Why Are Our PMS So Bad?

Structural changes have harmed our politics — but we bear responsibility as well

JOHN MACLEOD

Margaret Thatcher served eleven years as Prime Minister. Tony Blair? Ten. In the last decade, however, six PMs have come in and out of Number 10.

David Cameron, the nonchalant Old Etonian, took us out of the European Union by accident. Theresa May, in her Cardinal Wolsey cosplay — big on scarlet and beads — threw away her Parliamentary majority and found herself in hock to the Democratic Unionists.

What has condemned us to this extraordinary succession of inadequates, chancers and duds?

Then came Boris Johnson, like a sort of bounding Labrador, sure that Number 10 would be a piece of cake until he was brought down by one. Liz Truss outlived a Queen, but not a lettuce. Rishi Sunak sought a dissolution of Parliament months before he had to and was duly toppled by a Labour leader — odd-looking, angular; like Picasso drew him — with a 174-seat majority on just a third of the vote. Few now believe that Sir Keir Starmer, sixty-three, who greets every question with a scowl like a just-slammed door, will be allowed to lead Labour into another general election.

What has condemned us to this extraordinary succession of inadequates, chancers and duds?

“The loyalties which centre upon number one,” Churchill once mused of the office of Prime Minister, “are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed…”

There has, of late, been much pole-axing. Churchill himself is a curious case. He was indubitably great: right about the Third Reich and effective in mobilising Christian civilisation to its downfall. But Churchill’s second outing in Downing Street, from 1951 to 1955 – granted him, really, as a reward for his first – was calamitous. He was not just past it but past even realising he was past it.

Churchill aside, most agree that only two post-war Prime Ministers were in historic terms consequential: Attlee and Thatcher. Both left Britain very different from the realm they had inherited and both wrought changes — and expectations — that have never been significantly reversed. Attlee is particularly striking because it is inconceivable such a figure would prosper in today’s media glare: the man had the charisma of a gerbil. Thatcher accomplished all she did because of her courage, and because for most of her career she was a consummate wily politician.

One has to be careful weighing reputations. As Alan Bennett observes in The History Boys, “there is no period so remote as the recent past.” Both Harold Wilson and John Major left the levers of power as figures of derision; even pity. Their serious achievements are now acknowledged and respected. Gordon Brown was in most respects a flailing Prime Minister, but in the critical days of October 2008, tugging on his old Treasury hat, he addressed the financial crash with some élan.

Tony Blair, like Thatcher, also won three successive general elections. His greatest achievement was securing what has proved a sustained peace in Northern Ireland. But his “Charter ‘88” constitutional tinkering, his enthronement of multiculturalism and the LGBT lobby, and — above all — his catastrophic lust for regime-change in Iraq have proved, in many regards, the sowing of dragons’ teeth.

Blair was also extraordinarily lucky. He came to Downing Street during a protracted economic boom and left office before the music stopped. By contrast, every Prime Minister since Gordon Brown has had to wrestle with a tanked economy, what since the spring of 2022 has become an intractable cost-of-living crisis, global trends from mass migration to artificial intelligence and, since June 2016, Brexit. Its merits aside, there was a central agony: the British people had given their rulers an unambiguous order, and most Members of Parliament did not want to obey them.

Other phenomena have taken root since the Millennium. Rolling, round-the-clock television news and its related “avalanche journalism.” Social media, with its point-and-shriek cancel culture. Ugly new sectarianism on our streets.

But there have, over the decades, been striking changes in the Premiership itself. It was an office generally held by older, grounded men with a conscious ethos of public service, not expected to walk off the pitch should they happen to lose a general election. (Stanley Baldwin, for instance, had between 1923 and 1937 three stretches as Prime Minister.)

It was understated: there were no red carpets overseas, no inspections of troops, no fancy lecterns on the street and no quasi-presidential campaign rallies. The Prime Minister is actually, in England and Wales, below the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of York in the formal order of precedence — being but first among equals and usually, in the end, dislodged by his Cabinet colleagues. He could rely on the confidence of the Crown: it meant something, between the wars, that George V had your back. It was particularly important, too, that the Prime Minister was on tight terms with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary.

Most agree that Thatcher’s fatal spiral began when she parted company in 1989 with Nigel Lawson. But the Foreign Office — in the postwar era of “summit diplomacy” and when Prime Ministers personally enjoy jollies to Paris, Beijing and Washington — does not have the clout it once had. Were it still a position of consequence, it would never have been entrusted to David Lammy.

Being Prime Minister is now a much lonelier role, surrounding oneself with a coterie of special advisers, spin-doctors and so on, these often distrustful of Whitehall mandarins and downright insolent to Cabinet ministers. What was once broadly a nine to five job is now a sea of paperwork and, often, a 16-hour day. Innumerable decisions must be taken — and the easy ones never reach one’s desk. There is little time to spend in Parliament and touring its tearooms. There is no question of nipping out to the shops or, on the spur of the moment, taking your wife out for dinner.

For in recent decades Premiers have been increasingly caged by their own security. Tony Balr was not allowed to attend the same church two Sundays in a row. Armed protection-officers — open jackets; no necks—– hang close whenever the Prime Minister is outdoors. A friend of mine, a veteran Clydeside journalist, was once on the Arran ferry when he spotted Harold Macmillan. He strode over with a smile, introduced himself, and was granted a laconic interview with the Prime Minister on the spot: today, it would be inconceivable.

All this in mind, how might we assess recent occupants of Number Ten?

The first thing that sticks out is the limited Parliamentary experience. Sunak and Starmer only entered the House of Commons in 2015; Truss in 2010. Boris Johnson, in total, was only an MP for a decade — he ducked out for two terms as Mayor of London — when he bagged the top job.

