'Off with their heads': British prime ministers and the power to dismiss

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 249-278

  King, Anthony ^a   Allen, Nicholas ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77953612507     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340999007X     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000), pp. 68-69
2. Richard Crossman, Inside View: Three Lectures on Prime Ministerial Government (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 63.
3. One of Margaret Thatcher's former cabinet colleagues made the same point using similar language: 'We were all, at different times, antagonized by the way Margaret ran roughshod over Cabinet, but outsiders do not appreciate fully the patronage power of a Prime Minister who won a General Election in 1983 and then again in 1987. The only way you get into Cabinet is if the Prime Minister decrees it. The only way you can move up from being Minister of Agriculture to Foreign Secretary is if the Prime Minister ordains it. The politician who keeps in favour is not being unprincipled. He or she has to recognize that the Prime Minister will decide.' See Peter Walker, Staying Power: An Autobiography (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 232.
4. The House of Commons Disqualifications Act 1975 limits to 95 the number of members of the House of Commons who may be appointed to ministerial office. The Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 limits to 110 the total number of individuals who may be paid ministerial salaries. In other words, a British prime minister may appoint no more than fifteen ministers in the House of Lords unless either he is prepared to restrict the number of ministers in the House of Commons and/or one or more ambitious (and probably wealthy) individuals, whether MPs or members of the House of Lords, are prepared to work for nothing. At the time of the 1997 British general election, the standing orders of the Parliamentary Labour Party sought to restrict the freedom of choice of any incoming Labour prime minister by requiring him to appoint to his new cabinet all those who had been members of Labour's shadow cabinet when the party was in opposition and who were still MPs. However, the new prime minister, Tony Blair, ignored this rule to the extent of appointing two elected members of the former shadow cabinet to his government, but only as junior ministers outside the cabinet.
5. See Torbjörn Bergman, Wolfgang C. Müller, Kaare Strøm and Magnus Blomgren, 'Democratic Delegation and Accountability: Cross-national Patterns', in Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller and Torbjörn Bergman, eds, Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Table 4.9, pp. 150-151
6. On the five European countries mentioned in the text, see Bergman et al., 'Democratic Delegation and Accountability: Cross-national Patterns', Table 4.9, pp. 150-151
7. On Japan, see Tomohito Shinoda, Leading Japan: The Role of the Prime Minister (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), pp. 59-61. Although the heads of government in all of these countries are constitutionally permitted to appoint cabinet ministers who are not members of the legislature, it is unusual in some cases for them to do so. In Japan, for example, the great majority of cabinet ministers are also legislators.
8. Maurizio Cotta, 'Italy: A Fragmented Government', in Jean Blondel and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, eds, Cabinets in Western Europe, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 136-156, at p. 149.
9. Peter Gerlich and Wolfgang C. Muller, 'Austria: Routine and Ritual', in Blondel and Müller- Rommel, eds, Cabinets in Western Europe, pp. 157-170, at p. 164.
10. The Australian Labor party and the New Zealand Labour party's traditional methods of choosing cabinet ministers are described in Patrick Weller, First Among Equals: Prime Ministers in Westminster Systems (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 74, 85-7.
11. Kevin Rudd took advantage of Labor's overwhelming victory in the Australian federal election of November 2007 and, when he came to appoint his cabinet, simply bypassed his party's parliamentary caucus. See Peter Smith, 'Rudd unveils handpicked cabinet', Financial Times (London), 29 November 2007.
12. Shinoda, Leading Japan, pp. 62-63
13. David Hine and Renato Finocchi, 'The Italian Prime Minister', in G. W. Jones, ed., West European Prime Ministers (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 79-96, at p. 82.
14. See also Cotta, 'Italy: A Fragmented Government', p. 149;
15. and Donatella Campus and Gianfranco Pasquino, 'Leadership in Italy: The Changing Role of Leaders in Elections and in Government', Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 14 (2006), 25-40.
16. Campus and Pasquino argue that in the second Italian republic those prime ministers who have led coalitions of parties to power - notably Silvio Berlusconi - have greater power to determine the composition of their cabinets than prime ministers who have not (pp. 32-3).
17. Svein Eriksen, 'Norway: Ministerial Autonomy and Collective Responsibility', in Blondel and Müller-Rommel, eds, Cabinets in Western Europe, pp. 210-224, at p. 219.
