Contemporary Record

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Cabinet government: A commentary

Peter Hennessy

To cite this article: Peter Hennessy (1994) Cabinet government: A commentary, Contemporary
Record, 8:3, 484-494, DOI: 10.1080/13619469408581310

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 Cabinet Government: A Commentary

PETER HENNESSY

Overview
For me it was John Hunt, a great seeker after efficiency at the centre and
anatomist supreme of the 'hole' at the heart of British government1 who
captured the essence of the problem of collective Cabinet government in
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late twentieth century Britain when he admitted at the IHR seminar that
'it is cumbersome. It is difficult. It has all sorts of disadvantages and it is
possible it may need to change.' It was in short 'a bit of a shambles'. But
he added 'it has got to be so far as possible, a democratic and accountable
shambles'.
Unless the British system of government was refashioned in a deliber-
ately premierist fashion by giving the Prime Minister some formal power
to override ministers, for which Lord Hunt doubted the country was
ready, the issue would remain one of finding ways of making the 'collective
executive' more efficient while retaining the benefits which flow from a
diffusion rather than a concentration of power, at the heart of that
executive.
Of our contributors, all but one of the five were with John Hunt, in
wishing 'Bagehot-style' to describe 'the living reality'2 while seeing suf-
ficient virtue in the traditional notions and mechanics of collective
responsibility to justify their maintenance, albeit in a reformed condition.
Only Edmund Dell argued that 'collective responsibility is an impossible
way of running government', that it is largely mythical in modern British
government and that in the one area where it continued to operate - the
allocation of public spending - 'it has proved to be a recipe for excessive
expenditure, considerable waste and unsustainable borrowing require-
ments'. Mr Dell argues for reality to dispel myth with a strengthened role
for the centre (primarily Number 10 and the Treasury) and the replace-
ment of collective responsibility by the principle of 'collective tolerance'.
All, however, recognise the importance of human factors as well as
procedural matters in the ecology of the Cabinet Room, not just in the
contrast between 'forceful' and 'less forceful' premiers, as John Hunt put

Dr Peter Hennessy is Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield

College, University of London. He is working on a study of The Prime Minister for
HarperCollins.

Contemporary Record, Vol.8, No.3, Winter 1994, pp.484-494

PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
 CABINET GOVERNMENT: A COMMENTARY 485

it, but in the contributions of crucial figures such as Lord Whitelaw who in
the Thatcher years, as Robert Armstrong recalled, 'didn't very often say
"no" to something that the Prime Minister was proposing, but when he
did she sheered away from it'.
Yet in tackling the standard arguments and counter-arguments about
the waxing of Prime Ministerial government at the expense of Cabinet
government, all five stressed the factors that had pushed successive
premiers into more prominent roles (the growth of the media, both in
reach and swiftness, in particular) whatever their place on the forceful/
less forceful spectrum. Similarly, the quintet of commentators appre-
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ciated that the same Prime Minister could display different characteristics
in terms of style and procedure at different times in his or her premier-
ship. This was especially true of Mrs Thatcher, frequently the victim of
over-simplistic almost monochromatic treatment, whose Cabinet Room,
as Nigel Lawson depicted it, 'evinced a very different mood and flavour'
at the end of her premiership compared to its early phase.
Perhaps most important of all, our five contributors are as one in
seeing the central terrain of Cabinet government, the very heart of what
political scientists now call the 'core executive',3 as a matter of continuing
importance - a subject requiring serious treatment and debate. This you
would expect from retired technicians-of-state such as John Hunt and
Robert Armstrong for whom managing the machine was a profession.
But in different ways and in differing degrees, it mattered to the politicians,
too: for Edmund Dell because there was a delusion at the heart of govern-
ment as collective responsibility is 'bad politically and bad administratively'
and 'if the reality differs from the convention, the convention will fall into
practical disuse'; for John Wakeham because 'many commentators who
bemoan what they see as the decline of Cabinet as a decision-taker fail to
appreciate its significance as the cement which binds the government
together'; and for Nigel Lawson because even if procedure is a secondary
issue (note his contrast between the collective handling of the poll tax
issue and the prime ministerial treatment of the exchange rate mechanism
question), 'creeping bilateralism' in Mrs Thatcher's relations with the
Cabinet carried a price as did the isolation of a forceful premier uncon-
strained either by a Whitelaw figure or an 'institutionalised Willie' in the
form of an 'inner cabinet'.

