Britain | Bagehot

Why the British prime minister’s job is an impossible one

It’s not all the fault of lousy incumbents

Editor’s note: On October 20th Liz Truss resigned as leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and thus will soon depart as prime minister. The party will hold another leadership contest, its third in as many years, to pick her successor within seven days.

WHEN HE WAS prime minister of the world’s most powerful country in 1902-05, Arthur Balfour spent as much time as he could on his 180,000-acre Scottish estate. The days were for golf on his private course. The evenings were for dinner, after-dinner games and his other great addiction, serious conversation (despite his Bertie Wooster persona, Balfour was a distinguished philosopher). The one thing that didn’t get a look-in was politics, to which his “mind did not naturally turn”, as he confessed to his sister. He did not read newspapers on the ground that “nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”

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Autres temps, autres moeurs. These days prime ministers spend every waking hour trying to master events, only to be broken by them in the end. In “The Prime Ministers”, Steve Richards, a journalist, uses the following phrases to describe his subjects’ lot: “toiling fragility”, “fearful paralysis” and “wretched powerlessness”. The careers of the last six prime ministers have all ended in tears, visibly so in the case of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. “I don’t know why anyone would want the job,” the queen apparently remarked to Boris Johnson when appointing him.

Why has Balfour’s easy chair become so uncomfortable? One possible explanation is that all top jobs are heading in the same direction thanks to hyper-fast change and hyperactive media. Yet Angela Merkel has weathered 15 years in office, and both Donald Trump and Barack Obama had plenty of time for golf. Another is that it’s a matter of individual incompetence. Yet the same problems keep cropping up regardless of who is in Downing Street. In “The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval”, Mark Garnett of Lancaster University offers a more plausible argument: that the prime ministership is now “dysfunctional”—indeed, that it is the dysfunctional heart of an increasingly dysfunctional system.

British prime ministers have to perform a wider range of jobs than almost any other world leaders. They are heads of government, party bosses, fund-raisers, parliamentary performers, foreign envoys, grief counsellors, local MPs who can be ejected by their constituents and, now, plague-fighters. No prime minister can do all these jobs well, and all are bound to fail hopelessly at some—witness Mrs May’s empathy-free visit to the smouldering ruins of Grenfell Tower and Mr Johnson’s tardy initial response to the pandemic. The weekly Prime Minister’s Questions, although not the only regular grilling a nation’s leader faces, is almost certainly the world’s most testing. Tony Blair described the ordeal as “the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my prime ministerial life”.

All these jobs are becoming harder. MPs are more rebellious. Mrs May was defeated 33 times during her miserable premiership and Boris Johnson is discovering that the habit of rebellion has survived the Brexit turmoil. The press is becoming more feral as the internet shortens response times and sharpens competition.

Mr Garnett points to two further contributors to overstretch. The first is successive prime ministers’ tendency to concentrate power in Downing Street. Both Lady Thatcher and Mr Blair, for instance, took over foreign policy because they regarded the Foreign Office as too friendly to foreigners and education policy because they regarded the Department of Education as too friendly to teachers. This contrasts sharply with the 1960s, when much of the energy in government came from the departments. Roy Jenkins, for instance, as Home Secretary, liberalised the law on abortion and homosexuality without either inspiration or interference from Harold Wilson. Today all ideas come from Number 10.

The second problem to which Mr Garnett points is the unstable mixture of the presidential with the prime ministerial. Prime ministers have taken to behaving like presidents—they keep their cabinet ministers on a tight leash, talk to the media before they talk to their own MPs, control everything, including wars, from Downing Street and, in elections, run highly personal campaigns. But they are constrained, as presidents are not, by Parliament. This peculiar hybrid works when prime ministers have big majorities. But unlike an American president, a prime minister without a decent majority in the legislature—like Mrs May in her second term or Mr Johnson in his first—does not even have an executive branch to play with.

The British do not go in for big institutional reforms. They prefer to muddle through and fix things quietly behind the scenes. But muddling through has reached its limits at the heart of government; and incremental changes, such as giving party members more say in choosing their leaders, have created a job that tortures its holders as surely as it weakens the rest of the political system. Britain’s initially dismal response to the pandemic led to a widespread call for inquiries into the workings of the government. The subsequent success of the vaccine roll-out should not lead to the abandonment of this idea. On behalf of the tens of thousands of people who have died unnecessarily because of government failure, some questions need to be asked. They should start at the office of the prime minister.

What is to be done with this impossible job? Mr Garnett favours restoring the old system of cabinet government in which the prime minister was “first among equals”. In a personality-obsessed culture which holds the top man accountable for everything, that is unlikely to work. A more pragmatic alternative might be to recognise the forces of presidentialism and create a properly resourced prime minister’s department. Mr Blair tried to do this by stealth with his IKEA-store worth of Downing Street Units. Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former chief adviser, tried to do it, characteristically, by creating a NASA-style control unit in the Cabinet Office. However it is to be reformed, the job needs to be made doable. Whatever Balfour’s views on the question might have been, it matters quite a lot.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "An impossible job"

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