime Minister. These
changes may be summarised as:

• The development of increasingly complex government machinery.

• Mass and near-instant global communication.
• The impact of the internet and the world wide web.
• A largely media-driven public interaction with politics.
• A growing sense of apathy and disengagement among the elec-
torate.
• The general decline in ideology-based politics.
• The end of the Cold War.
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 167

• The rise to power of an entirely post-war political establishment.

• A relatively stable economy.
These are all changes and developments that point to a ‘new’ kind of
politics that the office of the Prime Minister has had to evolve along-
side. The questions relating to prime ministerial power have been
debated since the 1960s and are particularly relevant when applied to
Blair. In seeking to examine the ‘Prime Minister/President’, issue it
may by useful to begin the discussion by setting out exactly what it is
we mean when we use the phrase ‘prime ministerial government’

Prime ministerial government

For a system to be described as prime ministerial, there are eight
key features that need to be present. The Prime Minister:
• Dominates the policy-making process.
• Takes responsibility for all key policy decisions.
• Will dominate the Cabinet.
• Will determine the outcome of the process of collective responsi-
bility.
• Will claim a separate source of authority from party and elec-
torate and not rely exclusively on Parliament.
• Will act as the principal spokesperson for the government and will
be treated as the ultimate interpreter of government policy.
• Will clear all key decisions made by cabinet ministers.
• Will make good use of prerogative powers that allow him or her
to act as head of state. This is especially relevant to foreign policy,
defence and security which tend to be personal powers of the
Prime Minister and subject to few controls.
To develop this further, Moran offers a straightforward set of
points in favour and against the suggestion that prime ministerial
government now exists. These are summarised in Table 8.1.1
When they begin to question whether prime ministerial govern-
ment still exists, other writers tend to distinguish between the short-
term factors which determine how dominant the individual office
holder is, and the long-term factors which may lead to the office itself
(whoever holds it) becoming more important. It will be useful to have
168 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Table 8.1 Evidence for and against prime ministerial

government

Evidence FOR Evidence AGAINST

• The value of prime ministerial • Patronage is too vast –

patronage. appointments can be made
• Prime Minister chooses only on the advice of others.
ministers. • There are always rivals in
• Prime Minister now dominates Cabinet.
modern elections. • If the next election victory is
• Prime Ministers can attempt to in doubt, a Prime Minister
exercise influence across all of will not be able to control
government, not just a all of the Cabinet.
department. • The resources available to a
• The Prime Minister is now the Prime Minister for him/her
key figure in ensuring ‘joined-up’ to attempt to oversee all
government. government are few.
• The Prime Minister is the key • World events may be
figurehead of government. dramatic yet can become
troublesome and allow a
rival to hijack the domestic
agenda.

an overview of the positions of writers, such as Seldon and Hennessy,2

in relation to these long-and short-term factors.

Short-term factors
• The size of the parliamentary majority provides a sense of
security and allows domination of Parliament. It also imparts
huge personal authority. Blair’s two huge majorities and
Thatcher’s wins in 1983 and 1987 gave both leaders a big advan-
tage. Jim Callaghan and John Major were less fortunate and there-
fore appeared weak.
• The state of the ruling party can make opposition seem
insignificant if the party is united. To challenge the Prime
Minister, ambitious colleagues need some degree of dissent in the
party. Blair’s cabinets have been largely compliant. In contrast,
between 1979 and 1982, Thatcher had major problems with
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 169

important factions in the party. Only her personal stature and

victory in the Falklands War enabled her to triumph.
• The personal popularity of the leader is a very important
factor. Until the war in Iraq began to have a serious impact on his
personal ratings, Blair enjoyed this particular advantage up to
2001/2 (and may do so again) whilst Thatcher enjoyed high levels
of popularity from across significantly large cross-sections of
classes in Britain.
• Events and luck – factors no Prime Minister can truly claim to
control. For most of the time, Blair has been a ‘lucky’ Prime
Minister. Labour inherited a mostly robust economy that has con-
tinued to remain stable, and he has faced a Conservative Party
that has had major problems reinventing itself. His foreign and
diplomatic policies, however, have been a mixed blessings. Initial
successes in Northern Ireland and a clear ‘moral’ leadership in the
Balkans were topped by a masterly political performance in the
immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks. His policy
towards Iraq and the ‘war on terrorism’ have, however, had nega-
tive effects on his personal ratings, and have made it difficult for
him to re-establish a clear domestic agenda. The terrorist attacks
on London in July 2005 allowed Blair to play to his strengths as a
national leader, however. By comparison, after 1991, Major stag-
gered from one policy disaster to another whereas Thatcher
enjoyed substantial ‘luck’ at a critical point in her premiership in
the form of the Falklands War.
It is important to note that none of the factors discussed here is what
we could describe as ‘permanent’. They may, indeed, have an impact
on the standing and style of a Prime Minister, yet remain, as we have
shown, short term and therefore difficult to build into the key debate.
To get to a closer understanding of what constitutes prime minis-
terial government, we need to examine the long-term factors that
may have brought about permanent changes in how a Prime Minister
governs. McNaugton suggests there are five of these factors to con-
sider:3
• The marginalisation of the Cabinet. This is a theme we have
already discussed at length. To what extent has the nature of
the relationship between the Cabinet and the Prime Minister
170 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

changed? To what extent is the Cabinet still the arena for the major
policy decisions? Critics of prime ministerial power point to short
and infrequent meetings as just two examples from many that illus-
trate the reduced circumstances of cabinet government in Britain.
• Media and public perceptions. The key point to make here
is that the public, the media, pressure groups and the wider polit-
ical community, Parliament and Whitehall, have fundamentally
changed their perceptions of the Prime Minister. The body of
evidence is growing – especially the data collected from focus
groups and opinion polls – that the Prime Minister is increasingly
looked upon as the single representative of the government as a
whole and, in some cases, of the state. In other words, as a
President.
• Institutional changes. These changes are most likely to
include changes and reforms to the central government machin-
ery and administration. We have already made a case for the
changed role of the Cabinet Office and the example fits this factor
particularly well. We have noted that the size of the Cabinet
Office has doubled under Blair, and that it has become much more
of a personal resource for the Prime Minister rather than for the
Cabinet. We have also discussed at length the increased use of spe-
cialist and personal advisers. Here again, we have evidence of
significant and permanent institutional changes that appear to
give major advantages to the Prime Minister.
• External factors. This argument revisits the Richard Rose
theory outlined in Chapter 5. Closer integration with the European
Union may well have placed the Prime Minister more firmly at the
centre of foreign relations. Similarly, Britain’s increased role in
world affairs has thrust the Prime Minister increasingly into the
limelight of the world’s media. This is particularly relevant to Tony
Blair who has had a higher foreign profile than most recent Prime
Ministers.
• Constitutional changes. As far as Blair is concerned, this
may be one area, on paper at least, where the New Labour
reforms have actually reduced the influence of the Prime Minister.
Devolution has certainly removed some power from central gov-
ernment, while the enhanced authority of the reformed House of
Lords has caused parliamentary difficulties for Blair.
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 171

Having established a broad definition of prime ministerial gov-

ernment, it will be useful to do something similar with the concept of
presidential government.

Presidential government
Nigel Jackson offers a starting point for this discussion by listing seven
key factors that could currently be used to support the presidential
government debate.4 According to Jackson, the Prime Minister:
• Is becoming more detached from government, Parliament and the
party organisation.
• Increasingly assumes a ‘detached’ role as the leader of the nation.
• Has significantly increased the Number 10 staff in recent years.
• Has downgraded cabinet meetings and cabinet government in
general.
• Has increased his/her ‘control style’.
• Has contributed to the politicisation of the Civil Service.
• Shows a preference for taking decisions alone or in bilateral
meetings.
Jackson argues that the last five of these factors have an increased
significance when applied to Blair.
It is inevitable that the use of the word ‘President’ in this context
invites direct comparison with the American system rather than with
any general notion of presidential government. It will therefore be
useful to have a checklist of key strengths of the American President
to compare with the current position of the British Prime Minister.
There are six key strengths enjoyed by the American President that
we could summarise here.
• The President is elected directly by the people, and authority is
drawn from the people.
• It is not necessary for the President to depend upon the constant
support of the legislature to survive in office. The President can
afford to be defeated in Congress yet will not be expected to resign.
• The President is head of state and head of government, and can
play the roles against each other, especially in appeals directly to
the electorate. Here, the President can claim to represent the
172 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

nation as a whole while other government leaders are seen as par-

tisan politicians who operate only for partisan interests.
• Over 4,000 officials are appointed by the President at the start of
the administration, this represents enormous powers of patronage.
• A far greater bureaucracy than that available to the British Prime
Minister supports the President.
• The American media allow the President direct access and can be
used on demand to speak to and for the nation.

Similar to the constraints on prime ministerial power outlined earlier,

it is important to note three significant restrictions on the powers
of the American President. These include working under a strict
Constitution as part of a system of checks and balances in a
fixed term of four years restricted to two terms in office.

Comparing the Prime Minister and the President

When we compare the respective powers and strengths of the
President of the United States and the British Prime Minister, it
becomes clear that there are similarities and differences (see Box 8.1).
The holders of both offices clearly enjoy substantial powers of
patronage, control of the media, policy-making support and the
ability/tendency to act as a national leader. The President is officially
head of state, however, and can claim direct authority from the
people, he or she will not be removed from office other than for mis-
conduct. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, does not operate
under the same built-in political checks as the President nor does the
British system bind the Prime Minister within a rigid set of constitu-
tional constraints. Therefore, based on a simple UK/US comparison,
it would appear that there are several almost ‘permanent’ differences
that prevent the British Prime Minister becoming an American-style
president, yet the debate remains. The focus of this chapter can now
switch to a detailed examination of this debate.