The Role of the Prime Minister

The two poles of the prime ministerial versus Cabinet government debate
were almost artistically marked by Edmund Dell and John Wakeham. In
the modern political argot, there was clear water between them.
 486 CONTEMPORARY RECORD

DELL: The Prime Minister has to be the leader. The Prime Minister has to
be number one. The Prime Minister is not primus inter pares, he is the
leader of the government or he is nothing.

WAKEHAM: The Prime minister is primus inter pares; he is the minister

who chairs the Cabinet. . . nor [unlike the U.S. President] does he have
a personal mandate to govern . . . the doctrine of collective responsibility
means that the Cabinet Ministers are all responsible for the policies and
actions of the government . . . executive powers . . . formally rest with
the ministers of the crown who run government departments . . . The
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Prime Minister has very few formal powers.

Intriguingly, Nigel Lawson steers a path between the other two politicians
by carefully distinguishing those factors which tilt life at the centre
towards prime ministerialism from those which work against it.
He stresses how both excessive departmentalism can lead to ministers
ceasing to think in collective Cabinet terms, a factor that further streng-
thens the relative power of the PM as it tends to be accompanied by
bilateralism - the striking of deals between the premier and the depart-
mental minister away from Cabinet fora to the mutual convenience of
both but to the detriment of collegial decision-making.
That said, Lord Lawson, more than any previous commentator, is
forceful and vivid about the mutual blackball which lies at the heart of the
PM-Minister relationship and is a real limitation upon the power of the
premier. The mutual veto can only be overridden by the departure of the
Prime Minister, or the sacking or resignation of the Secretary of State
concerned. Any of these events can raise the stakes, sometimes (as in the
case of Mrs Thatcher and the ERM) to a point where the survival of the
government could be at stake and not just in instances where the PM
might go, bringing, Samson-like, the Cabinet Room pillars down with
him or her. Similarly, a joint resignation on a matter of fundamental
policy by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary
would be very difficult for a government to survive.
As a result of the mutual blackball and the resignation threat, Nigel
Lawson argues, 'It is wrong to exaggerate the power of the Prime Minister
and certainly prime ministers don't feel themselves nearly as powerful as
they are made out to be, even though in my experience they would like
to be.'
The officials tended to support the Lawson line. Though Lord Hunt
emphasised several factors 'pushing the Prime Minister into a more
prominent role' (the demands of the media for an instant response; the
need to answer questions twice a week when Parliament is sitting across
 CABINET GOVERNMENT: A COMMENTARY 487

the whole range of government business; the interweaving of European

and domestic policy; the growth in summitry), he pointed out that none
the less 'Prime Ministers' offices really run on a shoestring in this country'.
'All four prime ministers I served', he added, 'toyed at some time with the
idea of setting up a PM's department and all four shied away from the fact
that it would look presidential, it would look as if they were taking away
power from their colleagues'.
Robert Armstrong sensed in the later Thatcher years after the 1987
election that, conscious of 'the winged feet of time' she felt 'she really had
to keep up a tremendous pace and if necessary to take the short cuts to do
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so.' She might have wished it otherwise, and that a presidential form of
government were possible in the UK, but she continued to need Cabinet
support and her lack of attention 'to making sure to take her colleagues
with her' was a factor in her fall.
Intriguingly, however, it was John Wakeham, the most prominent
espouser of the traditional view among our five, who pointed out that 'on
rare occasions', where opinion is evenly divided the issue will be referred
to the Prime Minister for decision. Though Wakeham did not give
examples, two such instances have become known from the Major years-
the decision to retain the May Day Bank Holiday and the decision not to
dump nuclear waste at sea.4

