The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Mission creep at No 10
Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, wouldn’t recognise the job that is required today
THE IMPOSSIBLE OFFICE by Anthony Seldon
430pp, Cambridge, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £19.99, ebook £14.20 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Three hundred years ago, on April 3 1721, Robert Walpole became what we now regard as the first prime minister of Great Britain. It would be another 125 years before an incumbent would actually call himself “prime minister” – that was Robert Peel – but by the definition of a head of government with the authority to run it, we are now on the 55th holder.
Since the 1730s they have had the right to live in 10 Downing Street, but it has only been usual to do so since the early 20th century. The job has changed in many ways – the
prime minister’s relations with the sovereign, and his or her fellow ministers; the workload; the constant scrutiny of round-the-clock mass media; and the demands of a massively expanded electorate. No wonder that, at the end of this book, Sir Anthony Seldon asks whether the job these days is impossible.
Seldon and his collaborators have compiled a book that is part instructional, part Wisden-style almanac on the sport of prime ministering. It would be an ideal textbook for a politics student, and that is very much how it reads. It is a good guide to the constitutional position of the Sovereign’s Minister; less satisfactory when evaluating the merits of holders of the office. Seldon sets much store in categorising the prime ministers by their capacity to innovate, which seems an unduly technocratic yardstick. But then there is a difference
between how political theorists view the prime minister and the inevitably less detached fashion in which we in the masses do.
Seldon has good sources in the present civil service, one of whom has told him that when the present prime minister started the job, he was told by Sir Mark Sedwill, the then cabinet secretary, that there were two ways of doing it. He could “operate in a loose way”, like Ronald Reagan did, or he could be an “interventionist”, like Gordon Brown. It is interesting that Sir Mark could not think of a “loose” British prime minister to exemplify the style of government that he, correctly, thought Boris Johnson would adopt. There will be many in the Conservative party who hope he turns out even half so well as Reagan. Seldon is especially interesting on his outrageous treatment of the Queen in the autumn of 2019, when
she consented to a prorogation under false pretences; after a legal action, parliament was recalled.
It took so long for a prime minister to call himself by that title because the constitutional theory was that the King was his own minister. That was a pretence even before Walpole began to exercise “independent authority” and, despite the trail of nonentities that followed him until Pitt the Younger, the independence of the office grew, and the master-servant relationship between sovereign and prime minister changed, at first subtly, then dramatically. Seldon pinpoints the reign of William IV as the pivotal point in the loss of monarchical power, but is perhaps generous in thinking it lasted in any measure into the reign of George V;
the fashion in which first Edward VII and then his son had to agree to the mass creation of peerages in the 1909-11 constitutional crisis suggests the master-servant dynamic had been well and truly reversed by then. It is also notable that the repeal (which this book takes for granted) of the malign 2011 Fixed Terms Parliaments Act would enhance the prerogative powers of the sovereign, in allowing her to decide on a dissolution, for the first time in living memory. It would
also, of course, restore an important power to the prime minister, in letting him or her decide when to seek one.
The guide Seldon presents is accurate, though one must take issue with the assertion that Peel “exhausted by office… resigned in June 1846”. In fact, Peel resigned after a defeat in the Commons that his party had been waiting to inflict since he outraged them by repealing the Corn Laws. And some of Seldon’s judgments are questionable; ranking Heath as a “major contributor” to the office seems to rest on his having taken Britain into what became the EU; and to say Asquith was not “top tier” discounts his massive achievements. The moral delinquency of Lloyd George does not prevent Seldon ranking him with Peel, Gladstone and Thatcher, which verges on the absurd. He is unduly generous to Major, Cameron
and May, none of whom will be treated nearly so generously by history as they are by him.
Seldon concludes with musings on how the post might be improved. One of his recommendations is the job, and the bureaucracy that services it, must become more diverse – more ethnic minorities, more women, more people of various sexual orientations and gender definitions. It is a pity he has fallen for this sloppy vogue thinking, because he’s wrong. What the job and the bureaucracy need – for the sake of the nation – are more people of genuine talent in them, irrespective of their ethnic origins, sexual preferences or any other box that fashion now decrees needs to be ticked.
The story of the past 300 years is too often about a lack of honesty, competence and good judgment: ensuring that that changes should be our first priority.
‘Prime minister’ was not used until Peel, as the King was thought to be a minister, too