President or Prime Minister? The debate

With its modern origins in discussions of Thatcher’s political style
from 1979 to 1990, this is not a new debate. By the end of her time
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 173

Box 8.1 Comparison of the Prime Minister and

the President

Similarities Differences
• More Patronage • President is also the head
of state
• Better use of the media • President has authority
directly from the people
• More policy-making support • President cannot be moved
from the legislature except
for misconduct
• Tendency to appear as the • President’s popularity does
national leader not depend on support of his
or her party
• President has to work with
in-built political checks
• President operates within
constitutional constraints

in power, Thatcher had sacked a lot of ministers, and an equally large

number had felt the need to resign. The memoirs and autobiogra-
phies of many former ministers were highly critical of the Thatcher
style. The sacked and the reshuffled contributed to a first draft of
history mostly as critics of a method of government that had sub-
verted collective cabinet decision-making. This testimony is flawed on
the grounds that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ The dismissals
of James Prior and Ian Gilmour, and the resignations of Heseltine,
Howe and Lawson were rancorous and bitter affairs, and the last act
of ‘revenge’ lay ultimately in the pens of these fallen ministers. In this
debate, the point to stress about Thatcher is that the style of leader-
ship may have been more striking than the substance of any real insti-
tutional change. As we have already stressed elsewhere, especially in
Chapter 7, the style of the Prime Minister is an important factor that
cannot be overlooked. The debate on this particular issue is rich and
lively, and we cannot hope to present all the various theories and com-
peting arguments here but can offer a succinct overview of the crucial
writers and their opinions. These will include Burch, Jones, Johnson,
174 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Kavanagh and Seldon, and Hennessy. Particular attention will be

paid to the work of Michael Foley.

Peter Hennessy5
Hennessy is cautious in his discussion of the power of the Prime
Minister, and he does not believe we should make the assumption that
this power will inevitably increase and that we are observing a per-
manent move from prime ministerial to presidential government. For
writers like Hennessy, the office of Prime Minister is essentially
flexible and malleable and will be shaped by individual premiers
according to how he or she wishes. Occasionally, these changes look
so dramatic that observers jump to the conclusion that they must
therefore be permanent. This is simply not the case; there will always
be forces at work in the British political system that will prevent any
Prime Minister from establishing complete dominance over it.
In his most recent study, Hennessy does not seek to deny that, in
Thatcher and Blair, we have witnessed two ‘remarkable’ holders of
the office who have succeeded in stretching the potential of that office
about as far as it will go. Thatcher and Blair have been ‘commanders’
of the system, with decisive leadership styles that have inevitably been
described as ‘presidential’. Does this therefore mean that the office of
Prime Minister has changed fundamentally? Hennessy thinks that
this is not the case. He makes several points to support his argument:

• Strong and dominant leaders are nothing new. Peel, Gladstone,

Lloyd George and Churchill all dominated the system. The system
has also had periods, however, where it has ‘relaxed’ during the
terms of Prime Ministers such as John Major.
• Britain is a constitutional monarchy, and we shouldn’t forget it.
The Prime Minister is not the head of state and can never entirely
rely on the absolute loyalty of the political community.
• Britain is also a parliamentary democracy. Political authority flows
through Parliament and, as long as it does so, that body will exer-
cise ultimate control over prime ministerial power.
• Finally, Britain remains an open, pluralist society. The highly cen-
tralised ‘command model’ of prime ministerial government does
not, therefore, accord with the nature of the political culture. For
Hennessy, power is an extremely diffuse concept and cannot be
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 175

readily captured by the holder of one office on a long-term basis.

We should therefore guard against the easy temptation to accept
that the current trends in prime ministerial government are
permanent.

Martin Burch6
Burch is also sceptical about the notion of a presidential Prime
Minister even though his 1990 study is restricted to an analysis of
Thatcher. His conclusions remain valid nevertheless. In a way similar
to Hennessy, he notes that there are practical restrictions on the Prime
Minister’s formal power to hire and fire ministers, there are limits on
the involvement of a Prime Minister in the initiation of policy; and
there are constraints on the capacity of the Prime Minister to control
government business.

George Jones7
Again, the two studies by Jones considerably predate Blair. His con-
clusions remain significant in their analysis of Thatcher, hpwever.
Jones is similar to Hennessy in that he does not necessarily believe that
the changes to prime ministerial power are permanent. He uses the
metaphor of an elastic band to illustrate his argument that a Prime
Minister may stretch the powers of the office well beyond that which
would usually be considered ‘normal’. In the same way that an elastic
band stretched to its limits will exhibit considerable tensions to return
to an unstretched state, however, then so the powers of the Prime
Minister when distorted by individuals, such as Margaret Thatcher,
will naturally seek to ‘snap back’. When the band ‘snapped back’ on
Thatcher in 1990, it was forceful enough to remove her from office.
How much tension is the elastic band under during Blair’s third
administration? Jones concedes that Prime Ministers can be in a pow-
erful position, but only so long as they can carry their colleagues with
them – they are only as strong as their colleagues allow them to be.
The theory is underlined by the position of John Major who suffered
from a small parliamentary majority, a divided party and a press that
branded him as weak and dithering. It is worth noting that the Major
premiership caused the debate on the ‘presidential’ Prime Minister to
subside until Blair took power on the back of a huge majority and a
lively and energetic leadership style.
176 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Dennis Kavanagh8
We spoke earlier of the ‘long-term’ factors that have brought about
permanent changes in the way the Prime Minister exercises power. In
Seldon’s The Blair Effect Kavanagh, saw Blair as early as 2000 as
having already made a long-term impact on the office of Prime
Minister. He sees Blair as a leader who has demanded a reanimation
of the office in a way that would have an impact the length and
breadth of Whitehall. Kavanagh also argues that Blair has set the bar
for his successors to the extent that they are likely to wish to emulate
a number of his practices. Some of the practices used by Blair may
well be part of a long-term trend but some are new.
Blair’s impact will be permanent. He will leave his mark to a
greater extent than other powerful Prime Ministers who came before
him. Lloyd George, for instance, created the Cabinet Office and the
system of cabinet committees, and they strengthened his position.
The innovations, however, did not survive him. Even Thatcher, with
her new style of dominant leadership, left little lasting effect, as the
whole basis of her approach was constructed around her own per-
sonality. When she went, then so did the façade of her style, and it was
impossible to hand such a thing to any successor, whoever that may
have been. Kavanagh believes that Blair’s impact will be permanent
for two main reasons:

• The Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Private Office have
seen a dramatic growth under Blair. As we have already noted,
Blair has a Prime Minister’s Department, all that is missing is the
formal title. The Policy Unit has grown, special advisers recruited
and a whole plethora of units and commissions has been hitched
to Number 10 in a confusing and Byzantine manner. The point is,
all of them report to Blair as Prime Minister. He now has a wide
range of individuals and bodies that feed policy advice to him.
Where does this leave the Cabinet?
• There has been a major change in Blair’s relationship with other
bodies in the political centre. The party is no longer as important
as it once was, and Blair has shown how effectively a leader can
control his own party. The importance of Parliament in the system,
especially the Commons, has declined while the Cabinet is seen as
a body of subordinates rather than as political colleagues. Only
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 177

Gordon Brown and his team at the Treasury give Blair pause for
thought in this respect. Finally the Civil Service has been brought
under control. Special advisers have had an impact here alongside
Blair’s determination to influence senior appointments.
To summarise the two points being made by Kavanagh: the tradi-
tional limitations of prime ministerial power have declined.
As far as the future is concerned, Kavanagh believes that Blair’s
‘system’ will last. It is highly unlikely that successors will dismantle a
system designed to give the Prime Minister so much dominance, and
it will therefore endure. Blair has, concludes Kavanagh, fashioned a
stronger role for the Prime Minister in the British system, and that this
has been due partly to his own ideas about effective political leader-
ship and partly by trends in politics and media coverage. On a final
note of caution, Kavanagh reminds us of the potential for hubris
associated with such power. As the Prime Minister becomes increas-
ingly separated from the Cabinet, the ruling party and Parliament, it
will be the Prime Minister who will be left shouldering the blame if
things go wrong. The greater the Prime Minister, the greater the final
fall from grace. If this happens to Blair, it will not be a unique event
and will stand alongside the downfall of Thatcher in 1990 as an
example of the down side of such concentration of power.

Michael Foley9
Foley’s initial analysis is again dominated by Thatcher, although his
first study, published in 1994, was updated in much more detail in
2000 with the publication of The British Presidency which focuses in
great detail on Blair and the ‘politics of public leadership’.
In his original analysis, Foley has argued that some features of the
American presidency may be employed to analyse some of the
changes in the role of the Prime Minister which have taken place
since the late 1970s. He isolates four features of the American presi-
dency which, he claims, have been adopted by British Prime
Ministers. We will summarise these four features in Box 8.2:
Blair fits neatly into this analysis:
• Spatial leadership was displayed early in his career as Prime
Minister when he distanced himself from political corruption
by Labour MPs and some Labour councils. Both were quickly
178 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Box 8.2 Michael Foley on the British presidency (1994)

Spatial leadership Cult of the outsider

This term refers to the attempts This is the distance claimed by
made by American Presidents either President or Prime
to distance themselves polit- Minister from the political
ically from the presidency when establishment. Nixon, Carter,
it is expedient to do so. Foley Reagan and Clinton in the
uses Major’s Citizen’s Charter United States, and every
as a good example of the way British Prime Minister since
in which this idea has been Callaghan have claimed to be
adopted in the UK. By publicly outsiders and therefore not to
criticising bureaucratic ele- have the vested interest
ments of government, Major of the government insider.
gave the impression that he Thatcher was particularly adept
was on the side of the ordinary at this in the way she courted
citizen, battling against oppres- the rank and file of her party
sive bureaucracy. and dealt in populist politics
that circumvented party élites
and Whitehall.