The Relationship of the Prime Minister with Senior Colleagues

All agreed on the Prime Minister - Chancellor of the Exchequer nexus as
the special relationship within modern British government. It was so
central and powerful that even such an arch prime ministerialist as Edmund
Dell felt that there was no need for a PM's Department as the Treasury
and Number 10 'combined form a good basis for the sort of strong centre
of government which I would like to see'.
Existing reality, according to Dell, means the Prime Minister 'is
number one, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is number two, the Foreign
Secretary is either on the eve of graceful retirement or is a bag-carrier for
the Prime Minister. . . everyone else in the Cabinet is relatively nowhere'.
For Edmund Dell, the discussions of the IMF autumn of 1976, in which
he took part, were a profound illustration of the centrality of the alliance
between Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street 'I had always assumed
that immediately Jim Callaghan said, "I support Denis Healey", which I
thought he was bound to say eventually, that was i t . . . I have described
the 1976 Cabinet meetings as a farce and a dangerous farce at that. Nine
Cabinet meetings while the [money] market was impatiently waiting for
a decision.'
 488 CONTEMPORARY RECORD
In a sensible system of government, Callaghan would, after discuss-
ing with Healey [Chancellor] and Foot [Deputy PM] and possibly
with Tony Crosland [Foreign Secretary], have told the Cabinet: 'It
is my responsibility. We have to cut public expenditure. Don't be so
stupid as to resign, which actually I know you are not going to do
anyhow and bring the government down and let Thatcher in. The
party would never forgive you.' If he had said that after a couple of
Cabinet meetings I'm sure the Cabinet would have accepted it.

Others are not so sure, including John Hunt who also sat through those
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IMF Cabinets. His view - that Callaghan genuinely wanted to explore the
possibilities and to minimise a perceived threat of resignations before
backing the Chancellor - is very much shared by those involved in the
discussions at ministerial and official level, including Callaghan himself
who thought 'it was quite possible we might have broken up as in 1931'.5
Where the consensus is with Dell is on the special nature of market-
sensitive monetary and fiscal decision-taking which is a rarity at full
Cabinet level. 'Nobody', said Mr Dell, 'pretends that decisions in respect
of the Budget are taken by anybody but the Chancellor and the Prime
Minister'. He was, however, referring to the position before 1993 when
the first 'combined Budget' bringing taxation and spending (which is very
much a collective matter) together was presented to Parliament.
Nigel Lawson was quite explicit about the constitutional understanding
which keeps tax decisions and monetary matters, such as interest rates,
away from the full Cabinet as very much the preserve of the PM and the
Chancellor. Though, in terms of the old Budget, he added, 'a sensible
Chancellor does soften up one or two colleagues on one or two aspects of
the Budget in advance'.
Lord Wakeham, however, makes no mention of the Chancellor's
special position on economic matters apart from his being brought in on
all discussions that involve spending. He is silent on Budget and monetary
matters and seems to regard the Treasury as a floating semi-member of
the 'core executive': 'The Treasury is sometimes part of the centre when it
is commenting on other departments' proposals, and sometimes not,
when it is ploughing its own furrow.' (Presumably pursuing those matters
of departmental Treasury policy which do not involve other ministries,
though Lord Wakeham does not make plain what he has in mind.)

The Inner Cabinet Idea

The No. 10-No. 11 axis is but one of the many special relationships between
the PM and Cabinet ministers. Status and clout do not always come or
 CABINET GOVERNMENT: A COMMENTARY 489
go with a particular ministerial portfolio. As we have seen, whichever
Whitehall door carried the name of 'Whitelaw' between 1979 and 1987,
there lay a true seat of power. And where personal disagreement threw
up a stress barrier between the two famous Downing Street nameplates,
as it increasingly did between Thatcher and Lawson on the ERM issue
between 1985 and 1989, the result could be a weakening of both parties.
Lawson was right to emphasise the importance of Whitelaw and that
'the process of government definitely deteriorated in the third Thatcher
parliament after Willie Whitelaw had departed'. What arguments buttres-
sed his idea of an inner cabinet as an 'an institutionalised Willie'? Collegial
ones certainly, but not the unwieldy collegiality that a full Cabinet at best
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can provide. An inner cabinet according to Lawson can help insure

