Changing horses in mid-stream
It is not unusual for a new prime minister to be appointed during the course of a parliament; but the results have historically varied
Today we discovered that Rishi Sunak, the 42-year-old Member of Parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire, had been elected leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party nemine contradicente. The last-minute withdrawal of his likely rival, Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, obviated the need for an election process, so Sunak was confirmed, and will tomorrow be invited to form a government by the King. He will then begin to appoint a new cabinet.
The opposition parties have been leaning heavily on the argument that Sunak is “unelected” and “has no mandate”. In constitutional terms, as they know, this is hogwash: our system elects 650 Members of Parliament, and the head of government is the man or woman who can command the confidence of the House of Commons (usually, therefore, the leader of the largest party). No prime minister has ever been elected or had a mandate. But Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP politicians see political mileage in this line of attack, despite its obvious cant and hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy comes from the fact that most parties have done this before. In 2007, when Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister after a decade, he was succeeded by Gordon Brown, who became leader of the Labour Party without a contest, and did not seek an immediate general election (though he considered it and might well have won it if he had done so). Equally, in 2014, after the victory of the No campaign in the referendum on Scottish independence, Alex Salmond resigned as first minister of Scotland and was replaced by Nicola Sturgeon with no formal competition save a confirmatory vote in the Scottish Parliament. Similarly, she did not seek an election of the parliament, but waited until the scheduled poll in 2016.
It is true that Sunak is the fourth prime minister to take office during a parliament (though Boris Johnson won a general election a few months after he moved into Downing Street and May scraped a win in 2017). And it is perfectly open for opposition parties to use this argument, so long as they accept that their errors will be called out in rebuttal. It is unlikely, however, that Sunak will seek a dissolution, given the parlous position of the Conservatives in the opinion polls, so we should turn out attention instead to what sort of start he will have as prime minister.
A new premier taking office during a parliament after a long-serving predecessor can often enjoy a bounce in popularity on simple grounds of novelty and freshness: this happened to John Major in 1990, and to Anthony Eden in 1955 (though Eden chose to call a general election anyway), but that is clearly not the situation Sunak finds himself in. However, there is a feeling of some relief in the parliamentary Conservative party tonight that Liz Truss will soon be gone and there will not be a potentially divisive leadership contest. The sun is not yet shining again, but Tories hope that the selection of Sunak may at least mean the party’s fortunes have bottomed out and they can use October 2022 as a low point from which they start rebuilding and repairing their image.
Major’s accession to the premiership in November 1990 was not entirely expected. Doubts had been growing about Margaret Thatcher’s continuing ability to lead for some time: the stalking horse candidacy of the obscure backbencher Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989 had been a worrying sign, Michael Heseltine—who had dramatically walked out of cabinet at the beginning of 1986—was openly presenting himself as an alternative leader, and the quietly savage resignation speech by Sir Geoffrey Howe, Thatcher’s deputy and most faithful acolyte over the years, had explicitly called for her to be replaced.
There were other reasons why Thatcher’s time was up. She was increasingly imperious and passionately committed to the Community Charge, or poll tax, a policy which may have had intellectual charms but was poisonously unpopular with the public. She showed no signs of even considering the end of her reign, although she was 65 years old. And, perhaps most dangerously in the long run, she had no obvious heir, either in her eyes or anyone else’s, which, naturally, contributed to her disinclination to step down.
(There are reams to be written on Thatcher’s dauphins over the years, and I may come back to the subject. By 1983, she had alighted on the charming Cecil Parkinson, in his early 50s and chairman of the Conservative Party during the successful 1983 general election campaign. Alan Clark recorded in his diaries that Thatcher planned to make Parkinson foreign secretary after the election to begin positioning him as an obvious successor, but shortly after the poll win he confessed to the prime minister that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Thatcher initially decided to send him to the Department of Trade and Industry rather than the Foreign Office, but he had to resign from the cabinet entirely a few months later.
