POLITICS
The ministers who are not all the President's men
NOEL MALCOLM
Mrs Thatcher once told her Cabinet Secretary On a moment of speculative candour', according to Mr Hugo Young) that the position she really fancied was that of President of the United Kingdom. She liked the idea of running in a personal, presidential election against the leader of the Labour Party, and, having won it, of exercising presidential powers — under the Crown, of course.
Some speculations are more speculative than others. You may quite like the idea of being Emperor of the World. This is a thought which can seem very appealing, for example, when you are stuck in a traffic jam, but it need not follow that there is anything imperial about your style of driv- ing. Fantasies of power are usually express- ions of impotence: Mrs Thatcher was stuck in quite a few political and administrative traffic jams in her time.
For years, admirers and defenders of Mrs Thatcher routinely dismissed the claim that she was practising a 'presidential' style of government. They pointed out the basic differences between the British and Amer- ican systems, they referred to the projects she had abandoned because she knew she could never get sufficient support for them in Cabinet — radical NHS reforms, school vouchers, and so on. Yes, they said, she did like to lead from the front; but in the collectively responsible decisions of the Cabinet she was no more than prima donna inter pares. And now, to general const- ernation, along comes Mr Nicholas Ridley and says that of course she was presiden- tial, because that is the nature of the prime minister's job:
She disliked having votes in Cabinet. She didn't see it as that sort of body. Nor was it suitable to decide matters by vote in view of the constitutional position. She was Prime Minister, she knew what she wanted to do, and she didn't believe her policies should be subject to being voted down by a group she had selected to advise and assist her. Just as an American President would never allow himself to be outvoted by his Cabinet, so too did Margaret Thatcher believe she had every right to retain the initiative as head of the Government. Anyone who did not like her policies could resign.
As a summary of 'the constitutional position' (and Mr Ridley is not just report- ing Mrs Thatcher's views: he endorses them himself), this really is rather extreme. It is true that prime ministers need not take formal votes in Cabinet, and seldom do. It is true that they hire and can fire their ministers. But the collective nature of a British government is not a complete fic- tion: it has to function, for a start, as a government-in-parliament. Mr Ridley re- duces the Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the rest, the top rank of the parliamentary party, to the status of per- sonal advisers and assistants — of glorified Mrs Douglas Hoggs with limousines.
Most readers of Mr Ridley's book will, I imagine, reject his presidential theory of the British constitution. They will believe him when he says that that was how Mrs Thatcher understood the matter, but they will blame her own presidential tendencies on the peculiarities of her character and her 'conviction' politics. Now that she has gone, they will suppose, we can forget about this unBritish `p'-word and get back to the old conventions of government.
I think their confidence will be mis- placed. Partly, that is, because Mr Ridley's constitutional theory — extreme though it may be — does contain a small and uncomfortable kernel of truth; and partly because the drift towards a presidential style of politics has little to do with these abstruse constitutional questions anyway, and is likely to become more noticeable, not less, as a result of Mrs Thatcher's departure.
The kernel of truth in Mr Ridley's theory is the fact that both US presidents and British prime ministers have inherited many of the powers of 18th-century monarchs. The American presidency was in some ways a secularised and politicised version of monarchy; and the British prime minister acquired some of the monarch's powers by a gradual process of delegation. In particular, the conduct of foreign policy by a British government is an exercise of royal prerogative, and for that reason it is much less firmly anchored in Parliament than, say, the conduct of economic and fiscal policy. So the government as a whole can act in a lofty, presidential way vis-à-vis Parliament when it is negotiating the terms of new treaties.
One can already see the makings of an unholy alliance on this point between Mr Benn, who wants to scrub all traces of the royal prerogative out of the constitution, and those Tory Brugeist MPs who have begged in vain for a White Paper on the Government's negotiating position in Europe. Every time Mr Major goes to a summit meeting with the future of our country in his hands, he cannot help looking (and being) presidential — that is, beyond any form of parliamentary control until it is too late to do anything other than accept or reject the terms he has settled. This is a real constitutional problem, which has already caused some strain in the Tory party, and will cause more before the year is out.
But the general drift towards a presiden- tial style of politics is a completely different matter — one which is mainly in the hands of the publicity advisers and media men. In 1987 Mr Peter Mandelson ran a deliberate- ly 'presidential', Kinnock-centred cam- paign in the general election, and ever since then that party's publicity machine has been run, in effect, as a subsidiary of Mr Kinnock's office. Mr Mandelson's suc- cessor, Mr John Underwood, tried to reverse this trend and was forced to resign as a result; he was replaced this week by Mr David Hill, who will keep up the Mandelsonian status quo.
And in the Tory party one of the signs that the recently overhauled publicity machine is now running smoothly is that Mr Major has been placed in the limelight at every possible opportunity, taking over the launching of his Education Secretary's policies one week and of his Environment Secretary's the next. To judge from the opinion polls (which is all the publicity advisers have to care about) it does not really matter what policies he is launching; the important thing is that people should see his gentle features on their television screens as often as possible, and continue to think that he is 'competent' (75 per cent), 'caring' (80 per cent) and 'likeable as a person' (87 per cent).
Forget about the policies — most of the electorate will. The less clear the policy differences become between the Conserva- tive and Labour parties, the more impor- tant the personalities of their leaders will seem. Our politics is now becoming pres- idential by default. I would even place a small bet that when Mr Kinnock makes his traditional challenge to a televised face-to- face debate with the Tory leader at the general election, Mr Major will accept it.
We shall then be treated to a spectacle more presidential than anything Mrs Thatcher ever dared or deigned to submit to.
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