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Update 14: July 2007 - The new Brown Administration

In Politics and Governance in the UK I point several times to what is virtually a natural law in British politics: the obvious successor to a Prime Minister never actually inherits the office (e.g. pp. 399-400). Gordon Brown has overturned that law. He is only the second Prime Minister in modern times to assume the office of Prime Minister after being identified as the natural successor. (The other example is not encouraging: Anthony Eden succeeded Sir Winston Churchill in April 1955, and was gone by January 1957 following the fiasco of the invasion of the Suez Canal.) Mr Brown’s has been widely called an ‘orderly’ succession, and in some important ways it was: he was elected unopposed to the Leadership of the Labour Party, and thus became the automatic candidate to succeed Mr Blair as Prime Minister. (That left most of the campaigning attention to the candidates for the Deputy Leadership, won by Harriet Harman after a closely fought contest.) But this ‘order’ was mostly confined to the last few weeks of the life of the Blair Administration, when Mr Blair had already accepted his fate. The history of conflict between Mr Blair and Mr Brown over the succession is well documented, and goes back even to before the return of Labour to office in 1997 (see Politics and Governance in the UK, p.135.) In the autumn of 2006 the Chancellor’s allies attempted a coup against the Prime Minister; the coup failed but it wrung from Mr Blair the public commitment to go within a year (see update 12, January 2007).

This turbulent recent history is important because it has affected the way Mr Brown has been obliged to approach the task of forming a new Government following his succession to Mr Blair on 27 June. Despite the rhetoric of change, continuity is its dominant feature. This may seem a surprising judgement. The coincidence of the end of a number of political careers (the last Prime Minister, his Deputy, leading figures like Home Secretary John Reid) meant that the scale of Cabinet reconstruction open to Mr Brown has been unusual: only one Cabinet member (Des Browne, Defence Secretary) remains in the office he occupied under Mr Blair. But while a generational change is taking place (the average age has fallen from 54 under Mr Blair to 49) the principles of government reconstruction remain strikingly unchanged. Four of these should be noticed.

First, Mr Brown’s conforms to the dominant feature of all modern cabinets: it is overwhelmingly made up of university educated professional politicians – mostly educated, indeed, at elite English and Scottish universities. Only one member (Alan Johnson, the new Health Secretary) missed out on the higher education route. Strikingly, he is also the only figure to have had a substantial career beyond conventional politics, as leader of a national trade union; the rest have known little in their adult lives beyond party politics. The rhetoric of forming a ‘government of all the talents’ that would reach beyond conventional party politics has made no difference to this. The most significant recruit from business, Digby Jones, was appointed to the (non-Cabinet) post of Minister for Trade and Investment, coupled with a peerage to get him into Parliament. But Mr Jones, though a considerable political operator and networker (he has been Director General of the CBI, the main business lobby group, and had already been appointed Mr Brown’s ‘skills envoy’) is actually a business man of no great significance. Mr Blair was indeed more successful in getting big business into his government: he appointed Lord Simon, who as head of the oil giant BP really was a successful ‘big businessman’, to a similar post as Minister of Trade. The appointment of entirely marginal Liberal Democrats like Baroness Julia Neuburger to posts as ‘advisors’ outside the government fulfils the useful function of sowing discord among Liberal Democrats, but makes no difference to influence within the government. The human faces around the Cabinet table, which naturally fascinate us, also reflect this more deep seated feature of the continuing professionalization of political life. There is a new generation of late ‘thirtysomethings’ (James Purnell, Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, Ruth Kelly, Douglas Alexander) while only one member of the Cabinet (Jack Straw) has turned sixty. The age profile, in other words, looks very like what we would find at the top of any other big organisation, like a large firm, run by university trained professional executives: an average age in the late forties with a sprinkling of rising youngsters and a few old salts. Likewise the importance of familial networks in the Cabinet is exactly what we would expect from professionalization, as individuals ‘specialise’ in the family trade, and contract marriages/partnerships with professional colleagues. (Meeting your partner at work is just about the commonest way of finding a mate.) Mr Benn, the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is the son of a prominent Labour figure of a past generation (Tony Benn) and the third generation of the family to serve in a Labour Cabinet. Likewise, we should not be surprised at the presence of two brothers (David and Ed Miliband) or a husband and wife (Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper) around the Cabinet table. (Ms Cooper is not a member of Cabinet but has right of attendance as Minister of Housing. This is also a traditional device in Cabinet making: it allows the Prime Minister to reward allies with a bit of extra status without inflating Cabinet numbers beyond convention. It happens that, at 22 members, Mr Brown has kept his Cabinet one below Mr Blair’s last figure.)

A second feature of continuity in Mr Brown’s construction of his Administration is the care he has taken to balance the factions in the Party. This, rather than the attachment of marginal non-Labour figures, is the most important symbolic significance of the claim to form a ‘government of all the talents’: it is a signal that the war with the Blairites is over. The process has been helped by the fact that established Blairites, like James Purnell and David Miliband, have nimbly distanced themselves from their patron in recent months. More important still, Mr Brown has moved to try to heal the great division over the Iraq. He has promoted from the backbenches to Cabinet John Denham, who resigned from a junior Ministerial post over the original decision to go to war. His new foreign secretary, David Miliband, has ‘let it be known’ – i.e. briefed journalists off the record – that he regards the Iraq commitment as a great mistake. In policy terms this suggests that the Brown Administration will have as a policy priority some method of disengagement from Iraq.

A third mark of continuity has actually been promoted as a novelty by the new Administration. On the day after the first formal meeting of Cabinet (28 June) Mr Brown held an unusual extra Friday meeting which was trailed as concerned with the ‘big idea’ of the new Government – constitutional reform. It may well be that the Government will indeed introduce radical constitutional change. But in doing this it will not be marking a break with the Blairite past. Constitutional reform has been New Labour’s ‘big idea’ for over a decade (see Politics and Governance in the UK, p. 87, Political Issues 5.1, ‘Constitutional Reform: New Labour’s Big Idea.’) The changes introduced and ‘bedded in’ over the last decade have had an impact comparable to the great privatisation reforms of the Thatcher Administrations of the 1980s. Devolution; the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act: these are now ‘institutionalised – that is, embedded in the system of government and producing irreversible changes in the way it operates. The new government has published a ‘Green Paper’ – a consultative document which makes no firm commitments – ranging over a wide range of reforms: The Governance of Britain, Cm 7170, can be downloaded at the Ministry of Justice website. Strikingly, the Paper refers only in passing, and without any proposals, to what has proved the most intractable constitutional issue that New Labour faced: reform of the House of Lords.

Finally, Mr Brown has shown an entirely traditional Prime Ministerial interest in reshuffling the institutions of the core executive. Responsibility for education has now been divided between two new Departments: Children, Schools and Families (Ed Balls) and Innovation, Universities and Skills (John Denham). The former Department of Trade and Industry is now Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Affairs (John Hutton). The new names are an attempt to send political signals: that the government takes the ‘burden’ of regulation on business seriously; that universities have to justify their economic roles; that school attainment is partly a function of family policy. How long lasting, or deep seated, the changes will be only time will tell: Mr Blair’s last attempt to rename the DTI lasted less than a week. But one change described in a separate update of this series (Update 16) has remained, and seems now to be a permanent part of the structure of the core executive: the division of responsibilities between the ‘Home Department’ (usually better known as the Home Office, now headed by Jacqui Smith) and the Ministry of Justice (Jack Straw).

The full list of the new Cabinet can be accessed at http://www.number-10.gov.uk and then follow the links.

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