ANDREW LEIB
THURSDAY 5TH MAY 2022: As this piece is being written, thirty million voters across Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and a wide range of English local authorities from Southampton to Sunderland, from Harrow to Hull have just voted in local elections, with those votes now being counted. These elections, if they result in insurmountable losses for the Conservative and Unionist Party, may prove to be the final nail in the party's coffin, in the eyes of many members of the 1922 Committee. As late, they have in large part abstained from sending a letter to Sir Graham Brady, as many did for Theresa May following the disastrous Conservative performance in the 2019 local elections. If fifty-four Conservative MPs turn in their letters, a motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister will be triggered.
David Cameron gambled with his electoral future by agreeing to a Scottish independence referendum in October 2012 following an SNP majority at Holyrood. Similarly, if Sinn Fein supplant the DUP as the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, as they appear likely to do, and the Conservatives lose their grip on the formerly strongly blue regions of Worthing, Barnet, and Wandsworth, (‘Thatcher’s favourite council!’), Boris Johnson’s future at the head and helm of his party, Parliament and polity may be placed in further doubt. Knife-edge Southampton and the Red Wall councils of Newcastle-under-Lyme and Pendle (such areas resulted in 2019 in the greatest Westminster majority since 1987) will also be crucial, as opposition parties Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats (predicted to make a resurgence in Somerset, where they held a majority of the MPs in 1997), make further inroads towards unseating the Conservatives. The future of Johnson and his party, of course, depends, through the 1922 mechanism, on the 'people in grey suits' - those willing to imitate Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative John Rhodes who advised Richard Nixon to resign in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in 1974, or Kenneth Clarke who warned Margaret Thatcher that she’d lose the second round of the 1990 Conservative Party leadership election. But all of this concerns the twilight years of a premier’s leadership, not the period at which they are at their peak. How far can a leader move during their rising periods?
The size of a party within the legislature is one of the surest indicators of a Prime Minister’s power. Nobody would have considered deposing Clement Attlee in 1945 when he had a parliamentary majority of almost one hundred and fifty, or Margaret Thatcher in 1983 when Labour was at its smallest since the 1920s and arguably more divided than it had ever previously been. The leaders of the parties, and how they are perceived, can significantly alter the outcome of an election. Three out of four respondents - 75% - of those who had normally voted for Labour but supported the Conservatives in 2019 did so because of Corbyn. After the ‘Back to Basics’ scandals and the European Rate Mechanism crisis of Black Wednesday, 1992 it is arguable that few candidates would have lost to John Major, who followed his party whilst Blair led Labour. In terms of party sizes, early elections can also be fatal to prime ministers if misjudged. When Edward Heath went to the electorate in 1974 to ask the question ‘who governs Britain?’, the answer was ‘not you’ as he lost two general elections in the space of nine months. Theresa May was similarly encumbered by the reliance on the DUP after the 2017 snap election - although she had been twenty points ahead of Corbyn when said election was called. The ‘dementia tax’ and robotic soundbites such as “strong and stable” resulted in the second hung Parliament in eight years, forcing her to widen her circle of advisors from her handpicked appointments of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill to include those who were openly critical of her, such as her making Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary.
Habitual rebels within a party can also be problematic for a party leader. Broad churches sometimes splinter, such as in the defection of twenty-five Labour MPs, including former Foreign Secretary David Owen, following the 1981 Wembley Conference, the rejection of "one member, one vote" within the Labour Party’s internal processes and the adoption of hard-left policies (e.g. unilateral nuclear disarmament, leaving the EEC and renationalisation of the aircraft and shipbuilding industries). The 2019 expulsion of twenty-one Conservative MPs for voting against a no-deal Brexit is another example, but by and large leaders of parties have to deal on a daily basis with members who disagree, sometimes extremely openly, with their actions. The threat of somebody on the backbenches such as Steve Baker, who consistently voted against David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s policies on the EU and Boris Johnson’s measures during the coronavirus pandemic, or Michael Heseltine, who eventually decided to launch a leadership challenge against Margaret Thatcher after Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe resigned from her cabinet, keeps - and should keep - a leader awake and in touch with a wide cross section of their party. This can sometimes prevent them from pushing through the policies they’d like to : Blair considered holding a referendum on joining the Eurozone, but even had it been accepted by the UK as a whole it would have been incredibly unpopular with the MPs and other members on the left of the Labour Party such as Dennis Skinner and Caroline Flint.
