In recent years the political role of the British prime minister has become a topic of considerable constitutional argument. Where once the prime minister was primus inter pares, sharing power and authority with the Cabinet, in more recent years first Margaret Thatcher and later Tony Blair were accused of using their solid parliamentary majorities to move towards a more executive, presidential style of government. More recently still, however, Theresa May’s lack of a parliamentary majority massively reduced her ability to get her way over the crucial issue of Brexit: has the constitutional power balance shifted?
To understand what has been happening in modern British politics, we need to look at the way the premiership has developed since the age of the first man credited with holding it, the 18th-century political operator, Sir Robert Walpole. The office of prime minister, as the convenor of a Cabinet form of government, marked the key distinction between Britain and its ancient regime contemporary societies in Europe, but the Crown had not entirely lost its political weight, as William Pitt the Younger, who dominated the political scene at the end of the century, was to find to his cost.
The 19th century saw the rise of political parties, increasingly open to democratic forces, and the prime minister had to combine statesmanship with detailed attention to party management. The cost of getting this wrong could be politically fatal, as the great Sir Robert Peel found. The undoubted masters of Victorian politics were the celebrated rivals – even enemies – Gladstone and Disraeli, whose influence set the pattern for British parliamentary politics well into the 20th century.
However the economic and military crises of the 20th century forced prime ministers to take greater control over executive action into their own hands, Lloyd George and Churchill both set a precedent for decision-making by a small inner group around the prime minister (a court?). In the post-war years the prime minister could increasingly use the media to become a celebrity and this too was to have constitutional implications, from Thatcher’s domineering stance to Tony Blair’s deceptively casual style of ‘sofa government’.
