Even if original diaries were redacted before publication, their main value for scholars lay in the unwitting revelations – often ones which the authors thought too trivial to leave out. In this respect, Labour politicians and their highly placed supporters have been far more prolific than their Conservative counterparts, so that anyone who was sufficiently interested could compile a voluminous day-to-day record of New Labour’s period in office (1997–2010) on the basis of these publications. The main contributor to this avalanche of research-rich material is Alastair Campbell. While his friend Alan Clark enriched Britain’s political literature by recounting the experiences of a narcissist who came close to the inner circles of British government, Campbell’s published diaries are the reflections of an incurable, indefatigable reporter, whose diligence as a diarist makes even the prolific Tony Benn look like a dilettante.
(4) Journalists: these include authors who have provided day-to-day snapshots for various media outlets, as well as those (like Andrew Rawnsley and Tim Shipman) who have published substantial studies of specific episodes. It seems churlish to deny the most perceptive of these authors honorific membership of the ‘contemporary historian’ club. They are distinguished here by their different vantage point, as bona fide inhabitants of the ‘Westminster village’ rather than occasional academic visitors.
(5) Last, but emphatically not least, are political scientists whose contributions are outlined in the rest of this section, mainly for the benefit of students of the subject. Readers with non-academic reasons for reading the book can be assured that this part of the literature is not revisited until the concluding chapter; and even then the main purpose of the discussion is to summarize the argument offered here rather than to engage too closely with existing interpretations.
For political scientists who have examined the role since 1945, the key questions have concerned the decision-making power of Prime Ministers – ‘Can they dominate the policy-making agenda, or are they heavily constrained by the Cabinet and/or other significant actors?’ – and an evaluation of the role in relation to institutions in other countries (e.g. ‘Is the British Prime Minister becoming more like a US President?’). Before 1979, the most widely discussed contributions came from scholars who argued that the Prime Minister’s role was superseding that of the Cabinet, which since the publication in 1867 of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1963) had been regarded as the fulcrum of the British system. According to the revised argument, Britain’s government was now essentially ‘prime ministerial’. Significantly, the best-known proponents of this view – John Mackintosh (1929–78) and Richard Crossman (1907–74) – were both active political practitioners as well as academics.
This new interpretation was not universally accepted, partly because of its troubling implications but also because it seemed at best an over-simplification of the real situation. All systems of government are complex – not least liberal democracies, which are supposed to depend on the voluntary adjustment of interests, mediated by sophisticated bureaucracies as well as political parties which are influential in themselves. Even before the advent of Margaret Thatcher, political scientists had qualified the picture presented by Mackintosh and Crossman (e.g. Jones, 1965, 167–85). They were joined in 1976 by an even more eminent analyst-practitioner, the recently retired Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who tried to demonstrate that Cabinet government was alive and well, thanks not least to his own unswerving fealty to constitutional convention (Wilson, 1976).
In his introduction to a volume devoted to the role of the Prime Minister, Anthony King wrote that, ‘With luck, interest in the remarkable premiership of Margaret Thatcher will have the effect of further stimulating interest in the prime ministership’ (King, 1985, 10). This was a pretty safe expectation, although the debate became more contentious after Thatcher had left office. Michael Foley’s provocative book The Rise of the British Presidency (published in 1993) asserted that Thatcher’s approach to governance had taken Britain beyond a merely ‘prime ministerial’ system, and that in important respects she had acted as if she were a President. As an expert in US politics, Foley was able to identify specific examples of ‘presidential’ tendencies during the Thatcher years. Using terms like ‘spatial leadership’ and ‘leadership stretch’, he argued that just like a US President British Prime Ministers can distance themselves from their parties, exploiting the media in particular as a means of reinforcing the idea that their authority arises from a personal connection with the electorate (Foley, 1993).
Foley’s book could have appeared at a more propitious time. By 1993 Thatcher’s successor, John Major, was projecting a very different style of leadership. Arguably, then, even if a British ‘presidency’ had risen during the 1980s it had sunk along with Thatcher herself – indeed her downfall could be attributed to a reaction against her domineering style. This course of events seemed to verify the opinion of the former Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, who wrote in 1970 that a Prime Minister who ‘habitually ignored the cabinet … could rapidly come to grief’ (Gordon Walker, 1972, 106). Normality seemed to be restored under Major, and for most political scientists ‘normality’ meant collective government. The membership of the ‘collective’ did not necessarily coincide exactly with the ministers who formed the Cabinet, but this had never been the case. Rather, the ‘core executive’ consisted of the Prime Minister and representatives of institutions which enjoyed ‘resources’ of various kinds – that is, ministers in the most important departments and their senior civil servants (see, for example, Rhodes and Dunleavy, 1993; Smith, 1999). The ‘prime ministerial/presidential’ approaches depicted politics as a ‘zero-sum game’, in which an accretion of power for the Prime Minister entailed a corresponding loss for other actors and institutions. The ‘core executive model’ rejected this picture, presenting the relationship between the Prime Minister and senior colleagues as one of mutual dependence and co-operation. There was room in the core executive model for special advisers, too, but these relative newcomers to the political scene were not regarded as very significant since their ‘resources’ depended on ministerial favour – that is, if their political employers were unhappy with their services, their influence could be ended abruptly.
By the end of the millennium events had moved on, and in 2000 Foley published a new version of his book with a defiant title (The British Presidency) which suggested that his interpretation was now established fact rather than a provocative hypothesis. His argument was based chiefly on the first Blair Government (1997–2001), whose practices seemed in many respects to transcend Thatcher’s tentative ‘presidential’ steps. However, as Foley himself knew very well, any claim that Britain was governed by a President was bound to run into the objections that its head of government was a constitutional monarch, and the Prime Minister (unlike a President) was directly responsible to Parliament. Foley’s readers would be aware that he was trying to identify presidential features which had crept into a system whose formal constitutional status had not changed. However, his titles (and, often, his style of writing) gave a contrary impression; and others were less equivocal in their equation of New Labour with ‘presidential’ government. Indeed, the emphatically un-Blairite Labour MP Graham Allen published a very lively tract arguing that it would be much better for Britain if it implemented a formal presidential system of government, rather than suffering from the drawbacks which inevitably arose from a hybrid presidential/parliamentary system (Allen, 2003).
Despite Blair’s presidential style the core executive approach was still generally accepted among political scientists at the time of his resignation in 2007 (Diamond, 2014, 193–213). It received timely support from scholars, notably Andrew Blick and George Jones, who found plentiful precedents for contemporary developments, even in the practices of the earliest Prime Ministers like Walpole and Pitt the Younger, who had employed the ancestors of today’s ‘spin doctors’ and special advisers (Blick and Jones, 2010). While invaluable from an historical point of view, this plus ca change approach could be countered by the argument that examples drawn from the period before universal adult suffrage (1928) related to a very different political context. Since then, the exigencies of ‘total war’ would have promoted a lasting enhancement of the Prime Minister’s role, even under a premier with none of Churchill’s relish for supreme command, or Clement