18. Rudy B. Andeweg and Galen A. Irwin, Governance and Politics of the Netherlands, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2005), p. 122.
19. Quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 491. Mac- Donald complained that he had had would-be ministers 'in here weeping and even fainting'.
20. See Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs, 1887-1931 (London: Frederick Muller, 1953), p. 217.
21. Computed in the case of Gordon Brown from the House of Commons Information Office website and in the cases of Ramsay MacDonald and Harold Macmillan from David Butler and Gareth Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts 1900-2000, 8th edn (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 12-13 and 26-9. The totals in each case include the government's law officers but exclude the government whips.
22. Anthony King, 'The British Prime Ministership in the Age of the Career Politician', in Jones, ed., West European Prime Ministers, pp. 25-47, at p. 38.
23. On the changing character of Britain's political elite, see Anthony King, 'The Rise of the Career Politician - And its Consequences', British Journal of Political Science, 11 (1981), 249-85;
24. Peter Riddell, Honest Opportunists: The Rise of the Career Politician (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993);
25. and Peter Oborne, The Triumph of the Political Class (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
26. R. K. Alderman and J. A. Cross, 'The Reluctant Knife: Reflections on the Prime Minister's Powers of Dismissal', Parliamentary Affairs, 38 (1985), 387-407.
27. At least in this case, it is possible to find out. Through no fault of his own, Whitlock found himself caught up in a dispute between two of Britain's then Caribbean colonies, the islands of St Kitts and Anguilla. The British government proposed that the two islands should form part of a merged dependency. The Anguillans objected and declared their independence, and when Whitlock arrived on the island to try to broker a deal he was chased off, shots having been fired. He lost his job as a consequence, though some at the time maintained that he was unfairly blamed for what had happened. See the obituary by Andrew Roth, 'William Whitlock: Loyal Labour MP who took the blame for a colonial humiliation', Guardian, 2 November 2001.
28. It was rumoured that towards the end of his premiership, Tony Blair left Downing Street aides to get on with the business of organizing the details of some of his reshuffles, at least with respect to junior ministers.
29. The criteria listed here differ somewhat from those listed by other writers, notably in including presentational capacity and in placing less emphasis on intra-party balance. Richard Rose, in The Problem of Party Government (London: Macmillan, 1974), sets out 'at least three major criteria for making ministerial appointments': 'representativeness in relation to political factions and tendencies as well as social origins', 'loyalty to the Prime Minister' and 'ministerial competence' (pp. 363-4).
30. Rose offers a similar list in 'British Government: The Job at the Top', in Richard Rose and Ezra Suleiman, eds, Presidents and Prime Ministers (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), pp. 1-49, at p. 5.
31. Harold Wilson, in The Governance of Britain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1976), emphasized the desirability of having the various wings of the Labour Party represented in the cabinet and also the need to have ministers who could 'handle the House of Commons' and had 'a real rapport with the party nationally, and above all in the country' (p. 31). The fact that more recent writers have had less to say about ministers' role in the House of Commons and about the need to represent the various wings of the governing party may reflect the declining (though still by no means negligible) importance of the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher's ruthless exclusion of most 'wets' from her cabinet and also the much reduced importance of organized (and even unorganized) factions inside the contemporary Labour party. Concerning parliament, Peter Riddell puts the point bluntly: 'The main arena of British political debate is now the broadcasting studio rather than the chamber of the House of Commons.'
32. See Peter Riddell, Parliament under Blair (London: Politico's, 2000), p. 160.
33. One cabinet minister who largely kept her views to herself was Margaret Thatcher during her time as a member of Edward Heath's cabinet. On Thatcher's uncharacteristic reticence during this period, see John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer's Daughter (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), pp. 242-252
34. On Harold Wilson's relationship with Barbara Castle, see Anne Perkins, Red Queen: The Authorized Biography of Barbara Castle (London: Macmillan, 2003), passim
35. and Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London: HarperCollins, 1992), esp. pp. 334-338: 'Barbara y would mother and scold him' (p. 335).
36. On James Callaghan's dismissal of her, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 478-9
37. - 'she had no affection for Callaghan himself' (p. 479)
38. - and Perkins, Red Queen, pp. 416-18: when Wilson resigned in 1976 'Barbara knew that of all the potential leaders [Callaghan] was the one with the least time for her' (p. 417).