Parkinson’s fall from grace—though he returned to cabinet in a less high-profile role in 1987—disappointed Thatcher and she never really found another favoured son. John Moore, a good-looking man with experience in US corporate culture and a slight American accent, found himself basking in her approval for a while in the mid-1980s, first as transport secretary then in charge of the DHSS. He was felt to be an ideological disciple, but after a few years his blandness was curdled by a failure to exercise ministerial grip, and he was sacked in 1989. By that time, John Major, chief secretary to the Treasury 1987 to 1989, had begun to show promise, and was fast-tracked through the Foreign Office (July to October 1989) then made chancellor of the exchequer, but no-one saw him as a leading contender for the top job in 1990.)
When Thatcher fell in November 1990, it was a rejection of her rather than a clamour for a specific new leader. Major defeated the other contenders because he was not Michael Heseltine, the bête noire of Thatcher loyalists, and because Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary and the third contender, was too staid and redolent of privilege for the atmosphere of the times. He was not widely known, but in Westminster he was regarded as amiable, effective in ministerial office and, though this was not initially apparent to the public at large, rather funny. And he represented the opposite of everything which people had come to dislike about Thatcher. When he held the first meeting of his new cabinet (which, incredible to imagine now, was all-male), he looked round at his colleagues and said “Well, who would have thought it?”
It was a cabinet which attempted to appeal to all sides. Cecil Parkinson, who had been transport secretary, left with his chief, but Kenneth Baker, an effective and technocratic Thatcherite favourite, was promoted to home secretary. His predecessor, David Waddington, was elevated to the House of Lords to lead their Lordships and be a weighty figure of sage counsel, a Willie Whitelaw 2.0 (though the experiment was not in the end a success). Heseltine, to some the regicide but to others the party’s most attractive and engaging figure, returned to the front bench after nearly five years; he became environment secretary, the post he’d held in Thatcher’s first cabinet, tasked with dismantling and replacing the dreaded Community Charge. There was no purge, and the general atmosphere was one of competent, unflashy leadership.
The reboot of the government worked. Major’s accession cut the Labour Party’s poll lead substantially, and by 1991 the Conservatives were back in the lead. When a general election was eventually held in April 1992, almost as late as possible, it was still assumed that the opposition would win, but a few missteps by Labour and an unexpectedly engaging performance on an actual soapbox by Major changed the dynamic. The Conservatives dragged themselves to a fourth win, with a reduced majority of 21; it was, nevertheless, seen as workable (events would prove the folly of that assumption) and the very fact of another Labour defeat was extraordinary enough. Only the most fanatically devoted Thatcherites continued to believe that dropping the Lady had been a mistake.
The accession of Gordon Brown in 2007 came in rather different circumstances. Although opposition to the 2003 liberation of Iraq was growing and held by some against Tony Blair, the incumbent prime minister, there was no sense of impending disaster. The tension around the succession came from Brown’s feeling that, having been in his view promised the premiership as far back as 1994, it was time for Blair to honour that pledge and stand aside. Tom Watson, a defence minister and Brown cheerleader, had resigned in 2006 calling for a change at the top, and some other Brownites were agitating for their man to become leader. Blair had already announced that he would not serve “a full third term” (a concept unknown to the constitution) and had neutralised Watson’s challenge by promising to go within a year.
Blair was tired. Ten years in Downing Street would drain the heartiest constitution, and the Labour Party was becoming restive. Like any long-serving administration, Blair’s government was running out of steam, losing some of its shine and making unforced errors. Blair may not have had the fullest confidence in Brown as the man to inherit his mantle; it had leaked as early as 1998 that someone close to Blair felt Brown has “psychological flaws” (it would later be revealed that the author of the remark was Alastair Campbell, to virtually no-one’s surprise) and there had always been wary tension between the two men at the top of the party.
Nevertheless, Blair accepted the inevitable. He said that Brown “would make an excellent prime minister”, and signed the Scotsman’s nomination papers for leader. Talk of a challenge by Blair’s disciple and former head of policy David Miliband, by then environment secretary, came to nothing, as did potential candidacies of—take a deep breath—Hilary Benn, John Hutton, Charles Clarke, Alan Johnson, Alan Milburn and John Reid; in truth they were all attempts to deny the inevitable, which was Brown’s unopposed succession.
