POLITICS
The lonely constitutionalism of the long-distance Prime Minister
NOEL MALCOLM
One of the exchanges in last week's interview with Mrs Thatcher in the Sunday Correspondent was especially poignant. It went on as follows:
Mr Macintyre: Have you not become cut off from ordinary people?
Mrs Thatcher: No I have not, no I have not, but when I do a regional tour it does not get very much publicity. We went up to Ely and we were round the town and we did some shopping, we were through the cathedral, everyone was streaming through the cathed- ral. . . . I went to Oxford to open an interdisciplinary research centre on the struc- ture of proteins — always scientists every- where — and we went to Magdelen for lunch and there was a demonstration outside, of course there was. We went to Cambridge, the Polar Institute. We went to Cumbria to do a business award. . . .
The style may be a delicious mixture of Gertrude Stein and Daisy Ashford (Mrs Thatcher, it seems, is rarther parshal to scientists), but the sentiment comes closer to that other great lady of letters, Queen Victoria. The Prime Minister cannot con- ceive of meeting 'ordinary people' except in terms of 'doing regional tours' — on which the ordinary people will turn out to be deans of cathedrals, directors of re- search institutes and winners of business awards. Nor could it be otherwise, save where a few family friends and a few members of her constituency association are concerned. One can hardly expect her to start mingling incognito with people at bus-stops and supermarket check-outs. Great power necessarily involves a degree of isolation which at times may be tanta- mount to great weakness.
In general, coverage of the government crisis of the last two weeks has paid too much attention to the Prime Minister's power, and not enough to the ways in which she is weakened and isolated by the very nature of her position. The subliminal image behind much of what is written about her is that of the Waggon' in Private Eye's strip cartoon, 'Dan Dire': an all- seeing, all-knowing Empress of the Uni- verse, whose diktat is law and whose displeasure is instant death. In reality, however, she sees only what others allow her to see (Mr Ingham's digest, for exam- ple, of the daily press) and knows only what others enable her to know.
Those enablers include officials who deal with the executive side of government (the Private Office), with the party (the Politic-
al Office) and with the press (the Press Office). But only a tiny handful of people, mainly those in her Policy Unit, can supply her with the facts, ideas and arguments necessary for her to have any continuous influence on the development of policies. Much of their work involves dogging the heels of ministers, and questioning the assumptions of those ministerial advisers and officials who say that some policies are impracticable or undesirable. It seems, on the face of it, a very odd state of affairs that the commander-in-chief should have her own private guerrilla band (supported by the occasional free-shooter such as Sir Alan Walters) making war on her own regular army. But without such support she would be reduced in some crucial areas of her responsibility to little more than a figurehead — confined either to accepting whatever was proposed to her, or to rejecting it without possessing sufficient firepower to back up her arguments.
Looked at from a distance, the Prime Minister seems to enjoy an extraordinary concentration of power because she is the point where all the spokes of government meet. But we shall never understand the stance she has taken over the last fortnight unless we can imagine what it feels like to be at that central point: there are so many spokes, with so much happening on each of them, that even a Stakhanovite like herself will always feel outnumbered and outgun- ned. As she also said to the Sunday Correspondent (with a note of exasperation which rings very true):
Most of your decisions are done through Cabinet committees. . . . I chair only two committees, the Economic and the Overseas and Defence. . . . The idea that everything comes to me is so ludicrous. I am not even present at the Home Affairs or Legislation committees.
So to be asked, in effect, to stop having arguments of her own to put forward on the conduct of economic policy (for that was how she saw the effect of Mr Lawson's demand for Sir Alan's head on a platter) was to be asked to do something that she could not possibly do. Note that her phrase was: 'I did everything possible.' The phrase `everything in her power', which Mr Brian Walden used when inviting Mr Lawson to convict her of lying, was Walden's. It would be absurd to say that sacking Sir Alan was not in her power; it is not absurd to say that she could not possibly do it.
What Nigel Lawson told Mr Walden has done some damage to Mrs Thatcher's standing in the eyes of the public; but it has won sympathy for her among many of her backbenchers, who appreciate the con- straints under which she was speaking and her reluctance to betray the privacy of such discussions. This may seem no more than a point of etiquette, but it is the sort of etiquette on which government depends.
Cabinet government itself involves a fiction of unanimity which remains effec- tive despite being universally recognised as fiction. We may all know that two minis- ters are at each other's throats, but they are 'seen' to concur in public, and it is the public show that matters. Ministers may be known to disagree, but they must be seen to agree. What happens behind the scenes is not, in this sense, 'seen'. But consider these uses of the phrase: 'the successful conduct of economic policy is possible only if there is, and is seen to be, full agreement between the Prime Minister and the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer' (Mr Lawson's resignation letter); 'it is of the highest importance that Her Majesty's Govern- ment is seen to remain committed to that position' (Sir Geoffrey Howe's speech on the EMS two days later); 'I think is it very important that people should see that we are under Cabinet government' (Mr Hurd, interviewed during the Westland crisis in January 1986). In usage of this kind, the convention is turned inside out: the things described as 'seen' are the arguments which are conducted behind the scenes. `Not only must we agree, formally, as a government', these critics are saying, 'we must also be known to agree privately.'
It may be paradoxical, but it is not absurd, to say that Mrs Thatcher is being more constitutionalist here than her minis- ters. The essential type of agreement which is necessary for collective government is the formal, more or less fictional type which is embodied in the existence of the Cabinet. That, curiously enough, is what she has defended when she has argued that the opinions of advisers, like the private opinions of ministers, are not 'seen' to have any status of their own. If she is to be required not only to agree with her minis- ters in public, but also to stop disagreeing with them in private, the sense of compara- tive impotence which she already feels will become intolerable — not only to her, but to any future prime minister.
Previous page