39. On Margaret Thatcher's relationship with Cecil Parkinson, see Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, final edn (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 313-315: 'He made a fussing, worried, preoccupied woman feel rather luxuriously at ease' (p. 315).
40. On the circumstances of his retention in the cabinet, at least in the short term, see Young, One of Us, pp. 342-414
41. Parkinson's own account of his temporary retention and subsequent departure is contained in Cecil Parkinson, Right at the Centre: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), chap. 12. So fond was Thatcher of Parkinson, and so respectful was she of his abilities, that she restored him to cabinet office a few years later.
42. For example, Andrew Rawnsley, an unusually well-informed journalist, notes that 'As the [July 1998] reshuffle was announced, it became clear that Blair was carpet-bombing the network of supporters Brown had placed in the government y The partisan purpose of the exercise was underlined by Blair's refusal to give any balancing jobs to MPs, even of promotion-worthy ability, associated with Brown.' See Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), pp. 163-164
43. Another well-informed journalist, James Naughtie, adds: 'At each following reshuffle, the counting went on: how many Blairites in, how many Brownites out?' See James Naughtie, The Rivals: The Intimate Story of a Political Marriage (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), pp. 116-117
44. Heath's exclusion of Powell gives the lie to the oft-repeated assertion that there are some individuals who are so powerful within their party that they are impossible to leave out. Although Powell undoubtedly had a substantial following in the Conservative party, and although Heath was well aware that he had one, Heath as party leader in opposition had already sacked him from the shadow cabinet following his famous 1968 anti-immigration 'rivers of blood' speech. To have nevertheless appointed him to the new Conservative cabinet in 1970 would have made the new prime minister look inconsistent, feeble and ridiculous and would also have incurred the ire of most of his senior colleagues and probably a majority of Conservative MPs. Not only would it have divided the parliamentary party, but some senior Conservatives, including Iain Macleod, would probably have refused to sit round the cabinet table with him. Fortunately for Heath, the strength of his position as the man who had just led the Conservative party to victory in a general election meant that he could afford to exclude Powell at virtually no cost to himself. Heath's account of Powell's behaviour in his memoirs - The Course of My Life: My Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), pp. 290-4
45. - is excoriating. He adds that, after his sacking of Powell, 'We never spoke again' (p. 293).
46. John Campbell in his life of Heath does not even bother to mention that Heath did not offer Powell a job; see John Campbell Edward Heath: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape 1993), 296-299
47. Powell himself 'realised immediately that, after Wilson, he had been the great loser of the election': Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 566.
48. Because of the Labour party's historic electoral predominance in Scotland and Wales, Labour prime ministers have seldom had any difficulty appointing competent ministers from those two nations. Conservative prime ministers have latterly found it more difficult. When John Major left office in 1997, the secretary of state for Wales sat for the English constituency of Richmond (Yorkshire). The political history of what used to be the German Democratic Republic has meant that, despite Angela Merkel, postreunification German chancellors have found it difficult to appoint more than a few cabinet ministers from that part of the Federal Republic.
49. Clement Attlee is quoted in Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers: The War and Post-war Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 80.
50. As recently as 1970, there was only one woman, Margaret Thatcher, in Edward Heath's cabinet. The cabinet that Tony Blair appointed in 1997 contained five women, and by the end of his time in office the number had increased to eight. His predecessor, John Major, was conscious of not having any women in his first cabinet but says in his memoirs that he did not want to engage in tokenism and instead appointed a number of women to junior ministerial office so that he could appoint women to the cabinet on merit in the future: John Major, The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 213.
51. More generally, see Richard Cracknell, 'Women in Parliament and Government', House of Commons Library Standard Note: SN/SG/01250 (London: House of Commons, 2008).
52. That said, Barbara Castle (see fn. 21 above) felt mightily aggrieved at being asked to go. She recounts in her memoirs - Fighting All the Way (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 489 - how the prime minister, James Callaghan, summoned her to tell her that he was not appointing her to his cabinet: 'I had, he said, to make way for younger people. I bit back the riposte: "Then why not start with yourself?" After all, he was two years younger than I and I was not seeking to be Prime Minister.'