Brown’s ministry was regarded as a change in emphasis rather than a radical policy departure from the Blair years. Earlier in 2007, he had made a speech entitled “Make education our national mission” to a Fabian Society conference on “The Next Decade”, and he had identified as his priorities education, international development, narrowing inequalities, renewing Britishness, restoring trust in politics, and winning hearts and minds in the War on Terror. These were reflected in some of the early actions of his premiership. In July the government published a white paper entitled The Governance of Britain which proposed constitutional changes to reform the political system and try to restore public trust; in addition, Brown promised a public inquiry into the war in Iraq (which he had supported), which became the Chilcot Inquiry, beginning in 2009.
As under Major, there was no significant purge of the last premiers adherents. David Miliband, seen by some as the Blairite crown prince, was appointed foreign secretary, while Jack Straw, the former leader of the House, took over the Ministry of Justice. Alistair Darling, Brown’s long-term ally, became chancellor, as expected, and Jacqui Smith, Blair’s last chief whip, took over at the Home Office. Harriet Harman, sacked by Blair in 1998 for being unequal to the task of reforming welfare, had won the deputy leadership and, in an unlikely and largely inexplicable revival, became leader of the Commons and minister for women.
It would be an exaggeration to say it was a happy government. Brown was a difficult man and his long stint as bridesmaid to Blair had scarred him, leaving him with a sense of entitlement and frustration which some supporters had encouraged. His dour and serious manner, a contrast to the ever-grinning and upbeat Blair, was marketed as the sign of a trustworthy big-hitter, and he talked of his “moral compass” which he had inherited from his father, a minister of the Church of Scotland; he was famous as a son of the manse, brought up in his father’s tied house in Kirkcaldy. But Brown was abrupt and prone to volcanic bursts of bed temper, from pushing a typist out of her seat to take over the keyboard to hurling office items across the room. There were mitigating factors for his difficult temperament: he had lost his daughter Jennifer as an infant to a brain haemorrhage and one of his young twin sons had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 2006.
Moreover, in a school rugby match when he was 16, he had received a blow to the head which had detached his left retina and left him blind in that eye. He had noticed similar symptoms in his right eye and his sight had only been saved by experimental surgery at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Even political insiders underestimated the effect this compromised vision had on him; it made his handwriting large and untidy, he needed documents printed in a large font and at the despatch box in the House of Commons he piled books under his papers to bring them closer to him so that he could read them. And he was left with a tendency to look slightly to one side of whatever he needed to focus on, which he had to correct when speaking to camera. These problems affected him, though he never admitted the seriousness of his problems, and did not contribute to an easygoing personality.
Unlike Major, Brown did entertain the idea of holding an early general election to confirm his position as prime minister. When Parliament returned from the summer periodic adjournment in September 2007, rumours began to swirl that he would seek a dissolution and present a challenge to the relatively new David Cameron, who had only been leader of the opposition since the end of 2005. Within Westminster it became almost an assumption that there would be an election (as I know to my cost: I put off some bits of work because I assumed they would not be required and had to scrabble around when there was no dissolution), and it was matched by a widespread feeling that Labour was likely to win. For whatever reason, Brown decided not to go for an election, and it cost him. Not only did it create a sense that he was indecisive, but the Conservatives began to rise in the polls into 2008, and the government lost by-elections at Crewe and Nantwich (to the Tories) and Glasgow East (to the SNP).
Again unlike for Major, there was no happy ending. Brown eventually went to the polls in May 2010, after a turbulent time dealing with the global financial crisis (from which he emerged with some considerable credit). The Labour Party performed reasonably well, but the result was still a hung parliament, and, while a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was for a while a possibility, it was clear that Brown’s time as prime minister was over. In the end it was the fresh and politically supple Conservative leader, David Cameron, who agreed a deal with the third party and became prime minister.