Public leadership The personal factor

This particular aspect of the In both the United States and
thesis is best seen when the Britain an integrated image of a
President/Prime Minister party and its programme is now
appeals for support directly being routed through its leader.
over the head of Congress/ In this way, differences between
Parliament. Foley argues that parties tend to become person-
television has become crucial to alised. It is assumed that the
this, and has allowed the leader personal qualities of the Prime
to devep a relationship with the Minister and other leaders are
public that is now central and central to public evaluations of
decisive. political leadership and perfor-
mance.

disowned before any case had been proved against anyone involved.
He has also shown similar inclinations in his dealings with the trade
union movement and other symbols of Labour’s socialist past.
• Blair has never been anything else than an outsider in the party he
leads. He has no family connection and served no student appren-
ticeship in the Labour Party. His attitude to Labour’s history and
to sacred cows, such as Clause IV, provides further evidence of this
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 179

tendency. The success of this approach has been carried through

into government.
• In terms of public leadership and the use of the media, Blair, the
consummate actor, provides us with countless examples of his
astute handling of the modern media. His speeches on the death
of Princess Diana and his responses to terrorist attacks in New
York and London showed a clear skill in projecting himself as the
national expression of popular concern and the public interest.
• Blair has also made much of his personal qualities – youth (rela-
tively, in 1997), family man, ‘decent’, moral and clearly Christian.
Foley also uses the American President, Ronald Reagan, as well as
Margaret Thatcher to illustrate his arguments, particularly on spatial
leadership. Reagan was able to place himself ‘outside’ the system
when Congress attempted to push through unpopular policies, while
Thatcher’s credentials as a true political ‘outsider’ were even more
noticeable.
Foley is attempting here to cut us away from the old debate about
cabinet versus prime ministerial government. To replace this idea, he
is asking us to consider the possibility that something completely new
is evolving.
If the modern Prime Minister is indeed ‘separate’ from his/her
Cabinet, it does not imply a ‘dominance’ of Cabinet, or a simple shift
in the balance of power. This is a brand-new style of leadership.
We have returned to our earlier distinctions regarding the sub-
stance of style. The British Prime Minister may now exhibit a polit-
ical style of leadership that looks essentially presidential, but this does
not mean that the British Prime Minister is becoming an American-
style president. The constitutional differences between Britain and
the United States are too great for that. Rather, Foley suggests: ‘ The
British Prime Minister has, to all intent and purposes, turned, not into
a British version of the American President, but into an authentically
British President.’

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

This chapter has outlined several of the essential debates relevant to
the discussion of the ‘presidentialism’ of the British Prime Minister.
 180 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

This is a very complex and fluid debate. This chapter has provided only
an overview of the essential arguments. Wider reading here is
important to gain a more detailed understanding. Foley, in particular, is
a ‘must read’.
The debate can often appear simplistic, especially when
straightforward comparisons are made between the British Prime
Minister and the American President. In many ways, such a
comparison is meaningless, given the very different natures of the two
systems of government. Instead, we would do well to come away from
this debate with the recognition that there is clearly a process of
change taking place that may well be producing a British ‘President’
but not an ‘American British President’.
The future of prime ministerial styles beyond Blair will obviously add
much to this discussion. Will the system post-Blair be as
fundamentally changed as writers like Kavanagh have suggested, or
will the more cautious views of Hennessy, Burch and Jones be played
out in a move away from prime ministerial government? Or will a
Gordon Brown (or whoever) premiership slip neatly into the new and
successful leadership style as outlined by Foley?

Glossary of key terms



Presidentialism The process some observers claim to detect in the

evolution of the British Prime Minister into something approaching an
American-style president.
Prime ministerial government The system of government with a directly
elected individual as head of government.
Spatial leadership This term refers to the attempts made by American
Presidents to distance themselves politically from the presidency when it
is expedient to do so.

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Explain the essential features of presidential government.
Explain the essential details of prime ministerial government.
Briefly explain the concept of spatial leadership.
Essay questions
‘Tony Blair is a President.’ Discuss.
How far would you agree with the suggestion that the Prime Minister has
presidential-type powers?
 The Prime Minister: Hail to the Chief? 181

‘A British President is not a welcome development.’ Discuss.

Revision tasks
Monitor the news for two weeks. Make a list of actions carried out by the
British Prime Minister and the American President. How many of the
actions carried out by one could equally be carried out by the other? Plot
your findings on an ‘example table’ and be sure to explain your
judgements.
Design and produce a revision chart that shows the key arguments
surrounding the ‘Prime Minister as President’ debate.

 Helpful websites

www.number10.gov.uk/
www.direct.gov.uk/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
http://news.bbc.co.uk
The BBC website is particularly good for tracking the various changes in
central government.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk
An excellent website for political analysis and for tracking this particular
debate.
www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP
For American comparisons.

 Suggestions for further reading

Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).

Foley, M. (2002) Major, Blair and a Conflict of Leadership: Collision Course
(Manchester University Press).
Hennessy, P. (2000) The Prime Minister (Allen Lane).
Jackson, N. (2003) ‘The Blair Style – Presidential, Bilateral or Trilateral
Government?’, Talking Politics, vol. 15.3, January 2003.
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Tony Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review,
vol. 11.1, September 2001.
182 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government

(Hodder).
McNaughton, N. (2002) ‘Prime Ministerial Government’, Talking Politics,
September 2002.
Moran, M. (2005) Politics and Governance in the UK (Palgrave).
Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair, Prime Minister (Time Warner).
Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).
Seldon, A. (ed.) (2001) The Blair Effect (Little, Brown).
Seldon, A. (2004) Blair (Free Press).
CHAPTER 9

The Core Executive

Contents
The core executive: definitions 184
The core executive: a useful model 185
The relationship of the key players in the core 188
How the core executive works 194
Criticisms of the core executive 200
Concluding points 202

Overview
The concept of a ‘core executive’ has been developed as a way to broaden
and expand analysis of executive power beyond discussions based around
the traditional Cabinet/Prime Minister relationship. Building on the issues
raised in the previous chapters regarding the nature of prime ministerial
power and style, we can now go on to expand and conclude our analysis to
include a detailed discussion on the issue of the core executive in British
politics. By including this debate into our broad study of executive power
we will be more able to arrive at detailed conclusions as to the true nature
of executive power as it exists in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Key issues to be covered in this chapter

• Definitions and theories of the nature of core executives
• The nature of Prime Minister/civil servant relationships in a core executive
and the changing context of prime ministerial influence
• How the core executive works and how it has evolved
• Criticisms of the core executive
184 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

The core executive: definitions

At its most basic, the term ‘core executive’ refers to the key institu-
tions at the very centre of government. The core executive consists of
a large and variable number of players that includes the Prime
Minister, the Cabinet and its committees, the Prime Minister’s Office
and the Cabinet Office. It also includes large co-ordinating depart-
ments, such as the government’s law officers, the security and intelli-
gence services and the Treasury.
One of the first steps towards constructing a core executive model
was produced in 1990 in a very influential article by Dunleavy and
Rhodes that appeared in the journal Public Administration.1 The article
provides us with a detailed definition that stresses the importance of
the concept of the core executive and also provides a good starting
point from which to study, it. The two writers set the scene for our
study of the core executive by giving us a clear definition:
• The core executive refers to all the organisations and procedures
that co-ordinate central government and function as final arbiters
of conflict between different parts of the government machine.
• The core executive is the heart of the machine and covers a
complex web of institutions, networks and practices surrounding
the Prime Minister, Cabinet, cabinet committees and their official
counterparts, and less formalised ministerial ‘clubs’ or meetings,
bilateral negotiations and interdepartmental committees.
• The core executive also includes co-ordinating departments.
These include: the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, the Foreign
Office, the law officers and security and intelligence services.
In explaining the importance of his definition, Rhodes argues that
the label ‘cabinet government’ as the overarching term for some of
these institutions and practices is both inadequate and confusing
because it does not describe accurately the effective mechanisms for
achieving co-ordination. The core executive argument does not reha-
bilitate the Cabinet in any way from the criticisms we have already
levelled at it. As Rhodes has stressed in a later work: ‘At best, it is con-
tentious and, at worst, seriously misleading to assert the primacy of
the Cabinet among organisations and mechanisms at the heart of the
machine.’2
 The Core Executive 185

The core executive: a useful model

As a working model, the core executive is useful to all students and
observers of the British political system as it extends analysis beyond
the axis of Cabinet and Prime Minister and acknowledges the exist-
ence of a larger and less fixed network of power relationships that
embraces Westminster, Whitehall and key players outside of these
two traditional key areas of power and influence. By embracing and
engaging with the concept of a core executive, we allow ourselves a
different dimension on the traditional triangular debate of prime
ministerial, presidential and cabinet power.
As we have already suggested, the concept of the core executive
has been developed by political scientists in response to the endlessly
frustrating debate on the issue of prime ministerial versus cabinet
government. Rather than see the Cabinet and Prime Minister
engaged in a seemingly endless struggle for political supremacy, the
idea of a core executive offers us the idea that, in fact, both institu-
tions are embedded in a network of relations with other influential
bodies and people. It is the peak, or apex, of this power network that
is labelled the ‘core executive’.
We have already seen how writers such as Dunleavy and Rhodes
have focused on the notion of a core executive as a way out of the
impasse on prime ministerial versus cabinet government. Ignited ini-
tially by Bagehot in the 1860s and thereafter stoked occasionally by
influential works, such as a Richard Crossman’s 1960s introduction
to Bagehot, and later works such as the highly influential ‘British
Cabinet’ by John Mackintosh3, the debate has rumbled on in its
current form for the best part of fifty years. At the centre of the core
executive model is the belief that that the Prime Minister versus
Cabinet argument no longer fits the reality of modern politics. There
are two key reasons why this is the case:

