Churchill to Major: The British Prime Ministership since 1945

The British Prime Ministership since 1945

R.L. Borthwick, Martin Burch, Philip Giddings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315481517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This text summarizes the research on, and experiences of, democratic legislatures around the world. It focuses on what legislatures are and what they do - as both consequence of and contributor to democratic self-government.

1
THE OFFICE OF PRIME MINISTER

Donald Shell¹

No one invented the office of prime minister. No inaugural moment marks the deliberate creation or commencement of the office. There has never been any authoritative definition or delineation of the powers of the prime minister, and even today the duties that a prime minister must fulfil remain without precise definition. The essential qualifications for the office are nowhere specified, nor are disqualifications anywhere formally laid down. Appointment to the office is not for any fixed period of time and there is no limit on the length of time that a particular prime minister may serve. Nor are there clear-cut procedures by which the removal of a prime minister from office can be attained. In all these ways the office may be said to be characteristic of the uncodified British Constitution.

Potentially a prime minister is a very powerful figure. The holder of this office is heir to the prerogatives of the Crown and is also the leading figure in parliament. All the institutions of the state focus on the prime minister. Prime ministers appoint and dismiss ministers and a host of other senior servants of the state; they have the capacity to initiate policy and to shape the very structure of government itself. At least, if the prime minister does not do these things, no one else can do them. The modern prime minister is aptly described as an ‘elected monarch’.²

While no formal constitution prescribes rules about this office, it may nevertheless be argued that the understandings about how it is discharged, about the powers that may be exercised and the limits which may be imposed upon those powers, are all quite clear. How has this come about? How has the office developed? And what duties and functions are now recognised as belonging to the office of the prime minister? These are the main questions addressed in this chapter. It begins by examining the origins and development of the office up to the twentieth century, and then considers how in modern times it is attained. Then follows a brief overview of the main tasks that the prime minister carries out, so setting the scene for the chapters that follow.

The Origin and Development of the Office

In a formal sense the United Kingdom is governed by the Crown in Parliament, as it has been for some seven centuries. No limit has been placed on the legal power of the Crown in Parliament (at least until accession to the European Community took place in 1973). Here is the kernel of the Constitution. And it is not clear that the formal Constitution actually consists of anything beyond this kernel. Though all manner of other things may be said about the constitutional arrangements which now prevail, or which have at various times in the past prevailed, such statements can do no more than fill out the detail, indicating how, for the time being, the system operates. Such detail can and does change; and, when this happens, it simply happens. Constitutional change is not a matter of altering by formal process specially formulated rules. Rather it is a matter of altering the way things are done, and in so doing changing the expectations politicians and other have of the method by which the British as a people are governed.

The relationship between the Crown and Parliament has altered profoundly over the centuries. Central to that process has been the emergence of the office of prime minister, and the transfer of powers vested in the Crown from the person of the monarch to the prime minister.³ Parliament is not and never has been an initiating body; rather, it emerged as a body through which the consent of the people, or at least that section of the public which mattered in political terms, could be mobilised. Strong monarchs could at times treat Parliament roughly or ignore it or even simply send it packing. But prudence generally dictated otherwise. And when prudence was not heeded in the later Stuart period, conflict resulted. The seventeenth-century upheavals resulted in the rights of parliament being asserted and to some degree spelt out in a Bill of Rights. The institutions of Crown and Parliament continued, but the relationship between the two had altered and were to continue to alter, as indeed was their composition. At the interface between Crown and parliament the role first of a cabinet and then of a prime minister emerged.

Perhaps some court favourites from pre-seventeenth-century days can be seen as precursors of the office of prime minister. Such figures organised support for the King. They orchestrated in his name the work of government. They negotiated on his behalf. But they owed their position solely to monarchical favour. The seventeenth-century revolution altered that. The government remained the King’s government in the sense that it was the monarch who appointed and dismissed ministers, and who by and large decided the matters upon which he wanted the advice of ministers. The old doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings may have been dead, but democracy in the modern sense had certainly not arrived, even if a monarch could never again rule with disregard to parliament. At the end of the seventeenth-century and for much of the eighteenth, those in power had little enthusiasm for defining precisely where power lay, and still less in pushing to an apparently logical conclusion the outcome of the Cromwellian revolution and the Restoration. Too much blood had been spilt, and too much danger lurked in such an exercise. Rather, people tried to work the arrangements which they had been bequeathed.

In so doing those arrangements were of course adjusted and modified. A gradual evolution took place. Incrementally power shifted, and understanding of the system altered. From the large and formal Privy Council an ‘inner cabinet council’ or ‘cabal’ emerged. This consisted of the men chosen by the King and responsible to him for the exercise of that power which was delegated to them from above, so to speak. But increasingly they were also seen as responsible to the parliament in which they sat, and the power of government which they exercised was recognised as at least partly coming up from below, from the people, mediated through parliament. It became necessary for these ministers to command the support of parliament, and that necessity thereby became a vital qualification for appointment to office. Out of that group a chief minister or a principal minister – or, as some would have it, a prime minister – emerged. He was simply the King’s chief adviser.

The term ‘prime minister’ crept into use slowly and at least initially its sense was pejorative. Its first use in Britain is generally attributed to the great satirist Jonathan Swift who, during the reign of Queen Anne, borrowed the term already applied to France’s chief minister and applied it to Godolphin and Harley. Subsequently and throughout the eighteenth century various ministers were at different times called prime minister, but the title was frequently resisted by those to whom it was applied. Walpole in the 1720s denied that he was prime minister; North and Greville both disavowed the term, while Pitt preferred to be principal minister. Only in the early nineteenth century did the title prime minister become quite inescapable, but even then – and ever since – the term has found little expression in the formal language of the state.⁴

Walpole’s twenty-one years in office have earned for him by general acknowledgement the title of Britain’s first prime minister. Appointed First Lord of the Treasury in 1721, his position was enhanced in 1729 with the removal from office of his rival Townshend; thereafter Walpole was in full control of the cabinet. If that were one reason why he has been so widely credited as Britain’s first prime minister, the second concerns the manner by which he left office, for he resigned on losing a vote of confidence in parliament. Hence: ‘Whether or not he [Walpole] deserves the title no one before him does.’⁵ If he is seen as the first prime minister, it would be quite wrong to imagine that during his period in office any clear understandings about the nature of the office were formulated, still less any clear rules that subsequent premiers would of necessity be required to observe. For another generation, until the appointment of Pitt in 1770, party lines in the Commons were so chaotic that no one was able to fulfil a role such as Walpole’s.

Robert Blake discerns three especially formative periods in the emergence of the office.⁶ The first of these was 1782-4 when the resignation of Lord North swept an entire ministry from office. Party lines were becoming clearer and it was apparent that, while monarchs might initiate the choice of ministers, they must accept from parliament a veto power over who should be appointed prime minister. It was the changed relationship between monarch and parliament that was emphasised in these years. But the government still remained in a real sense that of the King, and until the 1830s the patronage power of the Crown ensured that no government actually lost an election. However, the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832 largely destroyed the rotten boroughs and brought in its wake the break-up of the old system of politics. This is the second of Blake’s formative periods. Government henceforth had to be based on party.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• The Authors
• 1. The Office of Prime Minister
• 2. Prime Minister and Cabinet
• 3. Prime Minister and Parliament
• 4. Prime Minister and Whitehall
• 5. Prime Ministers and their Parties
• 6. Prime Minister and the Public: Managing Media Relations
• 7. The Prime Minister and International Relations
• 8. The Prime Ministership, 1945-1995
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index