against prime ministerial isolation the 'departmental deformation' that
goes with 'creeping bilateralism' and the difficulty of reaching sensible
decisions on complicated matters in a group of 22 people.
His description of it as a body including the Chancellor and the Foreign
Secretary plus 'three other members who would be the weightiest most
senior members of the government of the time whatever office they
happen to hold', rang bells for Robert Armstrong who had seen some-
thing approaching inner cabinets operating under both Wilson in the late
1960s, and Heath in the early 1970s.
Mr Wilson at one stage sought to create an inner cabinet he called
the 'Economic Strategy Committee' and it was a rather small com-
mittee of senior ministers and it started off well. But the trouble is
that if you have a formal inner cabinet like that, it becomes a matter
of disgrace to a minister who is not on it and therefore a matter of
intense manoeuvring to get on it. And successively, Mr Wilson con-
ceded membership of [the] 'Economic Strategy Committee' to
people to whom it ought never to have been conceded.
Heath's inner cabinet Lord Armstrong depicted as a rather different
animal being entirely informal and 'based on as much personal friendship
as political alliance'. Thus Whitelaw (Chief Whip), Prior (Lord President),
and Carrington (Defence Secretary) were on it but Douglas-Home
(Foreign Secretary) and Barber (Chancellor) were not. So it was more of
'a kind of political cabal than a formal inner cabinet', Armstrong added.
It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of any inner cabinet, formal
or informal. Indices of effectiveness are very difficult to devise for some-
thing as nebulous yet important as 'co-ordination'. They might be attemp-
ted for the overlord experiment of 1951-53 by an assiduous researcher
willing to comb the Cabinet and Cabinet committee jungle for those two
years as well as the PREM and other files at the Public Record Office
 490 CONTEMPORARY RECORD
which might contain traces of the relationships between each 'overlord'
and the grand old 'superlord' in No. 10.
The same could apply to Wilson's Strategic Economic Policy, Parlia-
mentary and Management committees (provided proper minutes were
taken at the last two) when the 30-year rule catches up with their periods
of activity. Informal 'inner cabinets' will almost certainly not be susceptible
to such treatment. Given the political misjudgements of the last days of
the Heath administration - not least the ebb and flow of argument in early
1974 about whether there should be a general election, and, if so, when -
it is unlikely that Heath's informal group will go down as an exemplar for
future premiers toying with the idea of such an ethereal body.
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Dell's case for 'collective tolerance' extended by the rest of the Cabinet
towards the PM and a small, knowledgeable group of ministers could be
interpreted as a kind of argument for a de facto inner cabinet. While
Armstrong's and Wakeham's recognition that a full Cabinet of 22 is too
large and unwieldy for the proper discussion of detailed matters might be
used to sustain an argument for an inner cabinet, equally it can be used
to strengthen the case for Cabinet committees, which is the way that
Wakeham deploys it. Radicals might argue that if Churchill's and Heath's
attempts in 1951 and 1970 to reduce the number of the full Cabinet were
repeated with determination and success, the need for an inner cabinet
would disappear.
If the inner cabinet idea were pushed too far and too formally, it
would arouse counter-arguments of the kind which eventually terminated
Churchill's experiment with 'overlords' between 1951 and 1953. 'That
didn't work', Sir David Pitlado (Churchill's joint Principal Private
Secretary at the time) commented bluntly at the IHR seminar. Robert
Armstrong explained that in the early 1950s other ministers resented
being 'overlorded' greatly, especially as they remained responsible to
Parliament for their policy areas. Churchill abandoned his 'overlord'
experiment and reverted to Cabinet committees as his main means of
policy co-ordination as Attlee had urged him to in the House of Commons.6

The Uses of Cabinet Committees

Edmund Dell and Nigel Lawson were both sceptical about the utility of
Cabinet committees, Dell generally and Lawson specifically in the context
of the poll tax.

DELL: I always found that attending Cabinet committees was very enjoy-
able. It was an enormous relief from serious work. I always liked to be
able to comment freely on what my colleagues were doing. But it was not
 CABINET GOVERNMENT: A COMMENTARY 491
actually a very sensible way of operating . . . Prime Ministers should
select Cabinet committees with a view to what they want to get out of
them. That was the great principle followed in the 1970s. Prime ministers
do have to run governments in this country if they are to be effective.
After all they are the people who stand on the hustings and win or lose
elections so this is understandable.
LAWSON: The introduction of the poll tax . . . was the most disastrous
single decision which the Thatcher government took. That went rigorously
through all the procedures the textbook said it should do and indeed
more. . . quite apart from a Cabinet Committee which sat for a year . . .
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The explanation of why this happened, lies I think, in a number of the

