Gordo’s premiership: whatever happened to the clunking fist?

Interesting developments in Westminster this week give us cause to consider the extent to which the Prime Minister is dominant or presidential.

The theory that we have Prime Ministerial government or that we have, as Michael Foley suggests, a full blown UK presidency seems convincing when applied to Mrs Thatcher circa 1987, or to Tony Blair’s time in office before we found out that Saddam had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

But at other times, the idea of the PM as a colossal figure that utterly dominates the Commons, Cabinet, and party can be seen as fantasy when we consider Mrs Thatcher’s departure from office, or Blair’s position from mid 2003 onwards. Likewise, Gordon Brown could not appear any less dominant than at the moment. Serious discussion is taking place in the media about a successor coming in to replace Brown before the next election.

Today in the Guardian, Martin Kettle floats such a possibility.

First he identifies the massive pressure the PM is under from his own backbenchers:

“Ask a Labour MP about almost any current question - the 10p tax rate, post office closures, embryology, 42-day detention, the Olympic torch, BAE Systems - and the anxieties about Brown pour out with almost indecent haste. This is not got up by the press. It is happening and it is serious. Oddly, it’s the senior Blairites, once so critical, who are often the most restrained.

The more accounts one hears about Brown’s meeting with his backbenchers last week the worse it sounds, and the more it appears to have been a tipping point among the previously undecided. Fisticuffs? I don’t think so. But “fevered” - the word of a senior cabinet minister - absolutely. Old hands say they have never seen a party leader lose it the way Brown did last week. Heckled by his own troops over the 10p tax rate abolition, he literally put his hands up and asked MPs to write to him with suggestions. It was a pitiful performance, some witnesses say.”

He then goes on to locate evidence of movement behind the scenes in the corridors of Whitehall that is eerily reminiscent of tales from the tale end of Thatcher’s premiership:

“If Labour is to win the next election, then either Brown changes, which seems unlikely, or he goes, which is currently in the realm of fantasy. Yet not quite. There is positioning for the succession going on among younger cabinet ministers. And on the backbenches there is some talk - but it is only early talk - about how Brown might be ousted. A deputy leadership contest has been mooted as one proxy option. So has a stalking-horse challenge against Brown himself, of the sort that Anthony Meyer mounted against Margaret Thatcher. There has even been some discussion about a full-on leadership contest this summer.”

A serious attempt to oust Brown seems unlikely, although a hammering in the local and London elections followed by a severe downturn in the economy could precipitate such a move. As things stand, however, the very fact that Brown appears so weak makes the idea of government dominated by one man seriously questionable. Both Thatcher and Blair managed to manipulate the media spotlight when things were going well in order to give the appearance of presidentialism, but as both successors of these two PMs have found it is harder to pull things off when fortunes change. Presidential? For me, it’s a matter of style over substance.