Recent Gyrations Of The Prime Minister’s Office In Historical Perspective

>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, my name's Niall Ferguson. I am the Milbank Family Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and I am also the Chair of the Hoover History Working Group. And this week we've been very fortunate to be joined by Professor Jon Davis, who's Director of the Strand Group at King's College London.

Before that, for many years, Jon Davis ran an extraordinarily interesting project at Queen Mary, University of London, the Mile End Group, which involved bringing all kinds of luminaries from British politics, including at least two former prime ministers, to a kind of large scale research and seminar project. He also taught at award-winning special subjects on the Blair government, and published a book on that subject, Heroes or Villains?: The Blair Government Reconsidered.

Jon's currently working on a new book on the British prime minister as institution. And his paper for us was entitled Recent Gyrations of the Prime Minister's Office and Decision-making in Historical Perspective. Jon, welcome to Hoover. Let me open with a question about the nature of British politics itself.

Simon Kuper has an entertaining book out called Chums, in which he argues that it's really all about a tiny number of people who went to Oxford together. And British politics is just a competition between that group to see who can get to be prime minister to the top of the greasy poll.

Is there any truth to that? Or is there something more going on here than just Oxford's student politics writ large?

>> Jon Davis: I think it's inescapable that there's something to this particular argument. I'm not saying that I buy it completely, but if you take the idea that Britain is a conservative country that sometimes votes Labour.

And so, Conservatives are in for a good two-thirds, if not more of the time, certainly in the 20th century and into the 21st century. So you're looking at the Conservative Party, then you look at the makeup of the Conservative Party, and many of them have been to Oxford.

There's no doubt about that. And then from that, many of them do a particular course at Oxford, PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics. A course which gives, as its name says, gives a broad view over the great politics, great philosophers, great economists. And what it does is, it sort of gives an idea, an introduction.

But because it's at Oxford, that introduction gets greater cache. And so, linked to that is the confidence that you've made it to Oxford and you're amongst very impressive, clever people. So a confidence starts to breed from this. And so what you've got here, especially when you bear in mind that Oxford has a preponderance of fee-paying school entrance, fee-paying schools that educate around about 7% of the UK population.

I think the thesis holds a great deal of awesome.

>> Niall Ferguson: So I'm not going to stick up for PPE, but perhaps I should stick up for Oxford. It's been providing prime ministers for a very long time, and I wonder if part of the story you're telling us is a story of a decline in, well, what?

Is it the quality of prime ministers, or is it the governability of Britain? What's changed since, let's say, the 1990s, since Tony Blair's time, that you could call the problem? I'm not sure whether it's structural or just a matter of inferior quality people.

>> Jon Davis: I'm not gonna lay into Oxford neither.

I mean, just before your 1990s, Margaret Thatcher, I think arguably the most impressive of prime ministers, certainly since the World War II, was a famous Oxonian of Oxford. Now in terms of quality, so we've explained why so many come from Oxford and into that incredible, sort of like, upward escalator from Oxford, into the Conservative Party, and not just into the Conservative Party, but often into the higher reaches of the Conservative Party, really quite quickly.

If we're talking about, has there been a declining quality overall? I think, I really don't wanna say it. I really don't, cuz I'm always looking. I'm so conscious of the old idea of, same as it ever was, that there was a golden age a time ago. Also conscious of the years passing myself.

But I think, talking with so many people, looking at these things from so many different angles, I think it is the case that the overall quality of British politician is not as strong as it once was. Huge, many great exceptions to what I'm saying there. But I think overall, the quality is not as strong.

And I think you just go into all kinds of issues here around the ideas of public intrusion into private lives, I think that actually it becomes a relatively less remunerated job contrary to what the popular idea is of very rich politicians who are earning fortunes, is simply not the case.

And so, you put all these things together, the social media pressure, especially on women, I don't think it's as nice a job as it once was.

>> Niall Ferguson: Let's talk about Brexit, because obviously, the thing that upended British politics in 2016 was the result of the Brexit referendum. And it hasn't felt as if British politics has been stable since culminating, of course, in the year of three prime ministers in 2022.

How far do you think it's really been that issue that has driven the political turmoil, and that even the most talented politicians would have struggled to stabilize Britain economically and politically if they'd been prime minister the day after the referendum?

>> Jon Davis: I think its inescapable that that's exactly what has happened.

What I would start to describe as the Brexit revolution, this incredible decision by the country to take a referendum outside of a general election, a binding 50-50. You should get that 51% or 52% in actuality, that would completely upend 40, 50 years of ever closer union in legal.

