Governing Britain: Power, politics and the prime minister

When Tony Blair hopped over the doorstep of No 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister in 1997, he encountered a huge crowd of civil servants in the entrance hall: they were applauding. Ten years later he left the House of Commons after his final Prime Minister's Questions, exiting past the speaker’s chair to the sound of more applause, this time from the assembled MPs. Such adulation would be a pleasant bookending for any job. For Blair it was particularly appropriate. He began as a longed-for saviour, come to give wise counsel and careful protection to the Civil Service, an organisation which he had constantly praised when in opposition. By the end, the Prime Minister was widely agreed to have abandoned the theoretical way the British government was organised. Strong departments and a neutral civil service had been replaced by a personal court at No 10.

This interpretation of the Blair years is more or less accepted by political reporters and by the wider public. In Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister (IB Tauris, £14.99), Patrick Diamond argues strongly for an alternative. Diamond has an interest in protecting Blair's reputation. He is Blair's former strategy chief, and judging from Governing Britain he remains a fervent crusader behind the long-tattered banner of St Tony. Still, Diamond's argument is convincing. He considers New Labour to have been a continuation, not a break, from what he describes as the "British Political Tradition": that is, a national political culture with a powerful central state run by Whitehall, guided by a vague philosophy of liberal parliamentarianism.

As Prime Minister, Tony Blair inherited powers which would make his contemporaries in other democratic countries quiver with envy. In Days of Fire, his new joint biography of George W Bush and Dick Cheney, Peter Baker emphasises the constant problems the President faced in running American foreign policy—let alone domestic policy—while fighting against an often hostile Congress and judiciary. Days of Fire makes an interesting contrast to Diamond’s investigation of goings-on in the UK. In contrast to the US Presidency, most Prime Ministerial powers are not actually written down as law. So long as the Prime Minister co-ordinates the government properly, his lawmaking can be limited only by his ability to control his parliamentary party. Blair had no problem in this regard, since he was popular for most of his tenure and almost always enjoyed comfortable Parliamentary majorities. With the support of the country and his party, aided by a strong economy and an enthusiastic civil service, he could effectively pass anything he wanted. Given the few obstacles his government faced, it is unsurprising Blair’s main problems came from inside it.

At this point, Blair’s critics would accuse him of strengthening his own position through expanding the Prime Minister’s Office, replacing neutral civil servants with political appointees and establishing powerful new agencies with names like the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, which put extendable ears into departmental processes. Blair did indeed double the number of Special Advisers (political strategists paid with public money who serve at the whim of their minister, rather than politically neutral Civil Servants in permanent administrative roles). He also expanded the importance of the Prime Minister’s Office by giving informal advisers powerful roles enforcing government discipline, and creating agencies to centralise delivery and policy.

But as Diamond shows, New Labour still had to work with existing institutions, especially the civil service bureaucracy, in order to get things done. Government departments retained their independent culture and operations—the Prime Minister’s Office simply lacked the expertise and staffing to genuinely usurp their powers. Just like any other premier, Blair had to endure the petulance of senior colleagues and the demands of vested interests outside his own clique of personal advisers. The mutual dependency between the political leaders and their permanent administrators meant Blair didn't want to become too closely involved in basic administrative details. If he wanted departments to do something, then besides commanding, he would also need to persuade.

Most important of all, Diamond highlights the Blair government's avid commitment to Whitehall’s hold on power in England. Civil servants might have had fewer roles in deciding policy. Media manipulation might have been more rigorously organised. The Prime Minister might have had a few more special advisers and an enormous Parliamentary majority. But decisions about everything, from what schoolbooks to use in Swindon to where a supermarket could be built in Middlesbrough, were still taken by a group of people in London who had never been anywhere near those places. A memo sent to Blair in 2000 proposed radical changes to the civil service, restructuring departments around objectives rather than administration and abolishing the office of permanent secretary, with the head of the home civil service becoming a chief executive with a direct management role. While New Labour did not succeed with these radical reforms, those reforms it did manage to put in place maintained a commitment to the model of a strong central government based in Whitehall. In Diamond’s words, the reform attempts launched by Blair were "intended not just to improve governmental performance, but to transform the nature of society by accruing power at the centre of the state."

Diamond’s ideas are unlikely to become popular opinion any time soon, partly because he has chosen to write an academic treatise rather than a tell-all memoir of his years in the pleasantly-carpeted corridors of Downing Street. He has a textbookish habit of relentlessly summarising everything previously said. There are also one or two howlers. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is misnamed to include Science. Given that Diamond is a former senior adviser at the department’s predecessor this is pretty inexcusable. A much larger problem is Diamond's failure to include much discussion of the history of Civil Service and Prime Ministerial power. There is a small lake of literature on this subject and Diamond’s argument would be far more convincing were he able to show how New Labour continued many traditions of British governance. Had he gone into more detail, he could have pointed out the importance of the Attlee Government in creating a single colossal organisation for the NHS, or Harold Wilson’s reliance on informal channels to shape policy.

But in the round Diamond’s analysis is strongly-argued, and he paints a bleak picture. Blair’s drive to increase the state’s power, and the power of the executive, does not distinguish him from most other executors of the British Political Tradition. It is difficult to name a single Prime Minister who, in modern times at least, has not supported the government's untrammelled power over both local institutions and national constitutional buffers, whilst simultaneously strengthening their own office at the expense of the average minister. By hoarding almost all power in London, by giving the Prime Minister remarkable leeway over all significant government activity, by maintaining a strong role for less accountable civil servants and powerful advisers, by failing to let reform Parliament’s procedures to allow it to be independent of Government, Blair was not responsible for the decline of the British system—he was a particularly good defender of it.