Abstract
This chapter argues that the progressive fixation on the top leader in British politics goes back to the leadership style of Margaret Thatcher. Expectations of prime ministers have altered over the past four decades: general elections are increasingly described as contests between two party leaders; the 2017 Conservative election manifesto was presented by the prime minister as ‘my manifesto’ and the party became ‘Theresa May’s team’. There have been ups and downs in prime ministerial power over the years, but the general tendency has been to expect the prime minister to do more than in the past and to project expectations on to him or her to an unrealistic extent. The author contends that not only are the powers of prime ministers exaggerated in much political writing, but that the placing of more power in the hands of an individual leader is also, in principle, undesirable in a democracy and conducive to policy ‘blunders’.
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Notes
- 1.
More of an ‘I’ person, almost certainly, than any earlier Labour leader, but I can write with some certainty only of the post-war leaders, since I read every speech to the Labour Party conference of leaders from 1945 onwards I could lay my hands on (which was almost all of them). No previous leader used the first-person singular anything like as often as did Blair. It was ‘we’, ‘this party’, ‘this great movement’, ‘a Labour government’ and so on. Even Hugh Gaitskell, in his famous speech to the 1960 party conference, defying the impending conference vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, did not say ‘I will fight and fight again’ but, rather: ‘There are some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love’.
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Brown, A. (2020). The Top Leader Fixation in British Politics. In: Crewe, I., Sanders, D. (eds) Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_15
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