53. On the issue of age generally, see the brief reference in Samuel Berlinski, Torun Dewan and Keith Dowding, 'The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the United Kingdom, 1945-97', British Journal of Political Science, 37 (2007), 245-62, p. 258.
54. The number 132, like most of the other aggregate numbers in this article, is derived from the data set out in Butler and Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, and David Butler and Gareth Butler, British Political Facts since 1979 (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2006). The total of 132 departures includes instances when the departing cabinet minister, having served under one prime minister, ceased to serve under that prime minister's immediate successor even though the same political party remained in power. We take the view that, whatever the formal position, the politics of the situation, from both the departing ministers' point of view and the prime minister's, remains essentially the same.
55. The official biographer in question was Kenneth O. Morgan, whose help we gratefully acknowledge. The former prime minister, who was in full possession of his faculties, was James Callaghan. The minister in question was Lord Shepherd (Malcolm Shepherd), the lord privy seal. We have no reason to doubt the statement in The Times' obituary of Lord Shepherd (6 April 2001) that he left the government simply in order to resume his business career.
56. The one minister was David Hunt, who left John Major's government in 1995. On the one hand, one of Major's biographers suggests on the basis of private information that Hunt resigned for personal reasons and that Major had actually pencilled him in to move to another cabinet-level office; see Anthony Seldon with Lewis Baston, Major: A Political Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 589. On the other hand, contemporary press accounts flatly assert that he was sacked.
57. For example, Andrew Marr wrote in the Independent (6 July 1995): 'The contrast with poor David Hunt is instructive. He got a job with similar potential last time round. He has been conspicuously, indeed excessively, loyal. He was Major's man. But he was also no good; so the Prime Minister quite brutally sacked him.' Although we had on a number of occasions to exercise our own judgement, on no other occasion did we encounter such a stark conflict of evidence.
58. Leaving the case of David Hunt aside, the total number of departures was 131, but the total number of individuals who departed was only 126, five of them having departed twice: Cecil Parkinson (1983, 1990), Peter Brooke (1992, 1994), Peter Mandelson (1998, 2001), Alan Milburn (2003, 2005) and David Blunkett (2004, 2005).
59. See, in chronological order, Robert Shepherd, Iain Macleod (London: Hutchinson, 1994), chap. 13;
60. Geoffrey Goodman, The Awkward Warrior: Frank Cousins, His Life and Times (London: Davis-Poynter, 1979), chap. 24;
61. Robert Sheldon, 'Edmund Emanuel Dell', in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol.15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 736-8;
62. Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), chap. 15;
63. and Robin Cook, The Point of Departure (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), chap 7.
64. See the nuanced account of Brittan's departure by Hugo Young in One of Us, pp. 453-454
65. Wilson described the scene of Jay's sacking in his memoir of his first government: 'We met in the station-master's office [at Plymouth] and, understandably, he took it badlyyBut he was now over sixty, above the "retiring age" that I had informally laid down, except for very special cases.' See Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964-1970: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and Michael Joseph, 1971), p. 427.
66. Wilson claimed that he sacked Jay for the reason just given, Jay's age, but no one believed him. Certainly, Jay did not. In his own memoirs - Douglas Jay, Change and Fortune: A Political Record (London: Hutchinson, 1980) - he insisted, partly on the basis of a conversation with an unnamed senior minister who had been involved, that 'the general public belief that my attitude on the EEC made it impossible for me to remain in this Government was basically correct' (p. 408).
67. In any case, as Jay himself readily acknowledged, he was not strong enough politically to give Wilson cause for concern. Wilson's biographer, Ben Pimlott, agrees with Jay that his opposition to Britain's joining the EEC was the root cause of his dismissal. He also agrees with Jay that by this time Jay was a largely isolated figure: 'WhenWilson cut him down, he had no powerful defenders.' See Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 467-468
68. On Richard Marsh, see his own account in Off the Rails: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), chap. 9, where he attributes his dismissal from the cabinet to his opposition to the prime minister's support for the In Place of Strife proposals (see fn. 56 below).
