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Political and Constitutional Reform Committee Political and Constitutional Reform Committee Oral evidence: Role and powers of the Prime Minister: follow up, HC 1187 Thursday 27 March 2014 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 27 March 2014. Written evidence from witnesses: – Dr Richard Heffernan – Lord Hennessy Watch the meeting Members present: Mr Graham Allen (Chair); Mr Christopher Chope; Mr Jeremy Browne; Mark Durkan; Paul Flynn Questions 291- 333 Witnesses: Dr Richard Heffernan, Reader in Government, Open University, and Lord Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History, Queen Mary, University of London, gave evidence. Q291 Chair: Hello, Richard, how are you? Dr Heffernan: Very well, thank you. Q292 Chair: Peter, you are well. We are both off this morning at about 10.15am. We are not going to hurry anybody, but I will have to disappear from the chair. If we run over, Chris Chope will take over in the chair and finish off. Let us see how we go. Did you want to say anything to kick us off or shall we jump straight into it? Lord Hennessy: Just to thank you for moving the time for Tony Benn’s funeral, much appreciated. Chair: Richard, sorry, did you want to— Dr Heffernan: No, ask away. Chair: We are obviously concluding our inquiry into the role and powers of the Prime Minister as part of our big review of the constitution as a whole. We are very grateful to you for coming along this morning to help us conclude the evidence taking. We will jump straight to questions. Role and powers of the Prime Minister: follow up, HC 1187 Q293 Mr Browne: Good morning. This will enable you particularly, Lord Hennessy, to play yourself in by observing that you have noted the Prime Minister’s functions or the nature of the role since 1947, and you have felt the need to update that on a couple of occasions. For the benefit of the Committee, will you reprise what you think the Prime Minister’s role essentially is since 1947 and how it has changed over that period? Lord Hennessy: The first thing I noticed when I did the functional analysis, which, of course, is never complete, is that the role of the Prime Minister is like the British constitution as a whole— you think you are getting close and it disappears into the mists. It was an internal document that gave me the idea, a 1947 document prepared by a young chap, William Armstrong, in the Machinery of Government Division in the Treasury for an academic seminar, Outsiders Ask for Help. His list of the Prime Minister’s functions as head of Government, not leader of party, intrigued me. There were 12 of them and I think there needed to be many more. The first thing to note about the pattern throughout is that the number of functions has increased very dramatically since 1947, indicating that within our system of government the Prime Minister has accrued—if you convert functions into powers—a considerable chunk of extra power in each generation. It very rarely goes back when he or she acquires a function; it very rarely goes back or outside. Our clout in the world has much diminished since 1947 in relative terms, but the power of the British Prime Minister within the British system of government has waxed mightily. I am not a physicist so I should not say this, but I have always thought the premiership was a quantum mechanics phenomenon, a mixture of waves and particles. The waves are the big things Prime Ministers have to do—safety of the realm, supervising the intelligence world and so on, and the nuclear question, which I will come back to in a minute if you would like—and the particles, the stuff that flies in every day that you have to deal with. It is the most enormously over-stretching job. The other thing that struck me, from looking at the functions from 1947 to I think 2011 when Andrew Blick and I updated it together, is overload. When you think of the state since 1979, it is much shrunken. Nationalised industries have gone; regulators matter and all the rest of it. There has been a remarkable amount of devolution, and yet the weight on the Prime Minister and the centrality of the Prime Minister to the whole thing, the overload potentially on Prime Ministers, is just as great as it ever was. We have ceased to be a superpower. We no longer have colonies, and yet and yet and yet powers always tend to accrue and great weight falls. When you think about it, No. 10 is a sump into which all the impossible problems fall, the things that cannot be settled lower down. Yet at the same time we always have to worry about that because ours is a collective Executive. If I can use a non-academic term, if it does not remain a collective Executive, we are stuffed. We rely on various mechanisms—not least Select Committees like yours—to keep an eye on this all the time. I have no doubt we are going to come back to the accountability question of the premiership, but the most awesome function of all is the nuclear one, which was not there in 1947. The Attlee Government had decided inside a Cabinet Committee that we would become a nuclear weapons power, but we were not then. The first Prime Minister to have a useable weapon was Winston Churchill in the early 1950s, but the big nuclear force came in in the late 1950s. This is the most awesome of the prime ministerial responsibilities. We academics nurture this debate about whether we have Cabinet government or prime ministerial government because we have to find exam questions from somewhere, Richard, don’t we? The one thing that would settle it—heaven forbid— is nuclear release because it is a prime ministerial decision. Only he can initiate the firing chain. If he is wiped out by a bolt from the blue, there are two or three alternates nominated—in secret of course; we do not know who they are. You know you are Prime Minister when you have to fill in those last resort letters, what you want to happen from beyond the grave, and you either write them Role and powers of the Prime Minister: follow up, HC 1187 out or you tick in a box and you shred the stuff you have not used. A big shredder is brought in and your instructions go into the inner safe of each Trident submarine. Nobody knows what they are and they are destroyed unread. That is when you know you are Prime Minister. Nothing can prepare you for that. In the magnitude of changes to the premiership—though heaven forbid it should even be remotely likely that it would happen—that trumps everything else and nobody else can do it. Q294 Mr Browne: Can I ask a follow-up to that? I accept that that is an awesome responsibility, but that change took place essentially 60 years ago and has not fundamentally altered since, whereas you revised or you did your updates—I appreciate you may not have been in a position to do an update in the early 1950s—in 1995 and 2011, which suggests that the particles have changed the role more than the fundamental responsibilities. Whether that is more intense media scrutiny or a changing nature, a less deferential society, I observe in my shorter time scale that, although the nuclear question is the biggest example, the nature of the role is perhaps constantly evolving as it becomes more frenetic and the Prime Minister has to respond to a faster moving and less deferential society. If you just took the Prime Minister and sat him down and said, “How was your day yesterday?” that would be the biggest contrast between now and, say, Harold Wilson—seeing we are in the Wilson Room—than the nuclear issue. Lord Hennessy: I agree with that absolutely. The reason for the timing of my updates is the academic publishing cycle. Of course, another one is Europe, once we were in the Community in 1973, which gets increasingly prime ministerial because you have to negotiate through the night at European Councils and so on. The phone is sometimes open to a handful of Ministers back in London, but the Prime Minister has to be given delegated powers. He or she has to carry the can when they come back, so Europe is a big one as well. Twenty-four hour media has paralysed them. I remember Douglas Hurd, who might have become Prime Minister in 1990, saying that there is no need for this excessive paralysis of the media. I think these were the words he used, “Why do Prime Ministers feel they always have to be at the head of the rush?” I remember a shrewd old No. 10 insider saying to me that the first version of a breaking story—particles—is very rarely accurate, and if you react to that too swiftly, you can build in distortions that are very hard to sort out afterwards. At the same time, because of the pressure of the 24-hour media and this mania with permanent rebuttal, which I think the Labour Party has a lot to answer for in the 1990s to be honest, everybody feels the need for such rebuttal. It eats up time and it burns nervous energy. Q295 Mr Browne: I am a Somerset MP and, presumably, the Prime Minister at the turn of the year had not scheduled in repeat visits to Somerset to direct the flood relief effort personally, and yet there he was.
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