The nature of the Prime Ministers job has not changed fundamentally since the days of Walpole (172142), regarded as Britains first premier. New roles have appeared, such as leader of his political party in the mid-nineteenth century, while other roles have declined relatively, including the importance of the relations with the monarch and the patronage role. But the complexity of the job, and the speed of response demanded, have changed out of all recognition. In 18067, Lord Grenville received sixty letters a week; by 197074, for Edward Heath, this number had risen to three hundred in an average week; by 1999, Tony Blair received 7,500 letters a week marked Prime Minister over a thousand letters a day. In addition to this postbag, written messages, phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications bombard Number Ten Downing Street. There are daily demands for a position or a statement from the Prime Minister on many subjects, the details of which he will often have but a hazy picture.
How does the Prime Minister manage? He has no more hours in the day or weeks in the year than Walpole had 280 years ago. How does he decide what communications he should see? Which people should he see of the many besieging Number Ten with demands for urgent meetings? How does he decide what speeches to give, how to respond to demands for decisions, how to lead the discussion in meetings and what conclusions he should arrive at, or how to respond when a visiting head of government or minister calls on him?
The simple answer is that he or she does not personally decide most of these questions at all. Forty years ago, Charles Petrie wrote a book, The Powers Behind the Prime Ministers, in which he showed that Prime Ministers from William Gladstone to Stanley Baldwin relied on an official who often became much more important than a mere confidential aide. The position has now changed again. No longer does the premier rely on just one or two key figures for advice: the prime ministership is now an office. In the same way that Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century might claim to have read all printed books, so Prime Ministers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to Lord Salisbury at the start of the twentieth century, could see and read all relevant items and make up their own minds on all key matters. The First World War and Lloyd George changed all that. From then onwards and the expansion of the Number Ten Private Office staffed by career civil servants mirrors the change the premiership in Britain began to become a collective. Aides increasingly took decisions for the Prime Minister, deciding who and what he should see and what he should say. There was nothing sinister in all this: it was inevitable. The Second World War and the expansion in the size of the state saw further growth in the size and scope of the Number Ten Private Office, a trend heightened since the 1960s by Britain joining the EEC in 1973, Northern Ireland, and by the proliferation of the media and their demand for instant responses from the Prime Minister.
Number Ten thus resembles the studio of a great Baroque artist, say Rubens. The finished product bears the masters name, but much of the painting, especially the routine work, was not executed by him. But it is all executed in the style and the name of the master. The great trick of the modern premiership is that Number Ten has to act seamlessly as if everyone important in it is the Prime Minister. This lays great stress on the picking of staff, sufficiently intelligent to advise or act for the master but also sufficiently self-effacing to subdue their own distinctive preferences.
Some critics of British government complain that there is a hole in the middle in Number Ten and that the Prime Minister needs a stronger system of support to provide strategic direction to the rest of Whitehall. The same hole might be said of our knowledge of what goes on in the Prime Ministers office, the Number Ten village. Little is known of the people who work there, how they go about their work and how this has changed in recent years. We have written this book in an attempt to shed light on the work of this village.
We have incurred many debts in this study. First of all we are grateful to over 150 former and present staff in Number Ten who agreed to grant us interviews, some several times. Some of the interviews were off the record, but a number were not. We met only three refusals, from a Principal Private Secretary, a head of the Policy Unit and a Political Secretary to a Prime Minister. Many also kindly agreed to read early versions of our manuscript and, as usual, must remain anonymous. Vernon Bogdanor, Peter Riddell and Rod Rhodes helpfully commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. We are also grateful to Annemarie Weitzel who typed successive versions of the manuscript with her customary speed and skill. Dennis Kavanagh would like to thank Marian Hoffmann and Michelle Harvey at the University of Liverpool for secretarial help. Anthony Seldon would like to thank Mary Anne Brightwell, Lauren Heather and Josie Buckwell at Brighton College. Lewis Baston provided research support for Chapter Two. We are also grateful for help under grant L124261002 from the Economic and Research Councils Whitehall Programme.
The Constrained Premiership
In 1973, Arthur Schlesigner Jr. published the highly acclaimed The Imperial Presidency in which he argued that the powers of the American presidency had grown to such an extent that the office had acquired almost imperial powers. The following year came Richard Nixons resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter two relatively weak Presidents followed before the presidency began to recover under Ronald Reagan.
In the late 1980s the political talk in Britain, with Mrs Thatcher in her prime, was of the over-powerful Premier. Had the consitution become lopsided, and did it need redressing to counter-balance an over-powerful Chief Executive? Then came Mrs Thatchers humiliating fall and the seven years of John Major. With Tony Blairs arrival at Number Ten in May 1997, and his seemingly unstoppable sway, the debate turned to the over-powerful Presidency. Peter Hennessy, the Hercule Poirot of Whitehall studies, published The Prime Minister in 2000, just as Blairs apparently unassailable power was beginning to crumble. Hennessy tells a story of increasing Prime Ministerial power at the expense of Cabinet, Parliament and other key players, including ministers and other stakeholders. The burgeoning size of Number Ten has permitted this accretion of power, which Blair shares in Downing Street, to some extent, with Gordon Brown. In time, Hennessys book may be seen as the British equivalent to The Imperial Presidency.
In the first edition of The Powers Behind the Prime Minister, we took a different line to most commentators. It was Prime Ministerial weakness that we saw, rather than Prime Ministerial power, excessive or otherwise. We argued that Prime Ministerial pro-activity was the exception rather than the rule and that the Prime Minister has been dominant only for a minority of the time. The forces bearing on him, including almost impossibly high expectations and his limited powers of command have meant that he has been the victim of events more often than their shaper. Whenever the Prime Minister has been in control, as perhaps in 194547, 195153, 195761, 196667, 197071, 198286, 198788, 199092 and 19972000, it has often been fragile.
Since 1945 the powers of successive Prime Ministers have probably shrunk. Britains loss of Empire and decline in relative international standing, the governments diminished control over the economy and utilities (in the wake of privatisation) and the hollowing out of the state because of the loss of powers to the EU and the Scottish parliament have reduced the standing of the Prime Minister outside the Westminster village.