69. On Nicholas Ridley, see his account in 'My Style of Government': The Thatcher Years (London: Hutchinson, 1991), pp. 223-224
70. The Ridley case is certainly arguable. On the one hand, Thatcher let him go because he had gravely embarrassed the government by making offensive remarks about Germany and because he had already made known his intention to stand down at the next election. On the other, his reported remarks about Germany clearly cut athwart the government's approach to Britain's relations with Germany, which were meant to be businesslike if not exactly cordial. Thatcher, perhaps embarrassed by not having stood by Ridley, an old friend and ally, makes no mention of the episode in her memoirs. Hugo Young discusses the close relationship between the two of them in One of Us, pp. 572-573
71. Recent prime ministers have typically remained in office for considerably longer than most of their twentieth-century predecessors. Thatcher served for nearly twelve years, Major for more than six and Blair for almost exactly ten. Of the premiers covered in this article, only one other prime minister served as long: Macmillan, who held office for nearly seven years. The first-named premiers therefore had longer time in which to dismiss ministers and also to see them depart of their own accord. Largely for that reason, the average numbers of departures and dismissals reported in Table 2 conceal the fact that the absolute number of departures and dismissals was substantially greater during the second half of our period than during the first. During the twenty-five years following Macmillan's accession to the premiership in 1957, only 52 cabinet ministers left the cabinet, 35 of them having been dismissed. In contrast, during the ensuing twenty-five years, no fewer than 80 cabinet ministers left the cabinet, 52 of them having been dismissed. Premiers inheriting governments of their own party that have been in office for some time and premiers who have themselves been in office for some time have shown a marked disposition to sack an above-average number of ministers. Callaghan sacked five colleagues when he took over from Wilson in 1976 (Labour under Harold Wilson having been in power during much of the previous decade), and Gordon Brown in 2007 either sacked or showed no signs of wishing to re-employ no fewer than seven of Tony Blair's cabinet colleagues and demoted two others. Thatcher and Blair, during their last two years in office, each dispensed with the services of at least four of their colleagues.
72. Quoted in Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 401.
73. Of course, the position would have been transformed had Home led the Conservatives to victory at the 1964 general election. But in the meantime, he had to coexist, sometimes uncomfortably, with the man who had been widely expected to succeed Macmillan and who made no secret of the fact that he did not rate highly Home's intellectual abilities, R. A. Butler. See D. R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), esp. pp. 319-320
74. On Wilson's loss of authority, especially following the devaluation of sterling in November 1967, see Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 503-509 Pimlott writes (p. 509): 'Here was a new phenomenon in British politics: a prime minister with little support in the country, the press or the Government, who survived only because of the inertia of his party, and the lack of a mechanism for getting rid of him.
75. How precarious Callaghan found his own position and that of his government during most of his premiership, following his brief honeymoon, is indicated by the tone and content of his memoirs, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), esp. Part 5. At one point (p. 435), he notes that he was aware of two groups of ministers who, in a time of crisis, were discussing policy proposals at odds with those of the chancellor. He goes on: 'It was apparent that if the two groups were to coalesce the Chancellor [Denis Healey] would not have a majority for his negotiating stance. He was very hard-pressed throughout this period and I did not know what his reaction might be if the Cabinet overturned himy[The] government could not have survived the resignation of the Chancellor.
76. A whole chapter of John Major's memoirs is actually entitled 'The "Bastards" ': Major, The Autobiography, chap. 15. Major recounts (p. 343) that, gossiping with a television journalist before an open microphone that he did not know was open, he said: 'Just think it through from my point of view. You are the prime minister with a majority of eighteen, a party that is still harking back to the golden age that never was and is now invented. I could bring in other people. But where do you think this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You and I can think of ex-ministers who are causing all sorts of trouble. Do we want three more of the bastards out there?' Newspapers quickly identified the three ministers they believed Major was referring to. Major sacked none of the three, though one subsequently resigned.
77. Anthony King makes that claim in The British Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 316. John Campbell in Edward Heath (p. 302) remarks apropos Iain Macleod's sudden death that 'Macleod was the one senior colleague with a mind of his own and the independence to stand up to the Prime Minister when necessary, to whose advice he would always have listened. It was increasingly a weakness of the Government that Heath was almost entirely surrounded by ministers who owed their position solely to himself'.
78. On the events of January 1958 (the 'little local difficulty') and July 1962 (instantly dubbed 'the night of the long knives'), see Alistair Horne, Macmillan 1957-1986 (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 70-5 and chap. 12.
