Brown in Power – What the Rawnsley Revelations Tell Us About the Office of Prime Minister

In amongst all of the headline grabbing stuff about Gordon Brown’s famously bad temper, there are some interesting glimpses about the nature of the office of prime minister, and in particular just how it is being performed by its present incumbent.  No student going in to an AS exam paper on the Executive should be in ignorance of these fascinating insights.

“Brown found being Prime Minister much harder than either he or his acolytes imagined” notes Andrew Rawnsley in his book The End of The Party.  He identifies three significant changes that Brown seemed ill placed to make on his transition from No. 11 to No. 10.

1. While Brown was Chancellor, his team waged an insurgents’ war against Tony Blair.  They had “been adept at destabilising, guerrilla warfare against Blair”, and “could pick the issues where they wanted a fight and ignore others”.  As Prime Minister, Brown and his team had to assume responsibility for the entire government machinery.  They couldn’t simply determine which fights they wanted and, of course, they were no longer ‘insurgents’.  They were in power, with no-one now to plot against.
2. “As Chancellor, Brown had often been able to do his Macavity trick of disappearing in a crisis.”  Now, as Prime Minister, he was needed all the time to make decisions on, and comment on, all manner of issues.  He had paraded himself as the man of experience – he could hardly just disappear because issues about which he actually had no experience started to push to the fore.
3. Brown is a poor multi-tasker.  At the Treasury, Rawnsley tells us, “he could focus on the four or five major events of a chancellor’s year. Prime Ministers can get hit by four or five major events in a month, even a week.”  Brown, it seems, just wasn’t ready for the huge number of issues crossing the prime minister’s desk, and had no strategy in place for coping with them.

The working style of the man at the top is immensely significant.  It is clear from Rawnsley’s book that one of the things that impeded the flow of business under Gordon Brown was that his Cabinet staff had no idea how to cope with his chaotic “and intermittently intense” way of doing things.  Letters – even important ones – were being left unanswered and phone calls not taken.  Brown’s style is also said to be very centralising.  Geoff Hoon is quoted as saying of Brown that “He’s temperamentally incapable of delegating responsibility”.

Gordon Brown spent ten years plotting to become Prime Minister.  It was the job he coveted, and as Chancellor he was Tony Blair’s most crucial Cabinet member.  Yet Brown was woefully unaware of just what the job entailed, and of how it was so different from any other Whitehall post.  Ten years as a senior Cabinet Minister did not adequately prepare him for it.  Vince Cable describes a man who was “just overwhelmed” by the pressures of being prime minister.  The comprehensive remit of the premiership, its need to be fire-fighting on a near daily business, and the managerial competence required to keep a huge number of issues at bay require skills that are clearly not necessarily honed in the job specification of the ordinary cabinet minister.  Next time we hear ‘experience’ being vaunted as a qualification for the job, we would be well placed to ask ‘what type’.

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How Cameron is Shaping the Premiership [3 Apr 2011]
What does Cabinet do? [1 Nov 2010]
Power in the central executive territory [16 Oct 2010]
What Does Ed Miliband’s Victory Tell Us About Modern British Political Leadership? [26 Sep 2010]
Assessing Blair - Robert Harris’ Damning Review [12 Sep 2010]
Tabloids and Governments [6 Sep 2010]
Full Cabinet graphic [18 May 2010]
Cameron As Prime Minister - Is There Anything AS Students Can Say? [15 May 2010]
Gordon Brown’s Reputation in History [15 May 2010]
Brown’s inner circle - AS exam update [6 Apr 2010]
Prime Ministerial Power: PMs behaving badly? [21 Feb 2010]
Executive Power [17 Jan 2010]
The heat is on [17 Nov 2009]
Cabinet unshuffle [17 Aug 2009]
It’s the economy, stupid! [1 Jul 2009]
AS last minute updates [2 Jun 2009]
AS revision: PM power [30 May 2009]
AS revision: MPs’ expenses [20 May 2009]
A new spin on PM power [28 Mar 2009]
Brown and the first PM [23 Feb 2009]
Brown and Mandy [15 Jan 2009]
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Media Monday: the Cabinet reshuffle [6 Oct 2008]
McRae on how Brown blew it [24 Sep 2008]
Wipeout! [21 Sep 2008]
Just another Media Monday [7 Sep 2008]
Brown to reshuffle the pack? [16 Aug 2008]
Gordo’s premiership: whatever happened to the clunking fist? [12 Apr 2008]
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