British Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen in 1834 Lord Melbourne was asked to go to the palace to see the king to form a government of Prime Minister and he said I I think it's a damn bore and he said he what he told his secretary he was in many minds what to do but his secretary said why dammit such a position was never occupied by any Greek or Roman and if it only lasts two months it is well worth while to have been Prime Minister of England by God that's true Melbourne replied I'll go now I don't think any of Melbourne's twentieth-century successors have taken that view have shared his doubts and most of them have sought with greater or less determination to get to number 10 Downing Street and perhaps today every newly elected MP has that in mind it's a summit of every politicians ambition now I think it doesn't necessary in joyed the job once they got their Lord Rosebery who was Prime Minister for 18 months from 1894 to 1895 not very happy period said that there were two supreme pleasures in life one is ideal the other is real the ideal is when a man receives the field of office from his sovereign the real is when he hands them back hell Macmillan when he became prime minister in 1957 said that power was like a dead sea fruit when you achieve it there's nothing there John Major once asked Roy Jenkins whether he ever regretted not having been Prime Minister Jenkins is said to have retorted by asking major whether he regretted having been prime minister now the prime ministership is a British invention first Prime Minister's were in Britain and much more recent perhaps than people imagine now the first Prime Minister is generally thought to have been a Sir Robert Walpole over 250 years ago in the 18th century but the title was for a very long period of time a mini courtesy title it seems first have been used satirically by Jonathan Swift during the reign of Queen Anne please and Walpole who was often regarded the first Prime Minister vehemently denied that he held any special role over and above that of the Kings other advisors the term Prime Minister was not actually used in any official document until 1878 when the preamble to the Treaty of Berlin stated that the Earl of Beaconsfield was Disraeli instead he always pronounced it Beaconsfield and not Beck ensue that the other beacons he had attended the Berlin conference as First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister of her Britannic majesty it was not the title was not used in any other official communication until in December 1905 it finally received royal recognition in odd way because a warrant of King Edward the seventh addressed to the Earl marshal said the Prime Minister had precedence after the Archbishop of York so the first man to be officially regardless Prime Minister was there for the now largely forgotten liberal Sir Henry campbell-bannerman in nineteen five the office did not achieve Stanley statutory recognition it wasn't in any statute until even more recently until 1937 the ministers of the crown act and then it was mentioned only incidentally as one minister who got a salary and the office of prime minister in a sense like the British Constitution as a whole evolved through a series of accidents no one planned it or created it and by contrast with for example the presidency of the United States there is no document setting forth the powers and duties of the head of the government they are incensed what he chooses to make of them and I'll say more about that later on the prime minister of course presides over chairs the cabinet that too is a fairly recent and kind of amorphous invention if you look at the beginning of the 20th century the cabinet had no regular time of assembly nor fixed place of meeting and the date of meeting was fixed usually at short notice by the Prime Minister and often the cabinet didn't meet at all for example in September and October 1901 in the middle of the borough war a cabinet did not meet once there were no rules of order then no agenda no record no minutes and it was considered bad form to take notes of what happened at a cabinet meeting and this led to various problems and in 1900 the prime minister Lord Salisbury wrote to his nephew Arthur Balfour also a member of the cabinet he said I'm beginning to think the rule of which we are rather proud there shall be no record of cabinet proceedings as a mistake Balfour replied I agree with you but a brief record of cabinet discussion would be a convenience my own memory in such matters is very untrustworthy and I sometimes find it difficult after our confused discussions to recollect even the instructions I have received on matters which I have myself brought before it the only record the historian has the cabinet meetings before 1916 when a cabinet Secretariat was set out the only record was a letter which the prime minister of the day used to write to the monarch and to say what had happened in the cabinet and prime ministers by the time they came to write this letter them sometimes very tired and the letters were quite perfunctory and insulting often example one letter that campbell-bannerman wrote the King Edward a 7th in nineteen six said the cabinet met today and was entirely engaged with arrangements of public business for the conclusion of the session and that didn't actually I think get help the King very much to what was discussed the cabinet wasn't mentioned in any official document at all the first time we mentioned in Parliament was in an amendment to the address in December 1901 a backbench MP called Barclay put down the following amendment to the address Queen the Queen speaks their most he said we humbly express our regret the advice given to your majesty by the Prime Minister in recommending the appointment