79. Horne makes it clear that in 1962 Macmillan believed that, because of a sagging economy, poor local election results and poor opinion-poll ratings, both he and his government were in serious political trouble. On p. 340, he quotes Macmillan as writing in his diary, 'Our stock is low'.
80. The fullest account of Thatcher's political demise is Alan Watkins, A Conservative Coup: The Fall of Margaret Thatcher (London: Duckworth, 1991). Watkins provides ample evidence of the draining away of Thatcher's personal authority.
81. For example, on pp. 8-9 he describes how one backbench MP, 'the Conservative Party's self-appointed parliamentary psephologist y sniffed the air, produced his pocket calculator, put his finger to the wind and pronounced Mrs Thatcher dead.' Another Conservative MP, accused afterwards of exaggerating the rate at which the prime minister was losing support in the party, riposted: 'You weren't there, old boy, and you're talking absolute balls. Her support was turning away so fast that by the end she'd have been lucky to have 90 f- - - - - - votes.' Robert Shepherd in The Power Brokers: The Tory Party and Its Leaders (London: Hutchinson, 1991) quotes yet another Conservative MP as saying 'that the talk about divisions in the party was true and that it wasn't the poll tax, it wasn't Michael Heseltine, it wasn't Europe, it was her' (p. 1).
82. See fn. 34 above.
83. Her old friend Michael Foot, in particular, did try to persuade Callaghan to keep her in the administration, but neither Foot himself nor any other significant figure showed any signs of going public, let alone of resigning, if he let her go. See Morgan, Callaghan, pp. 478-479
84. Thatcher's account in her memoirs of her sacking of Pym oozes contempt: 'In following Peter Carrington with Francis Pym as Foreign Secretary I had exchanged an amusing Whig for a gloomy one. Even the prospect of a landslide during the [1983] election made him utter dire warningsyI hoped he would consent to become Speaker and I still believe that he would have done the job wellyBut in any case he was having none of it. He preferred to go to the back-benches where he was a not very effective critic of the Government.' See Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 306-307
85. In fact, Blair did not want to lose Clarke as a member of the cabinet and offered him several alternative posts. He was disappointed, even dismayed, when Clarke declined all of them. But Blair was not willing to see Clarke remain at the Home Office and preferred to see him on the back benches rather than in that particular office. See Alan Travis, 'Released terror suspect sealed home secretary's fate', Guardian, 6 May 2006.
86. At least in connection with British politics, the phrase 'big beasts of the jungle' - or, alternatively, 'great beasts of the jungle' - appears to have originated with Sir Michael Fraser (later Lord Fraser of Kilmorack), a senior Conservative party official during the 1960s and 1970s. Another prominent Conservative - Douglas Hurd, who served as Edward Heath's political secretary and then as a cabinet minister under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major - inherited the phrase and helped give it common currency. In a letter to one of the authors, Lord Hurd writes of Fraser: 'He was full of tales of past doings of the "great beasts", usually culminating in a dramatic account of the Party conference of 1963 when they were all trumpeting in the jungle.' Although the use of the phrase in connection with politics may be relatively new, the concept itself is old. More than a century ago, Sidney Low suggested that there were 'superior and inferior classes of ministers', by which he meant ministers who counted and ministers who did not, by virtue of who they were as well as the offices they held. See Sidney Low, The Governance of England (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), pp. 162-170, esp. p. 167.
87. Anthony King made use of both the phrase and the concept in 'Ministerial Autonomy in Britain', in Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, eds, Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 203-225
88. King's list of big beasts for the period 1945-1994 is substantially the same as, but not quite identical to, ours. According to King, the big beasts of the jungle in Clement Attlee's time were Ernest Bevin, Sir Stafford Cripps and Herbert Morrison. In a persuasive research note, Laver and Shepsle also refer to 'big beasts of the jungle', but their reference is not to individuals but to big political parties, ones that can mobilize sufficient political talent to be able, on their own, to form a government: 'Ministrables and Government Formation: Munchkins, Players and Big Beasts of the Jungle', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 12 (2000), 113-124
89. The figure of 222 is calculated from the data set out in Butler and Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts 1900-2000, pp. 26-50
90. and Butler and Butler, British Political Facts since 1979, pp. 12-18. The total includes only those ministers who were full members of the cabinet, not those who, in Tony Blair's time, 'attended' cabinet without being full members of it; and, obviously, it does not include the prime minister of the day, though it does include those prime ministers who, at an earlier or later stage of their career, served under another prime minister between 1957 and 2007 (namely, Home, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher and Major).