things . . . the Prime Minister getting out of touch with her own Ministers,
and Ministers themselves [acted as] merely Departmental heads, even
though they were members of the Committee, concentrating on the issues
that directly concerned them departmentally, which did not include the
poll tax, even though it was capable of sinking the government.
Though, interestingly enough, Lawson, for all his poll tax experience,
continues to place great stress on the high constitutional status of a formal
properly constituted Cabinet committee compared to these informal,
ad hoc ministerial groups favoured by Mrs Thatcher as a way of doing
business. These groups did not find a place in the Cabinet Secretary's
Cabinet Committee Book (this rather detracts from the 'core executive'
school who argue that the constitutional primacy afforded Cabinet and
Cabinet committee discussions is misleading and unjustified7). For Lawson,
the difference was crucial, both as an explanation of the history of the
ERM issue and as an ingredient in the case for detecting prime ministerial
government in the Thatcher years:
In the case of the ERM, Margaret Thatcher tried every means she
could to avoid having to face up to the decision because, of course,
she did not want sterling to join the ERM. This meant . . . that it
required an enormous amount of work because the Prime Minister
controls the Cabinet agenda, to get to any collective process insti-
tuted at all. After going through various hoops I did secure a meeting
of senior Ministers, but it was not a meeting of a Cabinet committee,
it was not therefore a meeting that had any clear constitutional
significance, so even though an overwhelming majority came out in
favour of joining the ERM at that time in November 1985, no
decision to do so was taken. It was a case of using Prime Ministerial
power to bypass or to avoid the normal procedure of Cabinet
government.
 492 CONTEMPORARY RECORD
Both Lord Armstrong and Lord Wakeham seize upon the Lawson
point about the special constitutional status of formal Cabinet commit-
tees as well as their value as handlers of the kind of detail inappropriate,
because of time and size factors, at full Cabinet level. Wakeham stresses
the increasing use of standing Cabinet committees and the decline of
ad hoc groups (so variable in composition and subject matter that they in
no way represented an inner cabinet by another means) under Major
compared to the Thatcher experience, 'except perhaps as a means of
ensuring the speedy resolution of problems that emerge, for example,
between ministers with different responsibilities in a particular subject
area' or where there is a need 'to get material into a fit shape to be further
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considered by the Cabinet committee'.

Similarly, both Armstrong and Wakeham stress the importance of full
Cabinet's ratification of decisions taken lower down in the committee
hierarchy as in Armstrong's words, 'it still remains important that the
ultimate seal of collective responsibility should be put on them'. Lord
Wakeham, in a single paragraph in his Brunei Lecture, took pains to
ensure that it became thoroughly, publicly and officially known that
Cabinet government had reverted to a more traditional pattern in
November 1990 with the accession of John Major to the premiership:
. . . because of the doctrine of collective responsibility, the process
of Cabinet government has to work by building consensus. Collea-
gues must be able to support collective decisions. It is not possible to
conduct business by putting them in a position where they have to
submit or resign.
'Consensus' was a Thatcher 'boo' word ;8 'conviction' was a Thatcher 'yah'
word.9 Under Major, it was to be a 'consensus' Cabinet not a 'conviction'
Cabinet. Which brings us back to the essence of Cabinet government -
government characterised by shared discussion at the highest levels
before decisions are taken plus the notion of collective responsibility
binding all those privy to that shared discussion, whether they argued in
favour of the eventual decision or against it, into a position of common
support for that position thereafter in public.