What lessons might Rishi Sunak learn, therefore, from history, as he prepares to go to Buckingham Palace to be appointed prime minister? He now leads a party which is in a worse political maelstrom that either Major’s Conservatives in 1990 or Brown’s Labour in 2007; he comes to office with experience not dissimilar to Major’s but far less than Brown’s decade as chancellor. While his immediate predecessor, Liz Truss, seems unlikely to cause difficulties (she was quick to tweet her support for him this afternoon), he must contend with the continuing presence on his backbenches of the mercurial and ambition-soaked Boris Johnson, just as Brown had to manage the legacy of Blair and Major had 18 months sitting in front of Thatcher (who declared she would be a good “back seat driver”.
Sunak would be wise to appoint a cabinet which makes the best of the talent available to him. He is tipped to retain Jeremy Hunt, the new chancellor of the exchequer who has seemingly calmed the financial markets and reassured the political community as a steady and battle-hardened veteran. But he must ensure that he and Hunt work as a successful double act rather than falling prey to the rivalry which often crackles and sparks between Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street.
The rest of the cabinet is a challenge. Truss appointed a team consisting largely of her own supporters, leaving Sunak backers in the cold. Her original choice for home secretary, the flimsy and radical Suella Braverman, resigned and Sunak must now decide what to do with her replacement Grant Shapps. His potential leadership rival, Penny Mordaunt, will feel with some justification, that she is owed a reward for stepping aside to avoid a potentially bitter contest: some have suggested she could become foreign secretary in place of the inexperienced James Cleverly.
The new leader has senior supporters whom he will want to reward. Braverman herself, Mel Stride, chair of the Treasury select committee, Steve Barclay, former health secretary, Tom Tugendhat, security minister, and Johnny Mercer, the high-profile former veterans’ minister, might all expect preferment, and even after more than 12 years of Conservative rule, Sunak will want to present a fresh face to the electorate. But shuffling the ministerial pack is a zero-sum game: every MP promoted equates to another demoted or dismissed, and creates a pool of discontent.
I wrote an essay recently on reshuffles which looked at their advantages and disadvantages. They are hard work and often deliver less than prime ministers hope or expect. For Sunak, it is unavoidable: he must forge a new team for the next two years. Assuming that he doesn’t plan a snap election (which would seem electorally insane), he must somehow try to appoint senior ministers in a way which offends fewest, represents ideological balance across the Conservative Party and reassures the voters that he leads a sensible, competent government which is equal to the challenges we face at home and abroad.
If retaining Hunt makes presentational sense, he may (I would argue should) aim for a few eye-catching appointments to capture the headlines for a day or two, and seed departments with ministers whom he trusts and will be steady and competent. All governments begin to succumb to foolish mistakes as they grow older, and solid ministerial leadership should at least minimise this. He should also look at senior civil service appointments (about which I will write in the next few days), as the political leaders are not the only moving part of the Whitehall machine.
Being imaginative is not easy in government, especially after more than a decade. There is always an audience for nostalgia, and people frequently agitate for old hands to be brought back: William Hague, now in the Lords, is often tipped as someone whose return to the front rank would bring cheer and depth to the Conservative Party, while during the recent crisis some even pined for the days of Theresa May, still an MP. It is not always a success, as the second life of Norman Fowler in Hague’s shadow cabinet or Michael Portillo’s post-Enfield career can attest. Sometimes it gives a government a fillip. Francis Maude, a junior minister under Thatcher and Major, returned to Whitehall under Cameron and carried out some solid work reforming the governmental machinery, while Yvette Cooper is proving a doughty shadow home secretary under Sir Keir Starmer. But leaders wanting to get the band back together should think carefully.
I have also previously encouraged prime ministers to look beyond “the usual suspects” for high-profile appointments (see, for example, The Daily Telegraph from August 2021). There are hugely talented men and women who would bring energy and drive to the cabinet, but equally each “outsider” appointed displaces a loyal foot-soldier who may grow resentful. But this is a time of crisis, and perhaps Sunak should reflect that anything is worth trying.
Tomorrow we will see what direction the new prime minister takes. In the end, the people around him will have some effect on the success or failure of his government, but they are probably not the deciding factor. The composition of the new cabinet will, however, give clues as to how Sunak intends to government and what his priorities are as he tries to pull off the political upset of the century and win the next general election. I wish him well.