17th October 2022
For a good part of the history of Prime Ministers, the title of “Prime Minister” was informal.
Until the late nineteenth century it was not used in official documents and it was only in the twentieth century that, here and there, it began to leave a trace on the statute book.
It was a title that was used just to describe the most dominant minister of the day, the one who controlled the cabinet and had the confidence of parliament – usually the First Lord of the Treasury but sometimes not.
And if today one asked an alien looking down from space who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that alien would assume it was Jeremy Hunt.
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Billy the Fish and the Green Baize Vampire
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One of the features of our uncodified constitutional arrangements is that the power of the Prime Minister varies depending on individuals, events and politics.
The last three Prime Ministers before Truss all lost office between general elections and, as this blog has often pointed out, every Prime Minister since 1974 has either gained or left office between general elections (or, most recently, both).
But loss of office is not exactly the same as loss of power – our constitution is so flexible that not even loss of office is a requirement for losing power.
And what we have at the moment is power moving away from the nominal Prime Minister towards another figure in the Cabinet.
An allusion, in a playful way, to the distinction made by the greatest of our constitutional commentators, Walter Bagehot, between the efficient and the dignified (or, here, undignified) elements of the constitution.
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Many assume there will have to be a general election in the current circumstances – and there certainly should be.
But if the cabinet and the government majority in parliament can accept the current arrangements then there is no way forward to an early general election.
And in the meantime, and like the personal tax rate reduction, any influence whatsoever of Truss over policy is “delayed indefinitely”.
For it is Hunt who has control over policy and has the confidence of parliament – and of the markets.
We now have a Prime Minister in name only.
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(Apologies to Billy the Fish and Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire.)
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There is every reason to call for a general election and every reason not to get one.
In short, the electorate need to own their own choices. When 42% of electorate chose the current government in 2019, they chose not only the policy pitch (i.e. the manifesto) but also the judgment and skill of that government, such as it is (i.e. its ability to get “the big calls right”). That is the essential feature of a representative democracy.
The electorate gave the Conservative Party license not only to pursue their manifesto but to dump 1, 2 or more Prime Ministers along the way, and trash the country’s economic and international credibility by idiotic policy responses to economic reality. If anyone did not think the risk of them doing so was priced in to voting Conservative in 2019, they weren’t paying attention.
Whatever happens between now and whenever in 2024, a general election is called, voters should try to remember two things:
a) how they feel right now about a 12 month omnishambles that has been a blow upon the bruise of 6 years of cakeism.
The visceral indignation that when actual policy decisions could, and should, have been made the Conservative Party was otherwise engaged in internal psyhcodrama; and,
b) Labour objected to the rise in NIC, the reversal of which is the only part of the mini-budget that has been retained. Labour proposed a windfall tax on energy companies, the Government has introduced two. Labour proposed a 6-month Energy Price Cap, something which has been Liz Truss’ sole attack line for the last month, and, today, the Government has reduced the price cap to 6 months.
In short, Hunt in arriving at an economic policy that will be painful but, at least, credible, has jumped right over Sunak economics and adopted, almost holus bolus, Labour’s economic policy. A policy which, if it had been adopted earlier, would have avoided the diminished economic credibility (i.e. increased cost of borrowing).
Put simply, voters might prefer to have in place for the next crisis the authors of today’s economic policy and not its reluctant and panicked adopters.
Any chance of mandating classes in logic and basic arithmetic for MPs?
Useless Tim Harford has written that he and Liz Truss were in the same tutorial class in “advanced” logic at Oxford…Shall I say more?
Well, most of them seem sufficiently au fait with arithmetic to submit their expenses… but on the other hand I’m not sure how many of them could pass a class in basic logic.
There is a risk that if you were to make such a condition of service as an MP, the chamber would acquire something of a hollow echo…
I am not sure that this is a fair comparison (individuals and personalities being different), but there are elements here which remind me of the Blair-Brown ‘alliance’… Gordon Brown earned a reputation for being very controlling, for not being a team player at the Treasury, and for using the power of budget assignments to control the authority of any potential usurpers to the the job he so desperately wanted. So even though Blair was the de-facto PM, Brown set up department finances so he had to approve any changes, thereby setting up the feud with Blair.
The biggest single difference between then and now is that Blair/Brown actually did an excellent job of hiding the destruction of their working relationship in order for Brown to secure leadership of the party… whereas this time the implosion of the current Conservative government is happening on the front pages.
What other options do the opposition parties have? Is there for example the possibility for opposition parties to simply refuse to participate in any more parliamentary debates and committees? Would this cause a constitutional crisis where the only outcome is for the King to dissolve parliament?