Sunak and Truss had another weakness: no experience of life in Opposition. By contrast, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan (in the latter instance, with two brief gaps) had been MPs for over thirty years; Thatcher for twenty — holding office under three of her predecessors. Churchill first entered the Commons in 1900; Wilson and Heath had also done yeoman service, enjoyed turns in Cabinet and even youthful civil service experience.

The second is the manner of their election. As recently as 1963, it remained convention that when the Prime Minister stood down, mid-term, his successor was chosen by the Sovereign. This fell into disrepute, partly because Labour MPs increasingly roiled they would not in their own instance tolerate it (though they would not find themselves actually in this position till 1976) and because controversy rumbled around Macmillan’s appointment in 1957 and still more around his succession by the 14th Earl of Home.

Thereafter, leaders, in or out of office, were elected by their Parliamentary party. The Liberals abandoned this in 1976, Labour in 1980 and the Tories in 2001. Labour’s byzantine arrangements apart, party members in the country are generally balloted. It takes weeks, they are unlikely to be representative of the electorate as a whole, and few have ever actually met the candidates.

But there is a deeper question still: what kind of people are now allowed to become MPs in the first place? Decades back, constituency parties had far more freedom of choice and the job — which even in the Seventies was not well salaried; one SNP teacher who unexpectedly became MP for East Dunbartonshire was startled by the pay cut — was much less demanding.

It was the Liberals who established this notion that your Member of Parliament must be a glorified social worker — and, increasingly, the lightning-rod for inchoate public rage. Though Stornoway is hardly gangland, even our local MP’s office is heavily shuttered and with wary CCTV — but then, in my lifetime, six Members of Parliament have been murdered.

Few capable people, now, are up for the indignities and loss of privacy a political career involves, and fewer still for the dawn-to-dusk pavement-pounding of an election campaign, braving wild-eyed dogs and fat men in vests. Nor is it at all likely, in your first blooding, you will be allowed near any constituency that is actually winnable: in 1997, in less than optimal circumstances for his party, Jacob Rees-Mogg fought Central Fife for the Tories. (He won 9 per cent of the vote.)

To be a candidate at all you must first be vetted by party high command for a centrally approved list, these days prizing biddability above brilliance. Particular controversy surrounded cynical Conservative Central Headquarters manoeuvres when last year’s general election was so unexpectedly called.

“Applicants who have spoken to The Telegraph describe those in charge of the selection process as ‘yellow Tories’ whose preference is for candidates largely indistinguishable from Liberal Democrats,” sources huffed.

But back to our central question: why have a succession of educated, well-meaning men and women assumed the bridge of the ship of state — and helmed it as if it had a rubber rudder, a drunken crew and a fire in the engine-room?

At a philosophical level and in what is now an aggressively secular age, most in high places seem to have lost any sense of objective truth — essential if you are going to have core ideals, an explicable vision and a comprehensible narrative. Thatcher and Reagan were signally effective leaders because they could tell a story: what they believed had gone wrong, why it mattered, and how they would fix it.

The point could be pushed too far: Theresa May, for instance, is a (very) High Anglican. But Sir Keir Starmer is an atheist. So, it seems, is Kemi Badenoch. Boris Johnson is, really, a Merrie England pagan. And the public square is now extraordinarily hostile — as Tim Farron and Kate Forbes can grimly attest — to anyone of plain, robust Christian belief, especially as Britain descends increasingly into what St Pope John Paul II aptly described as a “culture of death.”

There are two other aspects. One is that our long-established party political order is disintegrating, to the degree that opinion polls now suggest that, between them, Labour and the Tories struggle to command 40 per cent of the vote. (At last week’s Caerphilly by-election for the Welsh Senedd, their combined share was a dire 13%.)

We speak of “parties,” but they are really coalitions, held together through decades by ambition, discipline, comradeship and good will. Labour in its heyday could encompass Marxists and social democrats; personalities obsessed with radical sexual politics to unbending social conservatives in the valleys of Wales, the odd Hebridean and the Catholic redoubts of industrial Scotland. The Conservatives likewise were a broad house: landed grandees, suburban types, the aspirational working class, bold reformers and unabashed patriots — determined, from a range of priorities, to stop the country going to the dogs; resuming power to fix what Labour broke.

Both coalitions have been disintegrating for years. The Tories now face an existential challenge to their Right; and Labour cannot counter its own threat from that quarter without shedding hundreds of thousands of votes to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the improbable “Queers For Palestine” confection of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

But it is hard not to feel, too, that we as a people have become ungovernable. Averse to unpalatable truths. Slamming as heresy the most timid talk of reforming the money pit that is the NHS. Demanding better public services, the pensions triple-lock, disability allowances and so on while refusing to pay more for them. Refusing, too, to shell out for desperately needed defence recruitment and procurement.

Our current political order … has no more God-given right to survive than had … the video rental trade

As Ernest Hemingway wrote of bankruptcy in another sense, it happens “gradually, then suddenly.” There is a famous group-photograph of Europe’s crowned heads gathered for the 1910 funeral of Edward VII. By the obsequies of George V — indeed, by 1919 — most of those thrones had tumbled. In 1914, there was a Liberal government in office. A decade later, they were the third party and, with rare contact with power ever since, irrelevant.

Our current political order — our reigning elite — has no more God-given right to survive than had hat shops, the video rental trade, MySpace and the Yellow Pages. Yet whatever replaces it, after the convulsion surely coming, may not necessarily be benign.

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This article (Why are our PMs so bad?) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author John MacLeod

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