of so many of his own family to offices in the cabinet and that was the first mention of the cabinet now I say the Prime Minister presides over the cabinet chairs the cabinet and we always think of the government as the Prime Minister's government and whereas if we were doing the history of earlier periods we're thinking in terms of kings and queens the reign of Henry the eighth's or Charles the first or whatever it may be we think of litical history since 1945 at any rate as written in large part in terms of the twelve Prime Minister's we've held that office and their success or a failure in achieving their aims and instead of talking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first example we talked about the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher or Clement Attlee or Winston Churchill or whatever it may be this may be a bad habit because it may lead us to overestimate the power and influence of the prime minister and again I'll come back to that pointer a bit later but it's first worth asking what factors brought the 12 Prime Minister's since the war beginning with Ashley to number 10 Downing Street and what I think is remarkable is how few of them you would actually predicted would actually get there I think there are only two who were really four ordained in a sense and one of them is Gordon Brown whom I think everybody you wouldn't be Prime Minister after Blair labor continued to hold office the only other one I think was Antony Eden who was the Crown Prince to Winston Churchill for many years became prime minister in 1955 but only lasted over 18 months in the 90 57 resigned from ill health but it's questionable whether he could have survived after the failure of the Suez expedition but it may be that obviously the jurors out on Gordon Brown it may be the reason why Antony Eden was so unsuccessful was that he'd been waiting so long Churchill now McMillan's eat sorry Eden successor Harold Macmillan rather unkindly said that Eden had been trained to win the Derby in 1938 but was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955 when he succeeded Churchill and that was the reason of his fader rather unkind ready he really had to wait too long and wasn't prepared to fight Churchill for the succession Amin Churchill hung on a long time perhaps Milan he should have done today he was over 80 years old and he made a famous remark when asked to retire he said I'm going to remain in the pub till closing time which he almost did but every other Prime Minister has had to fight hard to get the office I think you wouldn't have predicted that any of the others would have got there and some many got there quite unexpectedly now Napoleon always used to ask of his generals have they got luck in without it he said other qualities ability integrity and vision and so on were quite useless and I think that is the important point about many of the prime ministers that they were very lucky to get there I think that's certainly true of the first four prime ministers after the war actly who was prime minister from 1945 to 51 a Churchill who having been Prime's from the war was prime minister in peacetime again from 1951 to 5 Eden 55 to 7 and millon 57 to 63 there was a sense in which all of them were in part the product of luck in this way that without the Second World War none of them I think would have become Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s as is well known have followed a policy of appeasement in the hope that he could avoid war with the dictators as we all know that was unsuccessful but had it been successful there would have been a general election in 1940 which the Conservatives would almost certainly have won now that I think would have meant the end of athle as leader of the Labour Party because he'd been elected as leader of the Labour Party in 1930 five and widely seen as a stopgap until better qualified people could take over in fact he lasted longer as party leader than any other party leader in the twentieth century he remained leader of the Labour Party for twenty years and at the end of his life he he was rather he rather enjoyed writing limericks and the end of his life he said there was a road the following Limerick he said a few thought that he was much of a starter there were many who thought themselves smarter but he ended up PM CH and om an earl and a knight of the Garter but he was thought at the time to be a nonentity and stopgap leader and he would I think have been replaced probably by Herbert Morrison if there hadn't been a war in 1939 and he had also been lucky earlier on because in 1931 the Labour Party had suffered a terrible electoral defeat in which they had been reduced to just 52 MPs and all the cabinet ministers but to lost their seats and at aleene's one of the two and a lot of other people who had claims much greater than at least their seat so out of Parliament during the crucial time and when it came to elect a leader in 1935 at Lee was really the only one available now in the case of Churchill Eden and Macmillan who were the next three prime minister they'd all made their mark in the 1930s as opponents of appeasement opponents of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing the dictators and they would not have got high office in any Conservative government led by Chamberlain in any case it's worth remembering that Churchill by 1940 let alone 1951 by 1940 had already reached the retiring age of 65 if there was a compulsory retiring ancient politicians Churchill would not have been available and he was widely seen as a figure of the past and not of the future were brilliant failure who'd been wrong about many things so he was really saved and by the war and one occasion during the war when he was talking to Harold Macmillan and