• The focus on Prime Minister and Cabinet is too narrow and there-
fore ignores the range of institutions and players within the core
executive that have a central role in the policy-making process.
• The traditional debate is based on a misunderstanding. Past
observers have misjudged and misinterpreted the connections
between the various actors and institutions within the core executive
186 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

and have therefore failed to recognise that the operation of the core
executive is not about the Prime Minister commanding players but
about building alliances, exchanging resources and adapting to pre-
vailing circumstances. More recently, Rhodes has argued that the
traditional debate is a product of academic focus on Westminster
and Whitehall, where the Prime Minister is ‘indeed prime’.4
The debate around the notion of a core executive has been further
developed in recent years by writers such as Richards, Smith and
Marsh.5 The central argument remains: power belongs neither to the
Cabinet nor to the Prime Minister. Instead, political power is fluid. It
develops in the complex web of relationships within central govern-
ment and, if we are truly to understand power in the core executive,
then we need to be completely analytical in our approach. If we are
to summarise the arguments of one particular writer on this issue, we
are able to define the core executive approach in nine key points:6
• It is wrong to assume that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet
have all the resources of central government. All the various
individuals and groups in the core executive bring something to
the table; all of them have resources at their disposal that can
make them formidable opponents of the Prime Minister and
his/her Cabinet.
• The second part of the approach is all about the goals of every
player in the core. If any one person or any group is to achieve
their goals, then they must co-operate to exchange resources. It is
virtually impossible for any one player in the core executive to
make policy separately.
• If we approach the debate in terms of prime ministerial, presiden-
tial or cabinet government, we are dealing with flawed concepts
that are irrelevant. The reason for this is that power in the core
executive is based on dependence, not command. This means
that the key players are locked into the system in such a way that
none of them can entirely command or direct the system; they all
depend on one another to ensure that the system can actually work.
• The concept of dependence is crucially important to understand-
ing the core executive. What we need to identify are the structures
of dependence: these are the routes and processes that everyone
in the core uses in order to exchange resources with one another.
 The Core Executive 187

• Observers claim that these structures of independence are based

on networks within the core that overlap one another. Occasion-
ally, this can be a problem for the smooth running of the core
because these networks can often be based on loose and informal
structures that can lead to fragmentation, where not everyone
is entirely clear of the roles and responsibilities of all the other
players. This fragmentation and uncertainty over territory and
responsibility can sometimes lead to conflict.
• Some of the key players in the core are what we refer to as
resource rich: this means that they do not need to struggle for
attention or resources in the core. A good example of a current key
player who is resource rich would be Tony Blair. As we have
already seen, as Prime Minister he has made substantial changes
to the organisation of Number 10 (in particular the Cabinet
Office) which have left him even more resource rich than is usually
the case for Prime Ministers. Another example would be Gordon
Brown. As Chancellor, Brown has the multitude of resources of the
Treasury machine at his disposal as well as, in the words of one
political journalist, ‘sovereignty in the economics sphere’ following
the infamous Granita restaurant meal in May 1994.7 The other big
players in the Cabinet must also be considered resource rich. In the
core executive, however, even these powerful individuals with
access to significant resources are dependent on other players to
achieve their goals. Government that works through a core execu-
tive is therefore all about the construction of alliances and mutu-
ally beneficial relationships rather than about command.
• All the players in a core executive operate within a clearly struc-
tured arena or territory. By this we mean that everyone has a place
in an executive that is organised and arranged around clearly
defined structures. This approach is the opposite of those tradi-
tional approaches that have tended to overemphasise the signifi-
cance of personality.
• Personality cannot change the nature and form of the core execu-
tive. Prime Ministers, officials and ministers are bound by the
structures of external organisation and have a fairly clear idea of
the rules by which the government ‘game’ is played. They will also
be aware of the structure and nature of the external institutions
and players which whom they must interact. Strong personalities
188 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

may therefore come and go but the essential nature of the core
executive will remain the same.
• The context of any political or economic situation will decide the
degree of dependence that the players in the core will enjoy.
Actors will become more or less dependent in line with these con-
texts. Gordon Brown, for instance, has managed a relatively suc-
cessful economy since becoming Chancellor in 1997. This
economic success, coupled with the resources we spoke of earlier
(and the apparent ‘deal’ with Blair) give him considerable politi-
cal freedom. Similarly, a Prime Minister buoyed up by election vic-
tories and large majorities will enjoy significant room for
manoeuvre and independence. In the face of an economic down-
turn and/or a very poor election showing, however, both Prime
Minister and Chancellor would be required to become much
more dependent on support from the other key players in the core,
especially from the rest of the Cabinet.

The core executive is, for all the reasons listed above, fragmented
and very difficult to co-ordinate. It should also be clear that it is the
relationships between the key players, rather than the personalities of
those involved, that frame the nature of the workings of central gov-
ernment. For those academics who study the core executive in detail,
it is the relationships we have already referred to that make the prime
ministerial/presidential-government debate redundant. This debate,
they argue, asks the wrong questions and actually moves us further
away from any clear understanding of how central government really
works. Smith (in Holliday) sets out the six key questions which students
of central government should be asking when they analyse the rela-
tionships in the core.8 We can summarise them in the following box:
Having established what is a central fact regarding the crucial
nature of relationships in the core, we can now move on to look at
them in much more detail.

The relationship of the key players in the core

The Prime Minister
We should remind ourselves that, whatever model we choose to use
in our analysis of the machinery of government, the Prime Minister
 The Core Executive 189

Box 9.1 Relations in the core: the key questions

The Prime Minister and • How would you define the

cabinet ministers relationships that Prime
Ministers
develop with colleagues?
• How are Prime Ministers and
ministers able to build alliances
with other players in the core?
• How quickly, why and with what
effect do these alliances
change?
Whitehall • How would you define the
networks established between
the Prime Minister, ministers and
senior civil servants?
• How far does Whitehall structure
the nature of the relationships
between ministers and civil
servants?
The wider political context • How are all the relationships in
the core influenced by events in
the wider political context?

is the head of the government and, as such, has major resources at his
or her disposal. In Chapter 5 we examined the nature of prime min-
isterial power in some detail; we also noted the constraints on this
power. We can summarise the powers and resources of the Prime
Minister as follows:
• Authority – from various sources
• Political support from cabinet colleagues and the majority of
back-benchers
• Support from the wider party that he/she leads
• Support from the electorate who have voted the government into
power
• A substantially strengthened Prime Minister’s Office
• The growth of bilateral policy making
• The wide powers of patronage
190 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

All these powers and resources are available to the Prime Minister
through the office. The constraints on this power are not insignificant
and are explained in some detail in Chapter 5. It will be useful to sum-
marise them here as:
• Cabinet
• Party
• Outside world
The Prime Minister, therefore, has powers and resources and these
are subject to constraints. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister is
expected to make choices about policy and the management of gov-
ernment even though the contexts in which these decisions will be
made are varying and unpredictable as are the resources available to
the Prime Minister and to all the other players in the core. As you can
see, we have deliberately left the personality of the Prime Minister out
of the equation on the grounds that personality may well have an
impact on the structure of government but style is shaped predomin-
antly by their dependencies and the wider political context. At this
point, some writers argue that it is best to strip from the Prime
Minister all notions of personality and attempt to see the holder of
the office as primarily and an institution of government.

Ministers
Ministers occupy a somewhat different world. The main arena for a
minister will always be the department. Ministerial resources may
include:
• Political support from the Prime Minister and the rest of the
Cabinet
• The strength and organisation of the department
• The specific policy knowledge the minister may possess
• The policy networks into which the minister has been taken or
gained entry to
• In some cases, significant policy success will make ministers valu-
able allies to other players who have greater resource dependencies
In terms of constraints, ministers are faced with the rules and
structures of their departments, the various values and institutions
central to their particular areas of policy, and other colleagues in
 The Core Executive 191

the Cabinet. Norton has argued that, while ministers are powerful
figures in government, they are subject to ‘remarkable’ constraints
that frequently make it difficult for us to make sense of their role
in British government.9 Like the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers
will also find themselves making decisions about policy within
these varying contexts, structures and resource dependencies, all of
which are constantly shifting and subject to unpredictable outside
factors.
The relationship between ministers and civil servants is particu-
larly complex, and a wide selection of models is available to anyone
who wishes to look at this in greater detail. One of these models – the
power-dependency model – is particularly useful to us as part of this
discussion and we should summarise the key points here before we
proceed.
In short, the power-dependency model suggests an environment in
which ministers have to negotiate with other actors to achieve desired
outcomes. Even this brief one-sentence description should suffice to
establish the value to students of the model of the core executive.
The model was developed by Rhodes, initially to analyse the
complex nature of centre–local relations.10 There are two central
propositions to grasp in order to develop our understanding of power
dependency.

• The model is based on the belief that any organisation is depen-

dent on other organisations for resources. The Prime Minister, for
instance, has considerable resources at his or her disposal, but never
enough. Number 10 cannot supply everything, and the Prime
Minister will often be dependent on resources available only
through government departments. The same applies to ministers,
who are almost entirely dependent on their departments and on
civil servants to provide policy advice and then to carry out their
decisions. Even the civil servants themselves will then need ‘their’
minister to fight an effective battle with the Treasury so that the
department will continue to be resourced adequately. This is not
to say that conflict dominates the relationships in any or all of the
examples we have used. In a government secured by large majori-
ties and sound economic management, the relationship will most
likely be one of co-operation.
192 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• The second proposition in the model is that organisations must

exchange resources to achieve their goals. For a body to be effective,
it cannot operate exclusively of others, and players within the body
will require the co-operation of others in the system if they are to
achieve their goals. In other words, there is a dependence on others.
To achieve this, alliances must be created and resources traded.

The model recognises the central feature of the effective core execu-
tive: there may well be a group or individual player who can dominate
the relationships in government but those relationships will change as
players fight for position. If we accept the power-dependency model
(not just to illuminate the position of ministers but also to illustrate the
completeness of the core executive) then we are accepting a complex
and less hierarchical process than those models that see ministers
primarily as the agents of Prime Ministers or civil servants. This model,
therefore, sits along the principal-agent model – where ministers are
agents of the Prime Minister or of civil servants – and the baronial
model which suggests ministers have their own policy territories com-
plete with castles and courts around which they fight or build alliances
to get their own way.