It just goes on. It's the most gargantuan decision. And it was taken against a ruling party by a civil war within that ruling party. And so, the morning after the referendum that David Cameron had called, he resigns immediately. And then, one by one, the big supporters of Brexit, sorry, of remaining, are removed from the Conservative Party one by one, until you've got a cabinet under Boris Johnson, who largely was chosen not because of ability, but because of fealty to this Brexit idea.

And then what's happened from it? It took several years, three years, to actually get Brexit done. Theresa May, I think, in retrospect, actually put together a great deal that might have, that might have stabilized things, a really good deal. But it was rejected because it became a logical conclusion that we had to go for the hardest break possible.

Now, we all know that Britain's history is half-in and half-out when it comes to Europe. When we were outside, we desperately wanted to be in. When we're in, some of us desperately want to be out. I think Britain's destiny is to be in a halfway house, and that's what I think is now coming.

>> Niall Ferguson: One of the themes of your work going back many years is the role of the civil service in British political life. And I think, for many people, British politics is still summed up by the sitcom Yes, Minister and later Yes, Prime Minister. I've often wondered, if the civil service is so powerful, why were they unable to stop Brexit, which can't have been something that any civil servant wanted?

What's the answer to that?

>> Jon Davis: I'm sure that there were some civil servants who did, but it's certainly the case that many did not. I actually think that what's happened since Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, in a small way possibly, because of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, what's happened is that the power of the civil service has reduced over time.

I think that Yes, Minister parodies a time of the 1960s and 70s where you had the pendulum politics of Labour, then Tony, then Labour, then Tony, where the civil service was obviously to the fore. And they were in charge, in all kinds of ways. Not totally, but they were.

There was a great deal more influenced around. What I think has happened, since Thatcher, is a return of democracy. That what's happened, whether you like democracy or not, what has happened is that the popular will is now transferred by prime ministers who are unprepared to listen, to defer to civil servants in a way that, that parody that Yes, Minister brings out may well have been true in that earlier period.

But I also commend you, you'll recall, as a great expert on Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, remember how Jim Hacker becomes prime minister? It's because he attacks Europe, and says that we gotta protect the great British Banger, if my memory serves correct.

>> Niall Ferguson: And in that sense, it was prophetic as well as funny.

>> Niall Ferguson: I'll ask a last question, which is perhaps an unfair one about the future. Where does Britain go from here? You sit in London at a time of, I think, considerable depression, despondency about the outlook. Economically, things aren't great. It almost feels as if we've gone back to the 1970s with high inflation and a rash of strikes.

It's a little hard to say who'll be the next prime minister. But give me a sense of where you think Britain goes from here. Is Brexit actually gonna end up being reversed or are they, we, stuck with it?

>> Jon Davis: If you look at opinion polling right now, in late January 2023, the opinion polling is starting to, well, I mean, it's been nudging all the way.

It's now starting to nudge two-thirds of people who are convinced that it was a mistake. This is being seen massively in the constituencies that Boris Johnson won for the Conservatives for the first time, in many cases from the Labour Party, that that vote has become very soft and is showing great deal of regret, Regrexit, as the current phrase says.

Look, where do we go from here? It's undeniably true that what is happening is a great despondency that has descended upon British politics. I think that not only are we predicted to grow less, that if there is a recession, the recession will be deeper than close partners or competitors, comparators.

That's on the economic side. I think when you look at foreign policy, yes, we were out-front over Ukraine, but it's not. Apart from Boris Johnson visiting Zelenskyy so often, it doesn't feel like we're at the forefront of things, and nor will we, I think, ever be again. So I think that what we're seeing is a hastening of decline.

You'll recall that Liz Truss, in a leadership campaign, aped Margaret Thatcher from the 1970s, not just the way that she was dressing like her, but also this hatred of decline. But I think that Mrs. Truss has actually hastened, in some respects, that decline. I'm a natural optimist, Niall, and so from my point of view, I think that however far we go down, I do still think that there hopefully is a return not to where we were, not to, if I look back and I think about Blair, whatever you think about him, in the months after 9/11, he bestrode the globe.

He was everywhere and people were listening, listening to him. When you think back to Margaret Thatcher and Gorbachev, a man we can do business with. You go further back to the Falklands, and how Britain could put quite a mighty fleet together, none of these things are true anymore.

And so, I think that it's gonna be a hard lesson, but I think that Britain's destiny as a mid-rank European nation has only been hastened by, for what some people thought Brexit, was a return to greatness.

>> Niall Ferguson: Jon, thank you so much indeed for joining us. Your paper, Recent Gyrations of the Prime Minister's Office and Decision Making in Historical Perspective, is available from the Hoover History Working Group website as a Hoover History Working Paper.

It's been a great pleasure to host you and we look forward to the book when it comes out. I won't ask you for a pub date yet. Jon Davis, thanks very much indeed.

>> Jon Davis: Thank you.