talking rather interminably about Hitler and millon got a bit fed up with this and said you shouldn't go on about Herr Hitler as much as you do and churches and why he said I hope you're not expressing any sympathy for that man which is the way he was referred to as Hitler and McMillan's had no but it took Hitler to make you Prime Minister and me and undersecretary no one else could have done it and Jackson said well Churchill said well the something to that now Anthony Eden had resigned from the Chamberlain government in 1938 in protest against the attempt to appease Mussolini and he would not have worked his way back to the Conservative Party leadership I think if Chamberlain and his supporters had remained Macmillan was also an opponent of appeasement but even more than that in the 30s he was an unknown and eccentric backbencher with no significant following and I haven't found anyone who thought that he would be a prime minister he was an unimportant backbencher now the next two prime ministers after Harold Macmillan who resigned in 1963 but also I think very lucky the next one was Sir Alec douglas-home and he was lucky because he was a beneficiary in a sense of the sudden illness which brought Macmillan down in 1963 it came in the time of the Conservative Party conference and there was a lot of chaos and confusion and the party turned to what they thought was a safe elder statesman I think he wouldn't have got it in other circumstances Harold Wilson was lucky because like Blair in 1994 he was a beneficiary of the death of sudden and unexpected death of his predecessor Howard Wilson's predecessor was Labour leader was Hugh gates kill who died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1963 just as Blair's predecessor Labour leader was John Smith who died unexpectedly in 1994 and I think Gaitskell and John Smith would would almost certainly become Prime Minister's had they lived and Wilson was widely distressed by Gaitskell and his supporters and and I think would not have got as far as he actually did now going to later prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major I think were even more products of luck and Margaret Thatcher in particular we take her rain very much for granted but I think six months before she became party leader I don't think anyone could have been found to have predicted that she would in in 1974 after the first conservative election defeat Margaret Thatcher seemed to have been not particularly successful former education secretary not even one of the likely leaders of the Conservative Party but Edward Heath seemed fairly secure and no front front ranking conservative was willing to challenge Heath this gave her the opportunity all the others said we're loyal to Edward Heath and they didn't perhaps realize how unpopular Heath was becoming amongst the backbenchers and perhaps in the country and he became discredited by a second general election defeat in October 1974 and that gave Margaret Thatcher her chance had Heath I think resigned immediately after losing the election and she wouldn't have become leader and John major too found himself in the right place at the right time when Margaret Thatcher resigned in November 1990 I think he also was very fortunate now if you look at the history of prime ministers as a whole over the 19th and 20th centuries one thing you notice about those in the 19th century is that they were enormously distinguished and remarkable people who would have made their mark I think even if they hadn't become Prime Minister Gladstone as is well known could have been a classical or theological scholar indeed he did publish articles on homer and on theology while he was prime minister his spare time activity and his diary shhhhht some years ago showed that he maintained throughout his career colossal rate of reading that between the age of 16 and the age of 80 he read on average 240 books a year and that was of course he had other things to do as well but for a book for him would be Voltaire or Homer or Aristotle or whatever not the latest paperback and so he was very remarkable and energetic man and really extraordinary person Disraeli was novelist not in the top rank of English novelist but good second ranked novelist I think he wrote 11 novels and sadly the novel he was writing when he died was an unfinished was was going to be a satire about his great enemy mr. Gladstone it's called folcanet and Falken it was Gladstone there are few chapters of that which can be found if you were curious to read them in the official biography of Disraeli by Moneypenny and buckle it's a six-volume work but in the last volume you can find the this fragment that he wrote about mr. Gladstone I think they're not many Prime Minister's perhaps Gordon Brown would like to write a satirical novel about David Cameron land and inspecting will and his rate to of Jews rate his novels at least the well worth reading Sybil which is about the Chartists and problems the working-class in the 1840s and Coningsby which is a political novel about the Conservative Party there were worth reading still Lord Darby another 19th century prime minister spent his leisure translating the Iliad into blank verse as well as French and German poetry and other classical works now I think you'd agree they're post-war successes have not has not quite as remarkable as that and I think they're over twelve there are only two who could have had much of a career outside politics Macmillan I think could have been a d Basel successful publisher and he when he ceased to be Prime Minister he joined a rejoin the firm Macmillan who are incidentally publishing this book on prime ministers but they're not as efficient as they were in Midlands times it's not yet appeared but it will soon and he ran Millan's