Civil servants
Whitehall and its officials occupy a different territory to that of the
elected politicians. According to Smith, they ‘operate in a context
where the rules of the game are essentially set by a constitution that the
officials maintain through their actions and their beliefs’.11 In this view,
the Constitution and its ‘enveloping’ myths set the limits of official
behaviour, to the extent that civil servants are much more the continu-
ing ‘bearers’ of the structure of government than the ministers.
To illustrate his point, Smith uses the example of a change of per-
manent secretary in one of the main government departments.
The impact of such change is relatively small. In suggesting this, we
are not saying that the civil servants are powerless or do not function
(there is far too much evidence to suggest otherwise) but that the ter-
ritory of their action is very different from that of the politicians. So,
the territory and the context are significant for all the key players.
Recent reports and inquiries – notably the Scott Report and the
Hutton Inquiry Report – have revealed the considerable freedom that
 The Core Executive 193

civil servants enjoy as they seek to interpret their freedom of man-

oeuvre while attempting to maintain their constitutional loyalty to the
ministers. The flexibility here is considerable given that the Constitu-
tion is ‘largely mythical’ and it is left to the civil servants to untangle
and interpret the myth.
In terms of the ‘resources’ available to the officials, we can also see
some key differences from those we have listed against the politicians:
• Permanence, as opposed to the dark clouds of election and reshuf-
fle that hover over the heads of ministers.
• Knowledge though still mainly generalists as far as the actual
policy area of the department is concerned, the civil servants will
have a far greater understanding of how that department func-
tions and how it relates to other areas of the government. This
‘Whitehall Network’ is a considerable resource based on perma-
nence and shared civil-service values, and has been developed and
nurtured over a long time. Politicians are rarely able to construct
similar networks themselves.
• Control over information. Numerous narratives in contemporary
studies and biographies that deal with the minister/civil servant
relationship illustrate this resource. The Alan Clark Diaries offer a
particularly good illustration of how officials attempt to ‘ambush’
and control the flow of information to ministers, while Ian Lang’s
description of the response of a senior civil servant to his simple
request for a piece of paper is a classic of the genre. ‘The Civil
Servant returned, holding a single sheet of paper “Like a
dead rat”.’
The Civil Service is also subject to considerable constraints. The
focus on delivery, the development of agencies, and the introduction
of management rhetoric and technique have had an impact as have
the decreasing role in policy formulation and the large-scale cuts to
the size and staffing of Whitehall.
To summarise this section on the relationships between key
players, we should focus on four key points in relation to the structure
and workings of the core executive:
• The Prime Minister, cabinet ministers and civil servants function
in different structures and territories from one another.
194 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• The territory of the civil servants is very different from that occu-
pied by politicians.
• These individual players have at their disposal resources that are
not available to other players.
• Personalities may be important in these relationships but they are
not the key factors in the working of the core executive.

Now that we have examined the core executive in terms of key def-
initions, individuals and relationships, we can move on to look at how
the modern core executive actually functions.

How the core executive works

It is important to note that the core executive is not fixed. Unlike a
static and unchanging structure, the core executive is fluid and chang-
ing according to circumstances and the wider political context. For
instance, the military and defence situations at any given time will
have a significant impact on the structure of the core. In recent years,
there has been a number of opportunities to attempt to piece together
this shifting core as a result of the various military commitments that
Britain has been involved in, especially under Tony Blair. It is possi-
ble to state that, in these circumstances, the top British military
leaders will find themselves entering the inner circles of the core only
to pass out again once a particular military operation has been
resolved. The likelihood is that British military commanders will have
been very close to the core since 2001 and the subsequent ‘war on ter-
rorism’. Similarly, the terrorist attacks on London in the summer of
2005 will have brought senior officials into the core from a number of
anti-terrorist agencies. In a book referred to earlier, John Kampfner
explains the workings of COBRA, the government’s emergency com-
mittee (which gets its name because of the meeting’s location in
Cabinet Office Briefing Room A), when news began to reach London
of the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001.
Kampfner’s account is doubly interesting: not only does it reveal the
actual shifts and movements around and within the core, it also pro-
vides a neat example of Blair’s use of the bilateral meeting by explain-
ing how, before the meeting began at 5.30 p.m., Blair had already had
individual meetings with the key ministers – Gordon Brown, Jack
 The Core Executive 195

Straw, Geoff Hoon, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers and Alan

Milburn, the Health Secretary – who then attended the full COBRA
session, each bringing with him a senior civil servant. In the brief
meeting (it lasted just over thirty minutes), short presentations were
made by the various security and intelligence agencies on the key
focus of domestic security. It is interesting to note, however, that, after
the initial meeting, COBRA met three more times that month while the
full Cabinet met only once. Kampfner makes the point that ‘Blair’s
inner circle was all that mattered’ while Number 10 referred to Blair
as ‘seeing people when necessary’. We will come back to this particu-
lar point later in the chapter when we consider the criticisms of the
idea of a core executive.
The meetings of COBRA that took place in September 2001 had a
very different format from those that had taken place the last time the
committee had needed to sit. The earlier meetings had taken place
the previous year when protesters had successfully disrupted the dis-
tribution of fuel throughout Britain. On that occasion, COBRA had
not worked particularly well, and changes had been made. The ‘tables
for two’, each with a lap-top computer, and the bank of televisions,
each showing the various twenty-four-hour news channels, were a
new innovation, as was the row of sound-proofed telephone booths.
COBRA is obviously an example of the core at its most dramatic.
Other examples from the Blair era that illustrate this flow of people
into and out of the core include the foot-and-mouth epidemic, the
various developments associated with devolution and constitutional
reform, and the ongoing issue of Britain’s relationship with the
Europeans Union, especially in the aftermath of the Constitution
debacle during early summer 2005.
Various metaphors and diagrams have been constructed in recent
years in an attempt to explain how the core executive ‘looks’ and how
it functions. Some of these attempts simply add confusion to the topic.
The standard ‘block’ diagram, that shows the key players locked by
joining arrows as they bargain and co-operate with one another,
cannot hope to show the full complexity of the core. The more
detailed diagram offered by Pyper and Robins is better,12 but again
tends to focus on the key players in terms of their relationships rather
than attempting to illustrate the fluidity and complexity of the chang-
ing political circumstances and contexts that we have outlined above.
196 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

An effective way of visualising the core executive is to think of the

central government machinery as a top-of-the-range compact disc
player with multidisc facility. The machine itself represents the per-
manent or semipermanent players in the government. We already
know that these include the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and civil ser-
vants alongside other key players with important resources, such as the
cabinet committees, law officers and security and intelligence services.
Now, think of each of the CDs in the machine as representing a par-
ticular political issue or crisis. Because the central machinery rarely has
the luxury of dealing with one issue or crisis at a time, it is able to shuffle
between the ‘discs’ as it attempts to juggle priorities, make alliances and
gauge the resources that are both available and in short supply. Some
discs may spend a long time in the machine and will be subject to long
periods of play. Others will be taken from the sorter after a brief period
and not be ‘played’ again. As the ‘discs’ pass in and out of the machine,
so do some of the key players for that particular issue, be they senior
veterinary scientists in the case of foot-and-mouth or experts in Balkan
affairs as in the case of the war in Kosovo. At any particular time, it is
difficult to say with precision who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, another
reminder that the core executive model is open to some criticism.

The core executive – 1945 to 1980

Another useful way of examining the core executive is to set out how
the central government machinery used to function. Between the end
of World War II and the start of the 1980s, it was possible to make
several basic observations about the key features of the core. These
are summarised in Box 9.2.

The core executive – 1980 to present

Since 1980, it has been possible to argue that the defining features of
the post-war core executive have shifted significantly. The reasons for
this shift have been documented in detail elsewhere and we do not
need to go into them in depth here. It is important to note, however,
that the shift did occur at the same time as a prolonged period of
almost one-party government in the United Kingdom that came to
have a very distinctive and different ideological view from those gov-
ernments that had been in power previously. These internal pressures
therefore combined with significant external pressures in such a way
 The Core Executive 197

Box 9.2 The core executive: 1940s to1980s

The state had to assume a high degree

of central control. This was largely
owing to the post-war policies of
nationalisation and the introduction of
the welfare state.
The increased role of the state required
the government to develop a vast
The post-war expansion bureaucratic machine.
of central government The post-war state and government
and the increased role had to be prepared to undertake an
of the state demanded interventionist approach to society and
that the core executive social issues. This was often on a large
developed a particular scale.
set of features. Key economic groups (including trade
unions) were incorporated into the
policy-making process.
Politicians and officials conducted their
business with a high degree of consen-
sus as to their respective roles in policy
and decision making. This spirit of con-
sensus even extended to the relation-
ship between parties where there was a
general agreement on the management
of a mixed economy, defence and the
welfare state.

as to change fundamentally the key features of the core executive.

