Prime Ministers

A think tank called the Future Governance Forum has this week produced a paper entitled In Power, about improving the efficiency of the UK’s governing process. The Forum, a successor to various New Labourish bodies, concludes that there should be a separate department of state called something like the Office of the Prime Minister, so as to make the Number 10 machine work more effectively, by bringing all the PM’s associates together. My feeling about this suggestion would be “Really?”

At a local government level, the tradition has always been to have a rotating mayoralty within a party structure so that the party leader only occasionally chairs the council. Something similar might work at a national level, and would prevent the party in power’s leader being the only viable representative of the nation. (It would have to rotate only among the cabinet obviously). We already have a head of state to take on the role of representative of the country, so the PM’s task is just to be the rep at summit meetings, most of which are pointless; the real work across nations is at more specific levels. Departmental ministers would have more freedom to develop their plans without constant recourse to a central inquisition and it could allow for a wider variety in views among the leadership. Not to mention a reduction in the number of reshuffles in the cabinet.

Britain has not been well served by its recent Prime Ministers (I leave it to you to choose the most recent decent one), and this is probably a combination of not being up to the job and the job being impossible. It would seem sensible, then, to consider if the role itself could be rethought rather than its functionality. Generally speaking, the requirement is for a cheerleader or a bully, neither of which are necessarily helpful. The concept of cabinet responsibility reinforces this (as does nonsense like PMQs), by focussing all attention on the person at Number 10. It’s also worth noting that the idea of a Leader of the Opposition is questionable in a multi-party parliament.

The main drawbacks, I think, would be departments pursuing their own agendas (which might not be such a bad thing) and delays in delivery without an overriding decision-maker. On the other hand, it would make for better planning (without always having to refer to the centre) and would obviate the current obsession with responding to every minor event with a governmental stance. On the principle that devolving power is always a good idea, it would also answer the charge that the UK is an “elective dictatorship.”

On the financial side, it might be argued that a Prime Minister is required to control the monetary demands of individual departments, but I would argue that this is largely a problem of government accounting, which takes no account of the benefits accrued from spending; if the multipliers from each project were to be published, we could have a clearer picture of the gains to the economy from each department (spoiler: defence always comes bottom). The Treasury’s role would not be affected except insofar as it would find it harder to deny departmental ministers without the PM’s support – but this would all need a fundamental change in the understanding of how government funding works – something long overdue.

The above was written before this week’s furore about a threat to the current prime minister, which embodies the issue rather well. We now have a politics that is all about who should be the number one person rather than what should be done about anything. The amount of time wasted on briefings from various sources is an indictment of a system that is fundamentally flawed. The plaything should be taken away.

AH