firm and he he used to say as Chancellor of Oxford University that he wished Oxford University Press every possible success providing they didn't actually overtake McMillan's is a commercially but I think the one who would have had an outstanding career outside politics from Winston Churchill who would have been a professional I think and all perhaps a general in the army but he in the 1930s and indeed after being Prime Minister he gained a lot of his income through writing he didn't join company boards or do the kinds of things people do now but he had expensive tastes he said only the best is good enough for me and he financed himself by writing he said I lived from mouth to hand because he didn't take his books and he continued to write books even after retirement many of them very remarkable but all of them I think and the practical reason for this all of them were what the 19th century Prime Minister Pat weren't so much they were all professional politicians they lived for politics and perhaps more so than the 19th century politicians now it's now worth perhaps looking at the education of the various Prime Minister's we've had since the war and again going back when Lloyd George became prime minister in in 1916 he told a loyal supporter of his that with the exception of Disraeli he was the first Prime Minister he said who had not passed through the Staff College of the old universities he'd forgotten the Duke of Wellington who also hadn't been to university but all the others have been to Oxford and Cambridge now marshal of the twelve post-war prime ministers all but four have been to Oxford Gordon Brown has been to Edinburgh the other three have not been to university at all which is perhaps remarkable the through haven't been to university are Churchill James Callaghan who was prime minister of 1976 to nine and John Major who was prime minister from 1990 to 1997 and indeed left school at 16 and a sidious journalists found that his educational qualifications were very limited that the 300 levels and he used to say to those who inquired about his education never has so much been written about so little now the main issue that people angst and I think about the role of the Prime Minister is how powerful he is and I want to give you two quotations about the Prime Minister's power the first is is the Prime Minister is the keystone of the cabinet arch and the British system has the advantage of flexibility which allows the Prime Minister to take upon himself a power not inferior to that of ICH Tator provided always of the House of Commons will stand by him and then the second one the precise amount of authority exercised by the prime minister must depend upon circumstances and his own character in some cases he may come near to being a dictator and that I think who would agree is what a lot of people believe about the role of a modern Prime Minister now those two quotations come from 1889 and 1904 so the fears about Prime Minister dictatorship and the dominance of the Prime Minister are really not new and I think a lot of people who talk about perhaps Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher whoever being a dictatorial or dominant Prime Minister really adopt a very short historical perspective now the first claim that I can find that the Prime Minister has become over powerful originated during the administration of Sir Robert Peel from 1841 to 1846 an art appeals resignation in 1846 Gladstone who'd been one of his ministers complained to him that your government has not been carried on by a cabinet but by the heads of departments each in communication with you in other words bilateral sofa government if you like seen things said about Tony Blair lovely cabinet naturally make decisions so these complaints are nothing new now in in 1963 shortly before the end of Harold Macmillan's Premiership Richard Crossman who was a labor shadow minister later become a labor minister he wrote an introduction to the famous book by a badger to the English Constitution and he said the post-war epoch has seen the final transformation of cabinet government into prime ministerial government and in 1965 a book appeared describing the Prime Minister as an elected monarch so the fears about prime ministerial dominance and so on are really not at all new now and I take this view that the power of the Prime Minister shows no evolutionary trend towards an increase and it's a grave error to think that somehow past prime ministers relied totally on their cabinets whereas modern Prime Minister's are content with sofa government or bilateral relationships or whatever it is some years ago I was writing about the Irish Home Rule problem in the 19th century and I was looking at the way Gladstone handled it in his third government in 1886 and when the government was formed he said the told ministers that the government's principle was to make an inquiry into whether home rule was compatible with the British constitution ministers fine and there then awaited events now Gladstone then proceeded to draft a Home Rule bill on his own and presented to the cabinet and more let's tell them that take it or leave it and most of them took it but two ministers resigned in protest but there were certainly no cabinet discussion then about the measures needed to the about how Home Rule should be implemented and so on gladsome did it himself and presented the ministers with our fait accompli so I think people over rate the power of modern prime minister and under 8 the power of prime ministers of the past such as Peel Gladstone Lord George and and so on and in my opinion the proper power of the Prime Minister I chose no evolutionary trend but there's an ebb and flow it depends upon vicissitudes electoral and personal vicissitudes and as I said I