Smith argues that there are six key changes to note.13
• There is no longer the tendency to provide detailed intervention.
This has been replaced by a general nudge towards the setting of
the overall direction of policy rather than the detail.
• The management of government has changed. It is now ‘decen-
tralised and delayered’ rather than focusing on bureaucratic man-
agement.
• The business of government is now less about the directing of
state bureaucracies and more to do with the management of
policy and delivery networks.
198 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

• The public sector has shrunk considerably. As a result, there is

much less of it for the core executive to manage.
• Economic groups are now effectively excluded from the policy-
making process.
• Consensus has largely had its day. While on the one hand, it is now
possible to bemoan the general lack of ‘difference’ between the
main parties, this is certainly not the case in the relationship
between officials and politicians.
In Chapter 6 we outlined the nature of the bureaucracy sur-
rounding the Prime Minister and, in particular, the changes that have
been made to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office.
These changes to important ‘structural resources’ of Number 10 have
considerably strengthened the hand of the Prime Minister as the key
player in the core executive, and have given Blair in particular a
greater role in the formulation and co-ordination of policy.
Conversely, the resources available to civil servants have been dimin-
ished, a fact that is particularly noticeable when ministerial/official
resources are compared and when we remind ourselves of the con-
straints listed in the previous section.
The modern core executive now functions in a world where the
established structures of dependence have changed. Four key points
may be summarised from Thomas that illustrate these changes.14
• The core executive has now become more dependent on interna-
tional organisations than was previously the case. Membership of
the European Union is a good example of how some areas of
decision-making have moved outside the core.
• Ministers are now more dependent on the resource-rich Prime
Minister than they were before.
• New means of exchanging resources and building alliances have
arisen between external agencies and government departments.
• The Treasury is increasingly dependent on departments to deliver
resources even though the Prime Minister and the Treasury
manage, on the whole, to have more advantages than disadvan-
tages over the other players and institutions within the core. It is
important to remember that everyone else in the core needs to
access the resources at the disposal of Number 10 and the
Treasury.
 The Core Executive 199

Writers such as Smith and Pryce have gone on to argue that the
modern core executive is now more concerned with governance than
government. If the core executive was ever sovereign (and there isn’t
a great deal of evidence to say that it was) then it certainly is no longer.
Instead, the core executive is at the centre of a complex network of
competing organisations, none of which it can directly control. These
competing organisations include:
• Privatised utilities
• Agencies
• International bodies
• The European Union
• Quangos
• Voluntary agencies
In dealing with the various parts of this complex network, the
centre of the core executive – Prime Minister and Treasury – find
themselves exchanging resources and building alliances with individ-
ual players. These competing individuals are as much a part of
the changing contexts of politics as are all the other players, yet all
may react and make choices in different ways. Under these circum-
stances, the best the core executive can do is to concentrate on indi-
rect control through contracts, regulations and the markets.
Government has therefore given up on any attempts to use national-
isation and bureaucratisation as means of direct control. For those
involved the consequences have been twofold:
• On the one hand, government has been made easier simply
because there is now less for it to do, less to be responsible for.
• On the other hand, government has been made more difficult
because the complex network we have been discussing now has
access to the control panel of power once lorded over almost
exclusively by the core executive.
Having pointed out the limitations that modern politics places on
the core executive, it is still worth mentioning that that executive has
major advantages over other players. It continues to be highly and
effectively resourced. It can claim major resources of authority and
legitimacy, and is able to control powerful financial resources. Finally,
if all else fails, the core executive can always turn to the resources that
200 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

allow it to deploy a range of legal and coercive measures. In other

words, no one else can call in the armed forces, no one else can
declare a state of emergency. In this sense, the core remains at the
core with all the potential ability to utilise all the resources of the state
that you would expect would accompany such power.
In the course of our overview of the core executive, we have sug-
gested that there is a number of criticisms of the model. This chapter
will conclude by setting out these criticisms.

Criticisms of the core executive

The nature of the core executive, as we have explained it here, leads
to a number of key questions. The first question raise issues about the
actual composition of this core at the heart of government while the
second asks searching questions about its effectiveness.

Does the core executive exist?

We should consider the questions below as a starting point:
• Who should be included in the core executive: Chief Whips?
chairs of the back-bench committees in Parliament? representa-
tives of insider pressure groups? In short, how are we to analyse
efficiently a structure that has no fixed place and no fixed and
certain membership?
• What about the role of cabinet committees in the core – are all
of them to be considered as ‘core’ or are some more ‘core’ than
others?
• What about the modern Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet
Office? We have already made the case that both bodies have
experienced significant reform and change in recent years. Does
this mean that all the individuals involved in these offices are
therefore to be considered members of the core?
Given these questions, and the fluid nature of the core executive
which changes according to circumstances, it is hardly surprising that
some writers have questioned whether there is such a thing as the core
executive at all.20 It is certainly the case that some of the examples
and debates which have been outlined in this chapter may be used to
question the concept of a core executive. Notwithstanding the
 The Core Executive 201

constraints listed against the principal players, we are still left with an
‘inner’ core of Prime Minister and Cabinet with an ever-changing
cast of ‘outer’ players circling around them. It would be possible to
argue that we end at the place we tried to leave, which was essentially
a description of prime ministerial and cabinet government.

If the core executive does exist, how effective is it?

There was a time before Blair when some commentators appeared to
bemoan the absence of a single executive that could provide policy
leadership and a coherent control of the machinery of government.
For one observer, writing in the Guardian in 1997, there existed a ‘hole
in the centre of government’ where policy remained mostly in the
hands of the departments, thus undermining the constitutional con-
ventions of collective decision-making and accountability.15 Critics
were also pointing to the weakness of co-ordination and strategic
direction at the core of British politics, and a desperate need to end
the ‘short-termism’ that had characterised most post-war govern-
ments. To achieve these aims structurally, some reformers argued that
inner cabinets needed to be formed that would be tasked with the
direction of government. During the same period it was possible to
read regular calls for the formal establishment of a Prime Minister’s
Department.
For other observers, many of them still wary of the trends set in
motion during the Thatcher period (others continuing to deliver the
same warning they had been refining since the 1960s), what the
British executive definitely did not need was more centralisation and
inner strategic control. Far better, they argued, to cut back the power
and secrecy of the government; far better perhaps to limit the powers
of the Prime Minister (especially patronage) and move towards a
much more decentralised and accountable executive. As one group of
writers argued, Blair came to power and almost immediately began
to face, Janus-like, in the directions of both the competing demands
outlined above.16 This position can be neatly explained in the box
below, and supporters and detractors of the Blair governments will be
able to make their particular cases by using the evidence of the two
columns:
It remains the case that any core executive is essentially the sum
of all the contexts and players that we have discussed in this chapter.
202 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Box 9.3 More or less government? Blair and the

core executive

Responses by Blair to the ‘hole Responses by Blair to ‘too

at the centre of government’ much power at the centre
argument of government’ argument
• Considerable reforms to the • Incorporation of the
Prime Minister’s Office and European Convention on
Cabinet Office – a ‘Prime Human Rights.
Minister’s Department in all • Freedom of Information Act.
but name’. • Handing power to set
• Units established to interest rates to the Bank of
concentrate on strategy and England’s Monetary Policy
delivery. Committee.
• Emphasis on ‘joined-up • Devolved assemblies in
government’. Scotland, Wales and
• Greater use of task forces. Ireland.
• Stronger control over • Support for (though not
ministers’ activities through popular with the electorate)
the Strategic regional assemblies.
Communications Unit. • Elected mayor for London,
• Stronger political control over London Assembly.
the government bureaucracy. • Some modernisation
• Promotion and placement of of local government.
‘Blair people’ to key • Continuance of devolved
ministerial and non-ministerial power in the NHS.
positions.

It is also important to remind ourselves that the core executive

remains a well-resourced and formidable political machine, and that
effectiveness or otherwise will be decided in the short term by the
electorate and the players themselves and in the long term by polit-
ical historians.

Concluding points
For a model constructed to challenge the prime ministerial or cabinet
government debate, it is interesting that our discussion ends with a
consideration of the Prime Minister in order to make a larger point
about the core executive. Yes, the resources of the Prime Minister
 The Core Executive 203

have increased, yet this does not necessarily mean that the power of
the Prime Minister has increased accordingly. Matthew Flinders,
writing in the Politics Review helps draw the strands of our discussion
to a neat conclusion.17
• Decision-making is moving beyond the core executive.
• Government is enmeshed in a range of international and global
interdependencies, which limits the executive’s scope for action in
many policy areas.
• Continued and greater European integration, devolution, and
government reform make co-ordinating policy much more
difficult.
• Many players are involved in policy-making; the Prime Minister
cannot control all of them.
• The executive acts in an environment that is ‘dense with con-
straints, but the strength and vigour of these limitations depend
on the specific context of each situation’.
• As the British state becomes more fragmented and diffuse, the
executive needs to develop new steering and control mechanisms
and is reluctant to do anything that might fetter the power it has.

What you should have learnt from reading this chapter

We began this chapter by looking at key definitions of the core
executive. To remind you, the term ‘core executive’ refers to the key
institutions at the very centre of government. The core executive
consists of a large and variable number of players that includes the
Prime Minister, the Cabinet and its committees, the Prime Minister’s
Office and the Cabinet Office. It also includes large co-ordinating
departments such as the government’s law officers, the security and
intelligence services and the Treasury. Having established a basic
definition, we went on to discuss the origins of the model and looked
at the theories of writers such as Rhodes and Smith.
Having established our definition, we then went on to discuss the
uses of the core executive as a model. We noted the availability of the
model as an alternative to the prime ministerial/cabinet-government
type of debate and, we hope, recognised that, in choosing to focus on
the core executive, we were developing themes already set out in
some detail in earlier chapters. Having looked at how the model could
then be applied to the British system of government, we discussed
 204 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

some key concepts that are central to the debate, such as ‘resource’
and ‘resource dependence’. You can check your understanding of
these key phrases in the glossary below.
Our discussion of the core executive has also included detailed
comparisons of the key relationships between the Prime Minister,
cabinet ministers and civil servants, and also provided you with an
overview of how the core ‘works’ and what criticisms have been made
of the model.

