Over the past seven years the UK has had five prime ministers, six chancellors and seven foreign secretaries, a turnover unthinkable in past decades. Yet, writes Phil Tinline, this is far from the first time the British government has faced the challenge of running an apparently ‘ungovernable’ country
In 2021, the historian Anthony Seldon published a history of the British prime minister, with the rather pessimistic title The Impossible Office? At the time, Boris Johnson commanded a huge parliamentary majority. He had taken office set fair for a decade in power. But by 2022, he was out; in the years since, Britain has had three more prime ministers and will shortly welcome a fourth. For many people, Seldon’s question mark now looks daringly optimistic.
But if it’s increasingly impossible to be prime minister, what does that mean for the running of the country overall? Worried columnists and broadcasters now ask: has Britain become ungovernable?
As he settles in behind the big black door, Britain’s new premier Andy Burnham will certainly find himself confronting a series of problems that has grown steadily more difficult. Not least because of the much higher expectations that we the voters have come to place on Number 10.
Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister to sit in the House of Lords while in office, was of the opinion that “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” After his death in 1903, this was not a view that could be sustained long into the new democratic century.
Rapid change
From 1906, an activist Liberal government swept to power and began building the rudiments of the welfare state. Then, under the pressure of the First World War, the boozy, adulterous prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was driven out by the even more adulterous but much more dynamic David Lloyd George. The new administration centralised power in a small war cabinet, and established the Cabinet Secretariat, under the command of the fearsome first cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey. At its height, the Cabinet Secretariat – the foundation of the modern Cabinet Office – was revered for its skill in forging agreement and making Whitehall work effectively.
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From the interwar period onwards, the state took on ever more responsibility. After the Second World War, prime ministers led governments responsible for much of the nation’s basic needs; the state that emerged from the war also developed the experience and expertise to deliver projects at speed and scale. Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government, largely run by old men exhausted by years of total war, rapidly built the National Health Service and an array of new towns. Later governments, of both main parties, led the creation of nuclear power stations, the motorway network, waves of new universities, and much else.
But that is long since gone. Today, as many think tank reports attest, the centre of government has become hopelessly dysfunctional. For instance, as the Future Governance Forum reported last year, “the Cabinet Office has become bloated, particularly at a senior level where there are now multiple permanent secretaries and directors general operating in the same space.” None of this is helped by trying to run a 21st-century government from an 18th-century townhouse.
This has fuelled a loss of self-confidence in government. As many critics have argued, it has retreated into a level of risk aversion and focus on process over delivery which would make Attlee shake his head in despair. This has itself stoked public mistrust, as governments take power promising change, only to turn round and explain that it’s harder than they thought. Public disillusionment is exacerbated by impossible expectations. Social media, reality TV shows and online retail have encouraged the view that when you register a choice about something – whether by tweeting, voting or clicking ‘Buy’ – you have the right to expect an immediate response.
The difficulties of government have arguably also been exacerbated by a trend, ever since Margaret Thatcher’s day, to try to exert too much day-to-day control from Downing Street – and the Treasury – instead of setting an overall direction, then giving ministers their head.
Art of the deal
Before Thatcher, things worked differently. Fifty years ago this summer, James Callaghan’s Labour government, with a majority of approximately zero, faced an unnerving currency crisis. Amid soaring inflation, unemployment and government deficit, sterling was falling faster than the Bank of England could handle. The government faced the prospect of seeking a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Callaghan’s cabinet was divided, his government teetering. But he had already been home secretary, chancellor and foreign secretary, and rather than panic or try to rule by diktat, he coolly allowed his ministers to discuss their position for days on end, while quietly steering the situation. He emerged with a deal, his government intact, and kept going.
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The excessive focus on the prime minister alone in the decades since has led to a tendency to see our parliamentary system too much through the lens of how government functions in America. This despite the fact that, as the recent independence celebrations remind us, it was designed not to be like Britain. The prime minister is not the head of state, as the US president is: they are meant to be “first among equals”. Disempowering the Cabinet does not necessarily make a prime minister more effective.
The comeback
There is one more factor which makes being a successful prime minister harder. Even if you’re not forced out within months of your arrival, you’re only allowed one go at doing this invidiously difficult job. Lose an election and – we now seem to agree – you have to resign.
This would have surprised Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill and Ramsay MacDonald, all of whom lost an election (in 1970, 1945, and 1924) and returned to power between four and six years later. It would have startled Stanley Baldwin, who did this twice, in 1924 and 1929. And it would have gobsmacked William Gladstone, who left office three times (in 1874, 1885 and 1886), but kept bouncing back, becoming PM for the fourth time in 1892, aged 82.
This litany of woe may make it seem as though the situation has simply grown ever more dire for our PMs and will continue to do so. But not everything that currently makes the job of PM arduous is linear. History suggests that some of this is cyclical – and that we may currently be in a low from which, in time, we will recover. This is not the first time, after all, that people have worried that Britain may be becoming ungovernable.
The new normal
During the Depression of the 1930s, Britain’s leaders looked old, tired and out of ideas. Commentators churned out books worrying that parliamentary democracy looked like a Victorian relic, unsuited to a modern economic crisis. As unemployed ‘hunger marchers’ fought the police, some people turned to the impatient young fascist leader Oswald Mosley, others to the communists. But the problem was not that Britain was ungovernable: it was that the steps necessary to revive the economy seemed unthinkable.
In the 1930s, the heretical ideas of John Maynard Keynes, allowing borrowing and inflation to climb in order to jump-start the economy, particularly in areas of high unemployment, appeared to risk economic disaster. Yet after similar measures had proved unavoidable to fight the Second World War, it was high unemployment that came to seem unthinkable – and around that belief, a new political consensus formed which endured for years. We tend not to remember the mid-1950s as time of political instability, even though the Conservatives changed their prime minister twice in three years, because the economy was growing and the consensus was holding.
In the 1970s, that postwar consensus broke down and, once again, leaders seemed unequal to tackle a prolonged economic crisis. This time it was rocketing inflation and waves of strikes that led a new generation of concerned commentators to write books with titles like Why Is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern?, Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence, and The Coming Confrontation: Will the Open Society Survive to 1989?
But once again, the problem was not that Britain was ungovernable. It was that the steps necessary to revive the economy seemed unthinkable. When Thatcher took power in 1979, she gradually reduced the power of the trade unions, while letting unemployment climb to heights not seen since the 1930s, slowly establishing a new political settlement with which her defeated opponents had to come to terms. Between 1979 and 2007, Britain had just three prime ministers.
The question for their latest successor is whether he can win political support to overcome the taboos that hem in what is the politically ‘possible’ today, without tipping the country into worse crisis. If he can, he too may be able to establish a new ‘normal’ – and the decade of six prime ministers will look less like evidence that Britain has become ungovernable, and more like a symptom of the agonising nature of democratic change.
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 years of British Political Nightmares and, as a policy associate with the Future Governance Forum, of Power Failure: A New Theory of Power
Authors
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares (Hurst, 2022) and presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Conspiracies: The Secret Knowledge, which is available on BBC Sounds