think Gladstone and Lloyd George were at least as powerful and dominant over their colleagues as shall we say Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair let me give some examples from the past which may interest you campbell-bannerman who's not normally thought of as a strong primes of liberal Prime's from nineteen five to eight he held staff conversations with France which committed Britain in effect the defence of France but he certainly didn't tell his cabinet about them and they were completely unaware of them Churchill committed Britain to the defense of Soviet Russia in 1941 when she was attacked by Germany without consulting any of his cabinet colleagues as soon as he heard that Russia was attacked he say we will come to the aid of Russia in the cabinet then agreed prefer Hatchin but he didn't bother to consult his cabinet most strikingly actly again not often thought of as perhaps and strong Prime Minister he kept from his cabinet the announcement that Britain was to become an atomic power that Britain was going to make nuclear weapons the cabinet did not know about this there was no mention of it in the crucial cabinet meeting in May 1948 nor indeed in the hand written record of the cabinet secretary of that meeting and when he was asked ten years later in an interview why he had kept his hidden from his colleagues from in the cabinet actly said I thought some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind in 1962 Harold Macmillan's sat seven ministers in his cabinet in one night the so-called night of the Long Knives seven out of twenty one a third of the cabinet in 1962 now I think wouldn't have been easy for Tony Blair to do that or Gordon Brown or even Margaret Thatcher in some ways and as I say I think there was no ebb that there is no evolution of and flow now the earlier quotation I gave about the power of a prime minister becoming like a dictator its rested on the proposition provided that the House of Commons will stand by him and that is a crucial thing now Margaret Thatcher in 1990 found that the House of Commons meaning her own backbench MPs would no longer stand by her and then her power disappeared it went just as Neville Chamberlain found that in 1940 and Lloyd George founded in 1922 that these seemingly very strong Prime Minister's suddenly found their power crumbling from beneath them but I think there's an even more important factor determining of Prime Minister's power and that is their standing with the electorate how they stand in public opinion now I think one of the reasons why Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair seemed powerful Prime Minister's was that they won landslide victories electorally a Margaret Thatcher won two landslides in 1983 and 1987 where now I'm winning a majority 144 in 1983 a hundred in 1987 Tony Blair - landslides in 2001 and 2005 sorry in 1997 and 2001 1997 whatever happened 67 2001 very similar 165 now by 2005 that majority had formed a 66 and I think one notice Blair was much weaker than and he couldn't even determine the time of his going he was by all accounts got it but perhaps fairly reliable and he in effect pushed out by Gordon Brown I had to leave earlier than he he would have wanted to but for a time these landslide majorities admittedly Andrew are perhaps rather odd electoral system because they're very far from getting 50 percent of the vote about between 42 and 44 percent of the vote in each case but under the system as it works landslide majorities so both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair could say to their cabinet I have put you where you are you have your you're in this position because of me this is a personal victory by me it's a personal manifesto and therefore I have great Authority and power without me you wouldn't be here but of course that isn't typical because the average Prime Minister has either won a small electril majority or as in the case of Gordon Brown or Callaghan in the 1970s or John Major before 1992 they haven't yet fought an election at all and perhaps don't look like election winners and in those circumstances a prime minister I think doesn't have very much power I think power has gone back to the cabinet diagnosis of circumstances now I mean Gordon Brown generally thought perhaps find it very difficult to win the general elections I had anything he's in the position to be a strong Prime Minister in the way that Blair was I don't know anything to do with the personal qualities or lack of particular personal problems but the electoral situation in which he finds himself the same was true of Margaret Thatcher in her first term from 1979 to 1983 before the Falklands War at any rate when she'd won a majority admittedly but a fairly small one of 43 her economic policy seemed in some difficulty unemployment was high inflation was high and she hadn't yet shown her remarkable qualities and I think at that stage she did have to defer much more to the cabinet than she did later on so I think there's an ebb and flow of prime ministerial power which can't be explained in terms of any simple model of an evolution of cabinet government to prime ministerial government and I think whenever people complain as they did under Tony Blair the Prime Minister having become too powerful Sofer government or whatever the phrase is I think one has to tell them to look at the history of the office and how there is this urban flow of power and I think if we don't like the power of the Prime Minister being the prime much power as ascension which we shouldn't blame the prime minister or the cabinet but blame ourselves for giving them such a large majority if you don't want the primes to have too much power give them large majorities on the other hand it's fair to say that between 1992 and 