It’s a nice idea, but it would hinge entirely on the presence of a rule that requires there to be an opposition present in parliament for all votes.
The problem is that if no such rule exists, then the absence of the Opposition [or to be honest just the Labour party, given their relative number of sites compared with the other parties] would basically give Truss and the Conservative government [lame ducks though we might agree them to be] carte blanche to do pretty much whatever they wished.
It would potentially be even more dangerous for the nation.
And given the last few weeks, that’s saying something…
William Pitt the Younger was, I believe, “The Minister”.
Disraeli was the first to sign as “Prime Minister”. He was also one of the first heads of government to attend an international conference. (Liverpool did attend the Congress of Vienna where his main contribution was to set down a marker for European abolition of slavery) At the Congress of Berlin, Disraeli played a role second only to Bismarck himself.
Indeed.
“as this blog has often pointed out, every Prime Minister since 1974 has either gained or left office between general elections (or, most recently, both).”
“Both” was the case for May and Johnson, but in both those cases there was at least a general election in between the gaining and the leaving of office, in which they managed retain the title of PM.
Truss is about to create a new category (unless it’s happened before?) whereby she both gained and lost the Premiership outwith a general election and with no intervening general election taking place in between those two events.
The most recent PM not to face any general election was Neville Chamberlain. But you can argue WWII makes it an exception as they were suspended for the duration.
There were several others, but back in those times when the determinants of who was PM was rather different.
Has there ever been an instance of a Prime Minister being less worthy of, less entitled to, the adjective “prime”?
True, I’ve only been paying attention for the last 40-odd years, but I can’t think of anyone.
Chamberlain. Baldwin won the November 1935 general election. Chamberlain took over when Baldwin retired in May 1937, and himself resigned in May 1940 without calling an election. The next general election was 1945.
Chamberlain was an idiot – but he wasn’t vindictively, ignorantly, wilfully wrong-headed the way Truss has proven to be.
Poor Lizzy, looked like a winner – to the deluded. The LRB has an interesting article on poor old Lizzy and Kwartang entitled Madman Economics.
The free marketeers should not cry too much, they have got most of Kwartang/Truss’s policy. The objective was to create chaos to justify cuts to the public sector and kill off the long tail of inefficient businesses. All that is missing is creating the environment and money for new replacement businesses. That was unfunded and based on magical thinking and the markets saw through it.
As an example BMW looks like moving electric Mini production to China. The wiseacres say ‘car production – so last century’. True, but do you have a new industry that can employ largish numbers of ordinary people making a reasonably good living to pay their mortgages? Answer = no, and there is the root problem. A Nobel prize for a workable answer and a good kicking for more magical thinking.
“One of the features of our uncodified constitutional arrangements is that the power of the Prime Minister varies depending on individuals, events and politics.”
I shall borrow and reverse one of technology’s favourite maxims to observe that, “this isn’t a feature, it’s a bug”.
There is a scene in the 2015 movie, “The Big Short” (covering the origins of the 2008 financial crisis) in which former banker Ben Rickert (Bradd Pitt) explains to a couple of “garage investors” the significance of their actions:-
Ben: “Stop it! Stop it!”
Investor: “What?”
Ben: “Do you have any idea what you just did?”
Investor: “Come on, we just made the deal of our lifetimes, we should celebrate!”
Ben: You just bet against the American economy…”
Investor: “{Expletive} yeah!”
Ben: “Which means, if we’re right, people lost homes, people lose jobs, people lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about {expletive} banking? It reduces people to numbers. Well, here’s a number for you. Every 1% employment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that?”
I got a call on Friday from a lady who used to work for me. She was set to retire early in December this year. Was. Turns out her pension had been set up to follow a “lifestyle” trajectory, which meant that over the last few years it has been transitioning from equities and higher risk investments to guilts, bonds and lower-risk investments.
She’s just seen her pension savings decimated – and the funds haven’t recovered.
Sometimes external events – like Covid-19 – come along and we are all caught up in the circumstances and have to do the best we can.
But we should not have to shoulder the burdens when other people make mistakes.
If what we’ve seen from our government were the actions of a company where we were either shareholders or customers, there would be a range of relief available to us.
Ministers should not be able to hide behind the shield of “because they are the government”.
All have a duty of care.
in case it helps lighten the mood for anyone ..
I can only say, of that photo, that it’s clear that neither of them know a thing about football, and have certainly never played subbuteo. The pitch is completely wrong, the players are far too big and clumsy to flick with a finger (and why rectangles with no figures on them!) and who on earth plays an 11-man midfield with no goalie, defenders or strikers?
hear hear!