Glossary of key terms



Baronial model A model of ministers that sees them in policy territories,

complete with castles and courtiers around which they fight or build
alliances to get their way. Developed by Norton (2004)
COBRA The government’s emergency committee.
Command A political style of strong leadership and control from the
centre.
Core executive Key institutions at the very centre of government. The
core executive consists of a large and variable number of players which
includes the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and its committees, the Prime
Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office. It also includes large co-
ordinating departments, such as the government’s law officers, the
security and intelligence services and the Treasury.
Dependence Where one player in the core executive depends on the
support and/or resources of other players to achieve his or her aims.
Fragmentation Used to describe a political system where the key players
are unsure of their roles and responsibilities, and where structures are
beginning to fracture.
Indirect control An attempt to use political power to control a situation
indirectly through agencies or institutiuons.
Permanent secretary Senior civil servant in a government department.
Power-dependency model A power model in which ministers have to
negotiate with other players in the core to achieve their ambitions.
Principal-agent model Where all ministers are agents of the Prime
Minister and/or civil servants.
Resources/resource-rich Resources in the tangible sense (information,
funding) and also used to refer to authority, influence, legitimacy etc.
Resource-rich refers to players with access to substantial resources, i.e.,
Prime Minister and Chancellor.
Short termism A political strategy which ignores long-term policy
planning in return for the quick electoral fix of immediate and ‘quick-result’
short-term decisions.
Structures of dependence The networks and complex web of
relationships in the core executive whereby alliances are formed and
resources are traded.
 The Core Executive 205

? Likely examination questions

Short questions
Describe what is meant by the term ‘core executive’.
Describe why the model of the ‘core executive’ was formulated.
Briefly describe the nature of the relationship between the three key
players in the core executive.
Describe the central features of the post-war core executive.
Explain why the workings and structure of the core executive have
changed since the early 1980s.
Essay questions
To what extent do discussions on the core executive reveal certain
weaknesses at the heart of the British system of government?
How far would you agree with the suggestion that the Prime Minister has
more power now than ever before?
‘The Prime Minister can no longer control the actions of all those involved
in the core executive.’ How far do you agree?
Discuss the suggestion that the core executive model does little more than
reframe the prime minister/cabinet-government debate.
Critically discuss the core executive model as an effective way of
analysing key political relationships.
Revision task
Take a packet of index cards and make yourself a deck of revision cards
on the core executive. Begin with three cards: Prime Minister, cabinet
ministers and civil servants, and then write brief sentences on other cards
to link them together. Gradually build up the number of cards you have
until you feel you have covered all the aspects of the core executive as
they have been dealt with in this chapter. Clear a space on a table and
start to place the cards down randomly one at a time. The idea of this
revision task is slowly to arrange the cards until they are laid out on the
table in some logical way that helps you remember all the key theories and
arguments associated with this topic.
 206 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

 Helpful websites

The usual government websites will be useful:

www.number10.gov.uk/
The 10 Downing Street website.
www.direct.gov.uk/
Particularly useful for department and Civil Service links.
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
Very good for detailed studies of the central government machinery.
www.civilservice.gov.uk

 Suggestions for further reading

Flinders, M. (2003) ‘Controlling the Executive’, Politics Review, vol. 13.1,

2003.
Foley, M. (1993) The Rise of the British Presidency (Manchester University
Press).
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
Norton, P. (2004) ‘Ministers, Departments and Civil Servants’, Talking
Politics, ed. B. Jones, 2004.
Pryce, S. (1997) Presidentialising the Premiership (Macmillan).
Pyper, R. and Robins, L. (1995) Governing the UK in the 1990s
(Macmillan).
Rhodes, R. A. W. (1995) Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive
(Macmillan).
Rhodes, R. A. W. (2005) Presidents, Barons, Court Politics and Tony Blair
(PSA).
Smith, M. J. (2000) ‘The Core Executive’, Politics Review, vol. 10.1, 2000.
Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
Thomas, G. P. (1998) Prime Minister and Cabinet Today (Manchester
University Press).
CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: The Prime Minister, Cabinet

and Synoptic Skills
Contents
Synoptic study 208

Overview
This brief concluding chapter will bring together the key arguments of
the book and will suggest ways in which students may wish to use the
other books in this series to undertake a detailed synoptic overview of the
Prime Minister and Cabinet in terms of other aspects of the British political
system and perhaps even to consider using the information and arguments
here as a starting point for detailed comparative study.

Key issues covered in this book

• The British system of cabinet government has experienced considerable
change in recent years.
• It is possible, if using traditional definitions as a starting point, to announce
the ‘death’ of cabinet government.
• Structural reforms and changes in Downing Street have considerably
increased the potential power of the Prime Minister.
• It is possible to detect aspects of the Prime Minister’s power and role that
now make the post increasingly ‘presidential’.
• The increasingly complex web of relationships and networks in which the
Prime Minister and Cabinet now operate suggests that the central
government machinery should be viewed as a ‘core executive’ rather than
as the traditional idea of co-ordinated and effective cabinet government.
208 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Synoptic study
Synoptic study is now a key theme of A-level and undergraduate pol-
itics programmes. The concept of synoptic study is essentially the
drawing together of all the knowledge and understanding you have
developed throughout the duration of a complete course on govern-
ment and politics. The purpose of synoptic study is two fold:
• From a purely examination board point of view, synoptic study is
designed to encourage students to see their study of politics as a
‘whole’ rather than as separate and unconnected units.
• Politics is by its very nature a ‘synoptic’ subject. It is impossible fully
to make sense of an individual aspect of a politics course if you do
not have an understanding of the wider context of your study. It is
impossible, for instance, to appreciate fully the true nature of
Parliament if you concentrate your study exclusively on the House
of Commons and ignore the House of Lords. Equally, you will not
develop a full understanding of the true nature of British govern-
ment if you study only the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As we have
tried to show throughout this book, context is everything.
To develop your understanding of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
in more detail you should now go on to place the key themes in the
wider context of British government and politics. The following sug-
gestions may be useful:
Pressure groups – what connections and links can you detect
between the proliferation of pressure groups in the United Kingdom
and the current nature of Prime Minister and Cabinet?
The judiciary – how often do the Prime Minister and Cabinet find
themselves at odds with the judiciary, and why?
Elections and parties – without elections and parties, the Prime
Minister and Cabinet would not be in power. What are the connec-
tions and links between these themes? What impact did the 2005
general election have on the Prime Minister and Cabinet?
Devolution – Blair has carried out reforms in this area that may well
have taken power away from him. Why? What other implications has
devolution had for the Prime Minister and Cabinet?
America – studying comparative politics is a very good way to
develop your synoptic skills. What are the similarities and differences
 Conclusion: The Prime Minister, Cabinet and Synoptic Skills 209

between the American and British cabinets? Is the Prime Minister

really a presidential figure?
Europe and the European Union – what are the implications for
the Prime Minister and Cabinet of continued UK membership of the
EU? Is the Cabinet broadly for or against further integration within
the EU? Why is the Euro a controversial issue in the Blair Cabinet?
Religion and morality – how far have the domestic and foreign
policies of Tony Blair been conditioned by religious and moral con-
siderations? To what extent has Blair been able to use his position to
deliver solutions to populist campaigns such as Live 8?
War on terror – are the Cabinet and the Prime Minister coping?
What are the implications of the war on terror for the British gov-
ernment?
Blair and Brown – what are the implications for government and
party in the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown?
Will the Labour Party choose a ‘coronation’ of Brown or will there be
other challenges? To what extent will Brown maintain the style of
government developed by Blair?

Reading
The following books will help you with your synoptic studies:
Cohen, N. (2003) Pretty Straight Guys (Faber).
Naughtie, J. (2005) The Accidental American: Blair and the Presidency
(Macmillan).
Rawnsley, A. (2001) Servants of the People (Penguin).
Stephens, P. (2004) Price of Leadership (Politico’s).
Stothard, P. (2003) Thirty Days – A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War
(HarperCollins).
References by chapter

Chapter 1
1 Bagehot, W. (1867) The English Constitution, 1963 print with an introduc-
tion by Richard Cressman (Fontana).
2 Kingdom, J. (1999) Government and Politics in Britain (Polity Press).
3 Kingdom, J. (1999) Government and Politics in Britain (Polity Press).

Chapter 2
1 Jones, B. and Kavanagh, D. (1998) British Politics Today, 6th edn
(Manchester University Press).
2 Jones, B. and Kavanagh, D. (1998) British Politics Today, 6th edn
(Manchester University Press).
3 Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).

Chapter 3
1 Brady, C. and Catterall, P. (2000) ‘Inside the Engine Room: Assessing
Cabinet Committees’, Talking Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
2 Budge, I. (ed.) (2000) New British Politics (Longman).
3 Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice
Hall).
4 Seldon, A. (2004) Blair (Free Press).
5 Naughtie, J. (2002) The Rivals (Fourth Estate).
6 Mandelson, P. (2002) The Blair Revolution Revisited (Politicos).
7 Brady, C. and Catterall, P. (2000) ‘Inside the Engine Room: Assessing
Cabinet Committees’, Talking Politics, vol. 12.3, spring 2000.
8 The Times, July 1998.
9 Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
10 Hennessy, P. (1998) ‘The Blair Style of Government’, Government and
Opposition, winter 1997–8.
 References 211

Chapter 4
1 Gay, O. and Powell, T. (2004) ‘The Collective Responsibility of
Ministers’, House of Commons Research Paper, November 2004, 04/82.
2 Benn, T. (1981) Arguments for Democracy (Penguin).
3 Quoted in Gay, O. and Powell, T. (2004) ‘The Collective Responsibility
of Ministers’, House of Commons Research Paper, November 2004,
04/82.
4 Dorey, P. (1991) ‘Cabinet Committees’, Talking Politics, vol. 4.1, autumn
1991.
5 Gay, O. and Powell, T. (2004) ‘The Collective Responsibility of
Ministers’, House of Commons Research Paper, November 2004, 04/82.
6 Hennessy, P. (2004) ‘Systems Failure at Heart of Government’,
Independent, 16 July 2004.
7 Rathbone, M. (2003) ‘The British Cabinet’, Talking Politics, vol. 16.1,
September 2003.
8 Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
9 Mowlam, M. (2002) Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the People
(Hodder).

Chapter 5
1 Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars (Free Press).
2 Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair, Prime Minister (Time Warner).
3 McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).
4 Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).
5 Johnson, R. W. (1990) ‘The President has Landed’, New Statesman, 30
November 1990.
6 Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice
Hall).
7 Rentoul, J. (2001) Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Time Warner).
8 Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).

Chapter 6
1 Milne, K. (1998) ‘The Policy Unit’, New Statesman, July 1998.
2 James, S. (1992) British Cabinet Government (Routledge).
212 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

3 Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).

4 Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Tony Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review, vol.
11.1, September 2001.
5 Hennessy, P. (2002) ‘The Blair Government in Historical Perspective’,
History Today, January 2002.
6 Burch and Halliday (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice Hall).