1997 when John Major had a small majority of 21 it's very difficult to govern particularly on Europe because any 11 Euroskeptics voting against him could defeat him and he said trouble is I had a majority of 21 the 13 of whom were mad and in the middle to get a majority on a lot of these issues but he had to weave and tack and turn to hold position to get the Maastricht Treaty through for example and people didn't then say wasn't it wonderful Prime Minister isn't too strong anymore too powerful they said this is weak government and no clear sense of directions not what we want so and away as the electorate we're never satisfied we say we want strong government but when we get it we say the Prime Minister's become too powerful too strong and when we correct that by giving the small majority to a government we say well there is too weak and this isn't very satisfactory but as I say if the Prime Minister too strong I think we should blame ourselves as much as we do the Prime Minister unless that's what we really want in which case we perhaps shouldn't complain at all it's worth saying that there that there seems a natural reaction against all this that Margaret Thatcher a powerful Prime Minister but went to farm was pushed out by her colleagues eventually she hadn't realized the force of the movement against her and the cabinet in the end said they weren't prepared to support her she had to leave and Tony Blair as I said a few moments ago forced to accelerate his retirement if you look indeed at post-war Prime Minister's I think it's remarkable that the owners only one whom we can be sure left office voluntarily and that is Harold Wilson who was under pressure to retire but simply made a decision that he was going to go but I think every other Prime Minister's either pushed out by the Cabinet by Parliament or by the electorate and perhaps ill-health sometimes was used as an excuse for that it's a salutary lesson I think now as I said we often complain about powerful and strong Prime Minister's but it seems to me that only a strong Prime Minister can give a government a clearer sense of direction and that when a Prime Minister fails to do so and perhaps the Prime Minister who've been most accused of that in post-war years was Anthony Eden but there also been others how Wilson I think John John major as well but when that happens you don't get strong cabinet government you just get a failure of Direction a failure of government and the cabinet doesn't operate properly it operates just as a collection of government departments rather than a collective form of government and it seems me that cabinet government if it is to work effectively actually presupposes a strong prime minister not perhaps too strong and we could argue about the precise balance not perhaps too strong but a prime minister with a clear sense of direction and a determination to achieve them so I think there's no contradiction between the idea of a strong Prime Minister and the idea of cabinet government I think the one presupposes the other they're interconnected and they're interdependent now I think that the best account of the role of a prime minister was actually written well before the post-war era in a book by askwith who was prime minister from nineteen 8 to 16 and after he retired he wrote a book called 50 years of parliament published in 1926 and in that chapter in that book there's a chapter on the role of a prime minister and he says that precisely because the Premiership the position is a product not of a constitutional document but of historical evolution he says there is not and cannot be from the nature of the case any authoritative definition of the precise relation of the Prime Minister to his colleagues and I agree with that there can't be any authoritative account because it's the product of history and not the document in the way the American constitutions were French or the German and he then says and I think is absolutely right the office of Prime is what its holder chooses and is able to make of it chooses but also is able to make of it what Parliament and Weezie electorate enable him to make of it and I think that is a key point now the Prime Minister in running his government has a I think a very old difficult isn't often pointed out that he's in a much weaker position than the heads of government in other countries because he has much less institutional support this is obviously the case when you look at a presidential system for example the American president has a huge office of advisers all working for him and the American cabinet is not like our cap and it's not a collective form of government it's he's a group of advisers and the famous story is told about an American president I think it's Lincoln he took the votes and said there are 19 against and one for the one has it because the one was him and the others are all the advisers they're not part of a collective machinery of government and when we think of American cabinet ministers we shouldn't think we shouldn't compare them with our own cabinet means they're more like administrative heads of departments more like permanent secretaries the Secretary of State in America is more like the permanent head of the Foreign Office than the foreign secretary because he or she is an advisor to the president are not part of the collective decision-making procedure now extending obvious in a presidential system people have much greater weight but even in other parliamentary systems example in Germany the Chancellor has a larger a large private office and in other Westminster type systems in Canada and Australia they have departments of the prime minister with over a thousand people working there they admittedly include people working in our Cabinet Office as well but still many