Cabinet Government
John Wakeham's notion of full Cabinet as the 'cement' which bonds the
whole British system of central government has to be viewed alongside his
emphasis on the degree to which the Downing Street 22 have increasingly
become 'a reporting and reviewing body, rather than a decision taker' as
'an irreversible consequence of the complexity of modern government'.
 CABINET GOVERNMENT: A COMMENTARY 493
Hence the deliberate and constitutionally proper use of Cabinet commit-
tees (the standing ones in particular) which 'have authority to decide on
behalf of the Cabinet, and will do so unless the Chairman takes the
unusual step of deciding that the issue needs to be further considered by
the full Cabinet'.
Mrs Thatcher did not abandon this system entirely but it was her
adaptation of it which caused unease inside Whitehall and stimulated a
revival of the old Cabinet government debate outside it - the down-
grading of full Cabinet to the point where in Nigel Lawson's characterisa-
tion, it was 90 per cent of the time a 'dignified' rather than an 'efficient'
element to borrow Bagehot's distinction,10 in the process of government
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with its meetings, his summer holiday apart, 'the only period of real rest
that I got in what was really a very heavy job'; plus her increasing use of
ad hoc groups as 'short cuts' in Armstrong's phrase or as devices for
'divide and rule' in Lawson's.
The reason why the technicians-of-state like Hunt and Armstrong
worry about such deformations of the traditional model (and why they are
uneasy about Edmund Dell's spirited exhortation that they should accept
new realities) is that for them, the old model has a higher constitutional
purpose bequeathed by history. This bequest was expressed with especial
eloquence by John Hunt:
There are big questions over collective responsibility at the moment,
but I don't think that it is a myth . . . I think it goes back a very long
way and starts with some point where the King lost his power of
being chief executive under the Hanoverians and was not replaced
by a chief executive.
And you had first, of all in the King's closet but then separately in
10 Downing Street, this collective executive forming . . . It does go
back to this constitutional thing that in this country we do not elect
a Prime Minister, we elect a Parliament and from that Parliament
the majority party forms a government with the Prime Minister at
the head of it. And Parliament vests all power in individual depart-
mental ministers, nothing in the Prime Minister who has no con-
stitutional position.
Hunt, like Cabinet secretaries before him and since, had a lively and
justified sense of the undertow of the past as a shaper of present actions.
As Lord Radcliffe said of Cabinet secrecy when invited to report on
ministerial memoirs after publication of the first volume of the Crossman
diaries, there had been breakdowns. But 'what matters is that it [the
principle of confidentiality] came to be restated'."
 494 CONTEMPORARY RECORD
What is most striking about the period since Mrs Thatcher's fall is the
degree to which the old verities about Cabinet government have not only
been just restated by the likes of John Wakeham but have been practised
most weeks by on most issues, in the Cabinet Room itself under John
Major's chairmanship - all this combined with a new openness evidenced
by Mr Major's publication of Questions of Procedure for Ministers'2 and
the list of his Ministerial Cabinet Committees.13 The robustness of the old
model - the ancien regime of British Cabinet government - is very con-
siderable which is why, like all the best historical debates, the argument
about Cabinet government versus prime ministerial government will
never be resolved and never should be.
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NOTES
1. See Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), pp.254-6 and Lord
Hunt of Tanworth, 'Cabinet Strategy and Management', CIPFA/RIPA Conference,
Eastbourne, 9 June 1983.
2. Walter Bagehot The English Constitution (London: Fontana, 1963), p.59.
3. See the special edition of Public Administration, Vol.68, No.1 (Spring 1990); Patrick
Dunleavy, RAW Rhodes and Brendan O'Leary (eds.), on 'Prime Minister, Cabinet
and Core Executive'.
4. Private information.
5. Lord Callaghan, 'Premiership', BBC Radio 3, first broadcast on 18 Oct. 1989.
6. Public Record Office, CAB 21/2804, 'Supervising Ministers'. The file also preserves the
parliamentary exchanges which puntuated the 'overlord' debate 1951-53.
7. Patrick Dunleavy and RAW Rhodes, 'Core Executive Studies in Britain', Public
Administration, Vol.68, No.1 (Spring 1990), pp.3-28.
8. Hugo Young, One of Us (London: Pan, 1993), p.223.
9. For her celebration of her notion of 'conviction' Cabinet see Mrs Thatcher's interview
with Kenneth Harris, The Observer, 25 Feb. 1979.
10. Bagehot, The English Constitution (Oxford: University Press, 1928), p.61.
11. Report of the Committee of Privy Councillors on Ministerial Memoirs (Cmnd 6386,
HMSO, 22Jan. 1976), p.22.
12. Questions of Procedures for Ministers (Cabinet Office, May 1992).
13. Ministerial Committees of the Cabinet (Cabinet Office, May 1992).