91. Bagehot, 'Rumble in the jungle', The Economist, 11 December 2008.
92. For example, among Conservatives, Reginald Maudling had clearly emerged as a big beast by the time Harold Macmillan left office in 1963. He remained one during Sir Alec Douglas-Home's premiership and ran a close second to Edward Heath in the 1965 Conservative leadership contest. However, although he became home secretary under Heath, his flaccid ministerial style and his mounting personal difficulties undermined his position and he was in no sense a big beast during the final phase of his career. On the Labour side, Roy Jenkins was an enormous beast during the final phase of Harold Wilson's first premiership, especially following the devaluation of sterling in 1967, but his personal aloofness and alienation from the majority of his party over Europe during the early 1970s had greatly weakened his position by the time Labour returned to power in 1974. He was not a significant force as home secretary between 1974 and 1976, finishing a poor third in the 1976 Labour leadership election, and later in 1976 James Callaghan had no difficulty persuading him to quit the British political scene (to become president of the European Commission). Barbara Castle, never a very big beast, had, like Jenkins, shrunk considerably in stature by the time Labour returned to power in 1974. Callaghan in 1976 dispensed with her services. In a later generation, Peter Mandelson lacked the stature to be a big beast during his two stints as a cabinet minister under Tony Blair. But, when he returned to government under Gordon Brown in 2008, he quickly established himself as a very big beast indeed. He still lacked any substantial following in the Labour party and was not held in high regard by the general public, but he was certainly unusually intelligent, assertive and unpredictable. In addition, whereas Blair's political position had been strong vis-à -vis that of Mandelson, Brown's was exceedingly weak.
93. Horne, Macmillan 1957-1986, p. 349.
94. One of Macmillan's early biographers, Sir Nigel Fisher, who was himself a backbench Conservative MP at the time, uses such words and phrases in describing the night of the long knives as 'a grave political error', 'whirlwind', 'bad advice' (from the chief whip) and 'a mistake - perhaps the first serious mistake Macmillan had made during his Premiership'. Although Fisher is generally sympathetic to Macmillan, his account of the night of the long knives is extremely critical, not least in terms of the extent to which it represented an error of political judgement on Macmillan's part. See Nigel Fisher, Harold Macmillan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), pp. 271-278
95. The minister who roamed most freely at will, in the sense of acting almost entirely independently of the prime minister and to some extent against the prime minister's better judgement, was Edward Heath, who as secretary of state for trade and industry insisted on promoting legislation to abolish the practice known as resale price maintenance (RPM). The extant accounts of the episode all emphasize how reluctant Home was to support Heath on RPM and the fact that the support Home did finally give him was largely a product of his political dependence on him. Home's biographer, D. R. Thorpe, notes that 'For Home it was a question of backing Heath or moving him to another department'. Thorpe adds that 'the second option was not politically viable'. Even so, Home's response to Heath's first suggestion that the government should abolish RPM was to minute, 'This is very difficult.' See Thorpe, Alec Douglas- Home, p. 356
96. and also Heath, The Course of My Life, esp. pp. 259-60, and Campbell, Edward Heath, pp. 150-2.
97. Campbell notes (p. 152) that 'Home was not in a position easily to deny his right-hand man and principal moderniser any measure he had set his heart on'.
98. Home in his memoirs - The Way the Wind Blows (London: Collins, 1976) - admits to having had 'many misgivings' (p. 189).
99. See also Richard Findley, 'The Conservative Party and Defeat: the Significance of Resale Price Maintenance for the General Election of 1964', Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), 327-53, p. 343.
100. Peter Paterson, The Life of Lord George Brown (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 241.
101. Wilson in his memoirs notes, with glee but probably accurately: 'Even George Brown's two closest supporters, of many years' standing, told him and
102. In the case of Jenkins, Wilson refrained from acting against him even though he knew that Jenkins and his allies were plotting against him and wanted to depose him in Jenkins's favour. See the graphic account of the Jenkins-Wilson relationship in Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 488-491
103. In the even more remarkable case of Callaghan, Wilson refrained from acting against him even though in 1969 Callaghan semi-publicly - for all practical purposes, publicly - opposed the key element in the government's legislative programme: proposals for trade union reform based on the White Paper, In Place of Strife. In his definitive account of the In Place of Strife episode - The Battle of Downing Street (London: Charles Knight, 1970) - Peter Jenkins observes (p. 80) that 'Callaghan was challenging the leadership [i.e. The prime minister] on a clear issue, he was identifying himself with an alternative strategy; he was offering a different style of leadership.