It should be noted though that strong and effective leadership in the House is not the be-all and end-all of a PM; Margaret Thatcher was still a strong leader in 1984 and 1985 during the depths of the miners’ strike, which threatened to unseat her. Thatcher herself had been significantly behind Jim Callaghan in opinion polls until six months before the 1979 election and remained within the margin of error a month beforehand. But at that point, as Callaghan stated, “there [was] a sea change in politics. It then [did] not matter what you [said] or what you [did], ” as the declared intentions of a PM, public opinion and international law can significantly hamper their movement on the political scene. Whilst a powerful PM can sometimes overwhelm those who would try to hinder their policies, and as influential as the people closest to Prime Ministers may be, it is the electorate to whom they are ultimately - theoretically - responsible.
The 1990 protests against the community charge, or poll tax, were a result of Thatcher’s misjudgement of the hatred against a flat-rate tax which didn’t account for a person’s inability to pay; although Heseltine’s, Howe’s and Lawson’s resignations contributed to Thatcher’s fall, it was arguably the perception that Thatcher was no longer an electoral asset which ultimately resulted in John Major becoming Prime Minister. The Conservative Party apparatus may have worked to remove her, but it was the wider population which gave it the cover and cause to do so.
Some factors are completely out of the hands of a single head of government, dramatically affecting the manner in which they govern; although they can often choose how to respond, the best response may appear to be very different to their natural instinct. Benjamin Disraeli opined - or cautioned - that “in a progressive country, change is constant.” In contemporary times, “no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another,” as has been highlighted by former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan. An obvious example of a crisis affecting the actions of a PM is the coronavirus pandemic. The reputation of the Conservatives as a ‘low tax’ party has recently been challenged by a larger total permanent tax rise for the current term after three years in office than Blair and Brown oversaw in ten years, to pay for the immense spending during the pandemic, such as in the furlough scheme and for coronavirus tests. The United Kingdom’s sixty-seven million inhabitants form less than one per cent of the global population; the country and its Prime Minister cannot unilaterally prevent man-made catastrophes or social movements such as the Arab Spring or stand in the way of ‘acts of God’ such as pandemics, which undoubtedly affect British politics.
Although David Cameron 'spun and won' on the referendum wheel twice over, he came up short on Thursday 23rd June 2016 when seventeen million people voting ‘Leave’ upended - terminated even - his career as Prime Minister, and resulted in his immediate successor’s term being consumed by attempts to reach a withdrawal agreement. Were it not for the pandemic, this would also likely have led to Boris Johnson being remembered as ‘the Brexit Prime Minister’. The Brexit referendum, only the third national referendum to have been held in the UK, was not legally binding; Parliamentary sovereignty ensures that no domestic body, including prior Parliaments, may legally compel Parliament to do anything, including following the result of a referendum. However, given that in April 2016 70% of respondents to a survey viewed Cameron as out of touch, with 74% viewing him as caring more for some people than for others, ignoring the result would have been political suicide, alienating millions more voters, of which four million had voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election. Cameron also had to side with his many Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, peers and the supporting media including former Conservative party leaders Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, and the Telegraph and the Mail.
One example of a PM (more successfully) pushing through an extremely unpopular policy is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, although it's true that public opinion had been strongly behind British intervention in the Gulf War in 1990. Blair’s first contested election had been the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, held eight weeks into the Falklands War when support for the Conservatives appeared to increase due to the response to the Argentinian invasion, and he wanted to appear close to US president George Bush Jr and the ‘coalition of the willing’. Although initially there was a slight majority in favour of military action, the resignations of Commons leader Robin Cook and International Development Secretary Clare Short, along with anti-war protests reaching around eight hundred thousand attendees at their peak, turned public opinion firmly against a British presence in Iraq. The spreading of news such as that of the September Dossier (and its exaggeration of the threat from Iraq and its alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction) further reduced the political desire to invade. Although the Liberal Democrats and SNP benefited from having opposed this military action, Blair won a third consecutive general election in 2005, on the back of his interventionist policy, albeit on the lowest percentage of the vote of any majority government in British electoral history.
In conclusion, Prime Ministers are often heavily influenced by the people immediately surrounding them. It is usually they who are able to use formal procedure to their advantage to either help or hinder a PM, such as by resigning or by calling for a motion of no confidence in their leader. Those closest to the PM tend also to be either their replacements or amongst their most fervent supporters. Although massive events having their causes in other nations or amongst the wider electorate, or being beyond reasonable human control, may influence a Prime Minister, ultimately the context in which a the leader moves is established by the actions of those around them, and this so often provides a series of vital checks and balances on the head of government in the absence of a codified constitution.