The Professor Will See You Now: The Limits Of Prime Ministerial Power
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
As memories of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher fade, so perceptions of the limitations of prime ministerial power increase
A study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports argued that time could be flowing in reverse, without any of us knowing it. This came as no surprise to me, because I’ve been marking student essays. Few things make time flow in reverse quite like 90 second-year scripts at 3,000 words each, plus 16 final year dissertations, each of 10,000.
They don’t land on the desk with a worrying thud anymore. It’s now all online. You used to be able to work your way through a stack of essays sat in the sun, with a long cold drink in one hand, while you scribbled “?” or “??”, or occasionally even “???” in the margins. No such luck anymore. Life is only enlivened by an outstanding paper or an occasional blooper or two, like the time Labour was said to have a problem getting students to the “ballet” boxes, or the reference to the 2001 election being disrupted by “foot and mouse disease”. My favourite was a student reference to the “minor’s” strike (so much division and strife, all caused by one child…). But nothing will beat the friend of mine who marked a history essay from a 12-year-old in which William the Conqueror “rode his whores to London”.
These, though, are the exceptions; for the most part, you grind on, essay after essay, and find yourself thinking that Prometheus got off lightly; there are days where having my liver pecked at by an eagle would be a merciful distraction. Obviously no student at Queen Mary does it, but my colleagues tell me the use of AI is now rampant elsewhere; the giveaway being that the essays are properly punctuated.
One of this year’s essay questions is about the power of the Prime Minister. It’s a hardy perennial, familiar to politics students all the way back to Richard Crossman or John Mackintosh. As a key reading, we set a 2003 paper on what its author calls “prime ministerial predominance”: the PM may be the single most powerful actor in the executive, but with power contingent on the mobilisation of resources, both personal and institutional.
Teaching it this year, I was struck by a clear generational difference. Between the ages of 10 and 38, I experienced three PMs. In the last decade alone, my current second years have known six. Plus (and how can I put this politely?) not all of them have been political giants. I was socialised by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their pomp. My students came of age politically under Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.
Thatcher left office 15 years before they were born. She is to them what Churchill is to me
Thatcher left office 15 years before they were born. She is to them what Winston Churchill is to me. Blair exited No 10 when they were still in nappies. We should always give short shrift to people who justify ignorance of something just because it happened before they were around (“You are aware of the Romans? You have heard of the dinosaurs?”), but there is still a difference between knowing about something, and having experienced it, and it was striking how much the students leant heavily into the limitations of the position, all the things that stop PMs being powerful.
From a teaching perspective, I am not sure this is a problem. In terms of length of office, Truss may be an outlier, but so too in their own way were Blair and Thatcher, the seventh and ninth longest-serving incumbents of No 10. Plus, I was always sceptical about all the stuff on the so-called presidentialisation of the position; even Thatcher and Blair were hugely constrained, in ways some of their more ardent supporters often forget.
And anyway, now we have a government with such a landslide majority, perhaps in a decade or two some grumpy professor will be complaining that students place too much emphasis on the atypical untrammelled power of the four-term Starmer premiership.
Further reading: R Heffernan, Prime Ministerial Predominance? Core Executive Politics in the UK, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2003)