more than working in number 10 and number 10 has I think no more about 150 people and that includes people carrying out secretarial functions very small basis for advice and the Prime Minister lacks the institutionalized advice which to depart the large Department of Whitehall has foreign office Treasury and the like and it's it's it's easy to mock bureaucracy and so on but if you're in government it does help to have a bureaucracy of your own to counter the bureaucracy of other people and people who worked in number ten have told me they're more impressed by the weakness of number ten than by its strength that it really hasn't got the institutional strength you might hope that a head of government executive would have now that relates to if you like the managerial function of the prime minister but i think it's a mistake to imagine that the main role of a prime minister is a chairman of the board or a managerial function it seems to me the main role of the prime minister is to give a sense of direction to the government and i think a number of great leaders I don't Churchill's perhaps an obvious example we're not particularly good administrators or managers but were able to give a sense of direction to the government conversely some leaders have been pretty good managers but poor giving a sense of direction I think it's a fair criticism of actly I think is myself rather overrated in recent years that he was a very good chairman of the cabinet very good at getting the business through but couldn't inspire the country or even his colleagues to any sense of direction as to where his government was going inspire them now the manager helps an organization survive and make decisions but the leader gives it a sense of purpose and indeed if you look at most of the reason why most MPs want to be Prime Minister and particularly the twelve who've become prime minister is not I think solely for reasons of personal aggrandizement or power but because they have large public purposes which they have sought to fulfill and which so they believed only they could fulfill I mean actly for example sought to create a society based on fellowship over what he thought of fairer and more just society than the capitalist society which he inherited a different sort of society that was his main aim Churchill wants to restore Britain's authority and power in the world and was why he was in politics fundamentally to ensure that Britain had had more respect in the world play a larger part in world affairs howlin I think wanted to adjust Britain's role to her circumstances that was why he made the first application to join the European community in 1961 Harold Wilson wanted to show that socialism was still relevant in the world of science and technology Margaret Thatcher wanted to reverse what she saw as decline of her country to make Britain powerful again by establishing better economic conditions bringing the trade unions in the framework of the law and so on and John Major and Tony Blair in a sense sought to humanize her legacy so I think when we're judging various Prime Minister's and seeking to ask ourselves how successful they actually were we're not looking at them as I say as chairman of the board or as managing but we're looking as leaders did they seek to achieve the aims that they set themselves how successful were they in doing that and obviously different people have different judgments about that but let me end by the pessimistic comment made by Enoch Powell when he said that all political lives unless cut off in mid-career end in failure because that is the nature of politics and I think it's probably fair to say that you can go through the vest Prime Minister's since the war with that in mind I mean at Lee was defeated in 1951 and I think by 1951 in any case his idea of transforming society in a socialist direction taking a bit of a knock Churchill sought to increase Britain's power in the world but at the end of his career in 1955 it was clear and even clear in the series expedition has occurred 18 months after a time and it was clear that Britain's power was going downwards Harold Macmillan failed to adjust Britain's role to her service and he didn't get us get Britain into Europe which he hoped to do didn't regenerate the economy Wilson didn't succeed in showing that socialism could scientifically and technologically relevant to the modern age Heath Heath the only achievement of Heath which remains for good or ill that he got Britain to Europe but everything else he tried to do was reversed by the successor governments of Wilson and Callahan Margaret Thatcher certainly felt that her legacy was betrayed by John Major particularly in the case of the Maastricht Treaty which he thought was treason to the country and perhaps Tony Blair feels the same with regard to Gordon Brown we don't know but I end on that note a very pessimistic note and you may think perhaps not none of this lecture offers much good cheer to Gordon Brown but there's good cheer for you all I hope because of the reception now and place the usual questions there's a reception in what was the Headmaster's study where there are drinks and their seats I think and everyone is invited to that and thank you very much for listening to me

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Keywords: Prime Minsiter, politics, government, history, political history, British Politics, British Political History, History of Government, British Government, British History, Westminster, Vernon Bogdanor, Attlee, Blair, Constitution, British Constitution, Bogdanor, Gresham College, Gresham, Politics lecture, Politics talk, History lecture, History talk, lecture, talk, London

Id: 1YaSZdhmgPA

Length: 45min 5sec (2705 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2011