104. For these reasons he had no intention of resigning y If Wilson wanted to make an issue of it at this stage he would have to sack him. The Home Secretary [Callaghan] was fairly confident that he would not be sacked.' (See also pp. 94-5.) In the event, Callaghan did not resign, Wilson did not sack him, and the In Place of Strife proposals were withdrawn.
105. See Ben Pimlott's vivid account of Benn's marginalization and then demotion - an account based on a mass of evidence - in Harold Wilson, pp. 664-668
106. Benn was a big beast. Had he not been a big beast, Wilson would undoubtedly have sacked him. Even so, Wilson, who was confident of his own position and also confident in his judgement of both Benn's position and his personality, treated Benn - as another member of the cabinet, Tony Crosland, reported to his wife - as a cat would treat a mouse: Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 293.
107. Wilson acknowledged Benn's big beast status in his own account of Benn's demotion: Harold Wilson, Final Term: The Labour Government 1974-1976 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1979), pp. 143-144
108. He feared Benn might, after all, decide to return to the back benches, 'the last place where I wished to see him' (p. 144).
109. Callaghan's encouragement of Jenkins took the form of making it clear that he would not appoint him to the one job in the new cabinet, that of the foreign secretary, that he really wanted and would have accepted. As Callaghan's biographer notes, 'Roy Jenkins had been promised by Wilson before the leadership contest the succession to the presidency of the European Commission, but he would have forgone this if he could now move to the Foreign Office in succession to the new Prime Minister. In fact, Callaghan at once made it plain that it was to Brussels rather than to Carlton Gardens that he must go. Jenkins, with his passion for Europe and his right-wing stance on most issues, he judged, would be a divisive force in the party' (Morgan, Callaghan, p. 477). Given Jenkins's political stature and the widespread support that he still had in the Labour party, it was convenient for Callaghan that the Brussels bolt-hole was available.
110. Walker, Staying Power, p. 146.
111. Alan Watkins in A Conservative Coup takes it for granted that 'Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe were the ministers (by this time, of course, ex-ministers) who were chiefly responsible for bringing Mrs Thatcher to her current condition' (p. 4).
112. Her 'current condition', of course, was the one in which she could be challenged and ousted. The enormity of Thatcher's folly is emphasized by Watkins and also by Robert Shepherd in The Power Brokers, chaps. 1-3. For the three big beasts' own accounts of their role in Thatcher's removal from office, see Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, chaps. 15-16;
113. Nigel Lawson The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam Books 1992), chaps. 76-7, 79
114. and Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London: Macmillan, 1994), chaps. 40-45
115. With regard to Howe, Shepherd writes: 'She dared not risk sacking Howe but treated him appallingly. At the last two cabinet meetings before his resignation she had openly displayed her impatience with him when he spoke "rolling her eyes and looking at the ceiling", according to one minister' (p. 1).
116. On the strange Blair-Prescott-Brown triangle, see, among many, many other things, Rawnsley, Servants of the People;
117. Naughtie, The Rivals; and Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries (London: Hutchinson, 2007).
118. Far from Blair being an overwhelmingly dominant prime minister, he and Brown shared power. Prescott notes in his memoirs - Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches (London: Headline Review, 2008), p. 303 - that Brown effectively blocked the prime minister's desire to take Britain into the European single currency and that he also 'rarely took Tony fully into his confidence as he was preparing Budgets.' Prescott also notes (p. 313) that Peter Mandelson, another minister, often referred to the three men as 'the Big Beasts'.
119. Martin J. Smith, 'Interpreting the Rise and Fall of Margaret Thatcher: Power Dependence and the Core Executive', in R. A. W. Rhodes and Patrick Dunleavy, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1995), p. 123.
120. See also Martin J. Smith, The Core Executive in Britain (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan 1999), chap. 4.