win the confidence of Conservative MPs after the 2017 general election, despite the fact that her attempts to bat back or evade the weekly quota of questions remained reasonably competent through her various trials.
Admirers of the British system of government tend to lay considerable emphasis on PMQs; Harold Wilson even described it as ‘the high tribunal of the nation’ (Wilson, 1976, 141). Equally, of course, critics bemoan its triviality and the bad manners exhibited by the rival tribes; to them, it can never be more than a hollowed-out sham of democratic accountability, giving Prime Ministers with a decent memory and a talented team of gag writers a clear advantage over MPs who try to develop and sustain a spontaneous and persuasive line of argument. In truth, PMQs is as good, or as bad, as the current Prime Minister and Parliament (led by the Speaker) allow it to be. The only constant factor is that it increases the public prominence of the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition.
Choosing a champion
Before the period under review, there were already signs that parliamentary prowess was becoming less important as a qualification for the leadership of Britain’s main parties. In 1963, Harold Macmillan manipulated the informal process to choose a Conservative leader in favour of the Foreign Secretary Lord Home, who promptly disclaimed his title and entered the Commons as Prime Minister and plain old Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The latter did have experience of the House, but this had ended in 1951, when he assumed his hereditary title. As such, the returning Home was in a worse position than a parliamentary novice, who might have adjusted to the Commons fairly quickly. In 1951, the Labour leader had been the mild-mannered public school product Clement Attlee, whereas as Prime Minister Sir Alec would have to face up to Harold Wilson, whom even Macmillan (who had served in the Commons almost continuously since 1931) recognized as an unusually artful opponent.
Consciously or not, Macmillan and his co-conspirators were acting on the thoroughly modern assumption that Home’s parliamentary performances would not matter: he would be able to command a majority in the Commons because he was Prime Minister. If Home’s tenure of No. 10 had depended on his ability to match Wilson as a parliamentary performer, the result of the 1964 general election would not have been close; no objective observer could have denied Wilson’s superiority. As it was, although the Conservatives lost the election they did well enough to deny Labour a secure majority. Although most of the party had rallied behind Home, after the 1964 election the Conservatives tacitly accepted that Macmillan had made a mistake and did their best to ensure that it could not be repeated. The party rules were changed, so that MPs would be given a formal vote for party leader rather than allowing an individual to ‘emerge’ (as Home had done) through informal consultations with senior party figures. The first beneficiary was Edward Heath, who was chosen on the ill-founded assumption that he could match Wilson at the dispatch box.
The long-running rivalry between Wilson and Heath was ended by the latter’s deposition as Tory leader in 1975; Wilson stepped down as Prime Minister in the following year. Unlike the Conservatives, the Parliamentary Labour Party had always followed a formal procedure for the election of its leader, so the kind of coup engineered by Macmillan on behalf of a personal favourite was not open to Wilson. However, he gave his preferred successor, James Callaghan, advance notice of his intention to resign. Undoubtedly Wilson’s choice was influenced to some extent by confidence in Callaghan’s ability to cut a suitably ‘prime ministerial’ figure in Commons debates, despite Labour’s failure to win a secure majority in either of the elections of 1974.
By contrast, Heath’s refusal to stand down as leader after the general election of October 1974 – his third failure to win a majority in four attempts – provoked a further change in the Conservative Party’s rules (overseen, appropriately, by Sir Alec Douglas-Home) which for the first time allowed challenges to incumbent leaders. While other possible challengers flinched, Margaret Thatcher stood against and beat Heath in February 1975. In this case, Thatcher was rewarded for her remarkable chutzpah in standing against the first Conservative leader who had been chosen by an electoral process of any kind. However, she had also shown herself to be a very effective parliamentary debater as part of the Conservative team attacking Labour’s economic policy, so her supporters had no reason for apprehension on that score.
Between 1979 and the time of writing (July 2020), the two main parties have been led by sixteen individuals (leaving aside caretaker leaders). Of these, many had qualities which would have made them respectable candidates in the days when parliamentary performance was a crucial consideration for aspiring leaders. However, at least two (one from each side) would certainly not have been chosen if parliamentary performance had been more than the marginal factor which it must have been for Macmillan in 1963; indeed, before 1979 any leadership aspirations they had shown would have been taken as signs of eccentricity.
The individuals in question only rose to the leadership of their respective parties because of further rule changes, which took the final choice of leader away from those who were really qualified to judge their performances in the Commons – that is, Bagehot’s ‘electoral college’, the MPs. By 1997, both Labour and the Conservatives had tried to appease their grassroots members by giving them an important role in leadership elections. In the Conservative case, the new system at least permitted MPs to reduce the field of contestants to two over a series of ballots before handing the final verdict to party members. But in 2001 this parliamentary safety net proved to consist of over-cooked spaghetti, when the anticipated run-off between candidates from the left and the right of the party (Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo respectively) failed to materialize, since Portillo’s underwhelming campaign had been further damaged by rumours concerning his personal history. Almost by default, the candidate previously designated as the ‘honourable runner-up’ by the Conservative right wing, Iain Duncan Smith, took Portillo’s place as the challenger to Clarke, who had narrowly won the third and final ballot among MPs and had all the necessary attributes for leadership except antipathy towards the European Union. This single disadvantage was enough to secure victory for Duncan Smith (Bale et al., 2019, 135–6). Thus, the leadership of a great political party passed to an individual whose only claim to prominence had been his persistent record of rebellion against its European policy during the 1990s – something of which he openly boasted during the 2001 leadership battle.3 The MPs who voted for Duncan Smith in preference to Portillo did so in the full knowledge that there could be no serious comparison between these two individuals as parliamentary performers (Denham and O’Hara, 2008, 59–62).
If the parliamentary perspective really mattered, the choice of Duncan Smith looks even more maladroit than Michael Foot’s elevation to the Labour leadership in 1980. Presenting Foot as a potential Prime Minister was widely seen as a hopeless instance of miscasting, not least (and significantly) because he had been badly injured in a car accident in 1963 and thus looked older than his years in television appearances. However, Foot was a Rolls-Royce compared to Duncan Smith’s Reliant Robin in terms of parliamentary skills. Although the House of Commons is irredeemably partisan, the acid test for a good leader in that environment must still be the hypothetical case in which the final outcome of key votes depends on the eloquence of rival speakers. More realistically, a party leader with a gift for oratory is better equipped to enthuse the party faithful than someone whose speeches, in terms of delivery and content, would only appeal to those whose minds are closed to any alternative position. Although he was seen as a disastrous leader, Foot always received (and deserved) a respectful hearing in the House; Duncan Smith was not even very good at preaching to the converted (as he demonstrated at his party’s conferences). A less sentimental party than Labour would have dispensed with Foot’s services before the 1983 general election; a less ideological party than the Conservatives would not have allowed Duncan Smith anywhere near the leadership in the first place.
Labour took more than a decade to emulate the Tories in this respect. But in 2010 it showed distinct symptoms of plumping for leadership candidates who pleased the party as a whole regardless of their parliamentary prowess, when the preference of MPs for David, rather than Ed, Miliband was over-ridden by other elements of the party. In terms of parliamentary stature, David was the better qualified