Chapter 7
1 Rose, R. (2001) The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Polity Press).
2 Norton, P. (1987) ‘Prime Ministerial Power: Framework for Analysis’,
Teaching Politics, vol. 16.3, September 1987.
3 Heywood, A. (1997) Politics (Macmillan).
4 Norton, P. (1987) ‘Prime Ministerial Power: Framework for Analysis’,
Teaching Politics, vol. 16.3, September 1987.
5 Mandelson, P. and Liddle, R. (1996) The Blair Revolution (Politico’s).
6 Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language? (Routledge).
7 Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review, vol. 11.1,
September 2001.
8 Judt, T., Tony Blair, A Man of Moral Certainty (March 2003) http://www.
pbs.org/(Public Broadcasting Service).
9 Smith, C., Tony Blair, A Man of Moral Certainty (March 2003) http://www.
pbs.org/(Public Broadcasting Service).
10 McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).

Chapter 8
1 Moran, M. (2005) Politics and Governance in the UK (Palgrave).
2 Seldon, A. (ed.) (2001) The Blair Effect (Little, Brown).
3 McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet Government
(Hodder).
4 Jackson, N. (2003) ‘The Blair Style – Presidential, Bilateral or Trilateral
Government?’, Talking Politics, vol. 15.3, January 2003.
5 Hennessy, P. (2002) ‘The Blair Government in Historical Perspective’
(History Today, January 2002).
6 Burch, M. and Halliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System (Prentice
Hall).
 References 213

7 Quoted in McNaughton, N. (1999) The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Government (Hodder); and ‘Prime Ministerial Government’, Talking
Politics, September 2002.
8 Kavanagh, D. (2001) ‘Tony Blair as Prime Minister’, Politics Review, vol.
11.1, September 2001.
9 Foley, M. (2000) The British Presidency (Manchester University Press).

Chapter 9
1 Rhodes, R. A. W. (1995) Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive
(Macmillan).
2 Rhodes, R. A. W. (2005) Presidents, Barons, Court Politics and Tony Blair
(PSA).
3 Mackintosh, J. (1962) The British Cabinet (Stevens).
4 Rhodes, R. A. W. (2005) Presidents, Barons, Court Politics and Tony Blair
(PSA).
5 Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
6 Smith, M. J. (2000) ‘The Core Executive’, Politics Review, vol. 10.1, 2000.
7 White, M. (2003) The Guardian, 6 June 2003.
8 Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
9 Norton, P. (2004) ‘Ministers, Departments and Civil Servants’, Talking
Politics, ed. B. Jones, 2004.
10 Rhodes, R. A. W. (2005) Presidents, Barons, Court Politics and Tony Blair
(PSA).
11 Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
12 Pyper, R. and Robins, L. (1995) Governing the UK in the 1990s (Macmillan).
13 Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
14 Thomas, G. P. (1998) Prime Minister and Cabinet Today (Manchester
University Press).
15 Bogdanor, V. The Guardian, 4 June 1997.
16 Smith, M. J., Richards, D. and Marsh, D. (2000) The Changing Role of
Central Government Departments (Macmillan).
17 Flinders, M. (2003) ‘Controlling the Executive’, Politics Review, vol. 13.1,
2003
Index

Bold indicates that the term is defined

Allen, Graham, 83 Cabinet, ch. 2, ch. 3, ch. 4

Amery, Leo, 36 ‘agreement to differ’ (1932), 75
Armstrong, Robert, 62 appointments to, 39–43
Attlee, Clement, 40, 87, 100 ‘bilaterals’, 55
changing constitutional position, 29–36
Bagehot, Walter, 7, 185 collective responsibility, 13, 71–81
Baldwin, Stanley, 75 consultative committees, 52
Barber, Michael, 123–4 decline of, 84–6
Benn, Tony, 72, 76, 106 dismissal from, 43–9
Better Regulation Executive, 19 ‘enforcers’, 63
Better Regulation Task Force, 19 free votes, 77
Birt, John, 131–4 hierarchy, 32–4
Blair, Cherie, 39 implied devolution, 52
Blair, Tony inner cabinets, 37
advantages, compared with Thatcher, kitchen cabinets, 38
160 ministerial (standing) committees, 56
appointments to House of Lords, 46 origins, 26–8
authority as PM, 101 reshuffles, 43
before becoming PM, 33 role and functions, 28–30
Butler Report (2004), 156 Scotland, 35
cabinet committees, 57 secretariat, 61
cabinet office, 64–7 size, 30–2
communicator-in-chief, 100 structure, 30–2
core executive, 202 traditional/constitutional roles, 28–9
‘president’, 171–8 Cabinet Committees, 21, 50–7, 60
relationship with Alastair Campbell, Cabinet Office, 60–70
129 and Blair, 57–8, 64–7
‘resource rich’, 187 effectiveness, 58, 60
‘spin’, 125, 147 Callaghan, James, 76
style as PM, 148–9, 152–7 Campbell, Alastair, 38, 125, 129
style in opposition, 151 Carrington, Lord, 43
‘top-up fees’, 108 Centre for Management and Policy Studies,
trust, 99 63
war, 99, 155 Chisholm, Malcolm, 79
‘blue sky thinking’, 140 Churchill, Winston, 34, 35–6
Blunkett, David, 40, 45, 123 Clark, Alan, 193
Bonar Law, Andrew, 34 Clarke, Ken, 39
‘Britpop’, 145 COBRA, 194–6, 204
Brown, Gordon, 58, 133, 187 Constitution, European Union, 18, 195
COBRA, 194 Cook, Robin, 81–4
‘deal’ with Blair, 188 ‘Cool Britannia’, 143
economic success, 188 Core Executive, ch. 9
Butler Report (2004), 156 ‘baronial model’, 192
Bundestag, 3 civil servants, 192
Butler, Sir Robin, 120 criticisms, 200
Byers, Stephen, 45, 137 defined, 184
 Index 215

effectiveness, 201 individual ministerial responsibility, 13

ministers, 190 Ingham, Bernard, 125
model, 185 intermestic politics, 111, 114
operation, 194 Iraq, 57, 79, 81–4
relations in the core, 189
Corn Laws, 28 Japan, 3
Cromwell, Oliver, 26 James II, 26
Crossman, Richard, 63
Currie, Edwina, 44 Kelly, David, 129
Kelly, Ruth, 41
Deputy Prime Minister, 33 Kosovo, 81
Devolution, 208
Disraeli, Benjamin, 34 Lamont, Norman, 44
Douglas-Home, Alec, 14 Lang, Ian, 193
Duchy of Lancaster, 32 ‘Lib–Lab Pact’ (1977), 77
Live 8, 113, 157
EEC Referendum (1975), 76 Lloyd George, David, 35, 50, 95, 178
English Civil War, 26 Lord Chancellor (Secretary of State for
European Convention on Human Rights, 55 Constitutional Affairs), 6, 46
European Council of Ministers, 17
European Court of Justice, 18 Maastricht Treaty, 108
Executive, 2 Macdonald, Gus, 119
and the European Union, 17, 19 MacDonald, Ramsay, 75, 151
Major, John, 17–39
Factortame, 18 ‘bastard’ years, 79
Falkland Islands/War, 45, 158 cabinet committees, 50
family tax credits, 44 Europe, 110
foot-and-mouth disease, 44, 196 style, 162
Forward Strategy Unit, 66 Mandelson, Peter, 38–9, 124
France, 3 Marr, Andrew, 82
Freedom of Information Act, 55 Melbourne, Lord, 28, 30
Fusion, 4, 6 Millennium Dome, 44
Milliband, David, 41, 122
G8, 98, 113, 157 Ministerial Code, 71
Germany, 3 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 3
George I, 27, 94 Mowlam, Mo, 42
George II, 27, 94 Mulgan, Geoff, 122
George III, 27, 94
Gladstone, William, 34 Oasis, 143
Glorious Revolution (1688), 7, 10, 26 O’Donnell, Gus, 8
Green, Damien, 121 Office of Public Service Reform, 66
Gulf Wars, 35 Olympic Games, 157

Hague, William, 110 Packer, Richard, 138–9

Haines, Joe, 38 Parliamentary Government, 12
Hankey, Maurice, 95 Peel, Robert, 95
Heseltine, Michael, 78 Performance and Innovation Unit, 65
Hill, David, 126 Portillo, Michael, 29
House of Lords, 32, 36 Powell, Charles, 38
Howe, Geoffrey, 79 Powell, Jonathon, 120
Hunter, Anji, 129 prerogative powers, 11
Hussein, Saddam, 99 Prescott, John, 42, 109, 138
Hutton Inquiry, 95, 126, 130, 155, 157 presidential government, 171–2
Hutton, John, 41 presidentialism, 180
216 The Prime Minister and Cabinet

Prime Minister, ch. 5, ch. 6, ch. 7, ch. 8 Spain, 3, 18

bureaucracy, 117–19 Spycatcher, 62
checks on power, 106–16 Sweden, 3
chief executive, 165–72
origins of office, 94–5 Taylor, Matthew, 126
Political Office, 117, 126 Thatcher, Margaret
Policy Unit, 117 advantages, compared with Blair,
powers, 93–116 160
Press Office, 117 and cabinet, 40, 161
Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), 119–26 cabinet committees, 55
Private Office, 117 defeat, 107
Research and Information Unit, 125 public opinion, 111
roles, 95–101 style, 157–62
Strategic Communications Unit, 125 and television, 100
style, 143–62 war cabinets, 35
support, 116–35 ‘wets’, 159
prime ministerial government, 167 Thatcherism, 126,140
Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), 16 Thompson, Wendy, 124
Profumo Affair, 14 Treaty of Rome, 17
Turnbull, Andrew, 66
Radcliffe Report (1976), 81
Redwood, John, 44 Walpole, Robert, 27, 94
Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884/5), 27 Walters, Alan, 131
Robertson, George, 43 Wass, Douglas, 37
Westland Helicopters, 63,78,159
Salisbury Convention (1912), 15 Whigs, 26
Scotland, 79, 86 ‘Whitehall Programme’, 53
Separation of Powers, 3, 5, 6 William III, 26
Short, Clare, 81–4, 135 Williams, Marcia (Lady Falkender), 38
Sierra Leone, 81 Wilson, Harold, 17, 34, 38, 166