Thatcher – The End of Cabinet Government

Saturday 13th April

As you may be aware I am in the process of reading the entire works of Anthony Trollope.  These books (over 50 of them) were written in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century; that is about 150 years ago.  They are highly political, in that while generally favouring the Whig cause they show us in great detail just how the political process was conducted.  And back then the Cabinet system was already being used.

The idea of a Cabinet is that it is comprised of the leading figures of a particular party who agree to serve under an individual who is the Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is the figurehead of the Cabinet and is there by their express permission and the Cabinet agrees to serve under him (or her) and brings forward a collectively decided programme of Bills to be presented to Parliament.

Until very recently it used to be the case that although a Prime Minister appointed his Cabinet and distributed the portfolios there had to be consensus in the Cabinet for measures to be adopted.  If a Cabinet member could not agree then he (or she) could resign.  The Prime Minister could also sack a Cabinet Minister, but this has always been a dangerous precedent.  In the words of, I believe Al Haig, ‘It is better to have the bastard pissing out of the tent than outside pissing in.’

But we have been gradually moving to a Presidential style where the PM is all important and although the country has elected the party it is the PM who has all the power.  This came to a head with Thatcher, whose first Cabinet did contain all the leading big beasts of the then Tory party, but which gradually became a Cabinet of yes men ‘those who were for us’ and anyone who disagreed with her was dumped.  This marked the end of Cabinet Government, and it has never been fully re-instated since.  Major tried and failed, Blair may have talked of consensus but was almost as brutal as Thatcher at getting rid of ‘dissidents’ – he baulked at moving Gordon Brown, but maybe he should have.  Brown was another, though weaker, despot who liked his Cabinet to be subservient to him, as it mostly was.  Cameron fortunately lost the only real ‘difficult’ Cabinet member when Liam Fox had to leave, and has a pretty subservient duopoly, because Osborne has almost as much influence as Cameron.

And maybe this is why we have such bad policies.  There is far too much power in the hands of one man (or woman) rather than real collective decision making, where some sort of wisdom may emerge.  We now do not elect a party, but a Leader who tries to dominate his Party instead of listening to all opinions and actually pursuing policies that people might have voted for.