“Such instability is bad for the country and for democracy.”
So said William Hague in a column last Monday in which with his usual lucidity he supported the conventional wisdom that it is bad to have had six Prime Ministers in the past decade, or seven if Sir Keir Starmer is defenestrated before 13th July 2026, which would be less than ten years since David Cameron made way for Theresa May.
On the contrary, I would argue, such instability is good for the country and for democracy. We expect our masters to be precarious.
They stay in office only as long as they can win a vote of confidence, and that confidence we reserve the right to withhold whenever we wish.
The American president serves a fixed term of four years: this can only be shortened by the seldom effective process of impeachment, or by the natural causes from which four presidents died in office, or by the assassinations which carried off four others.
In Britain we enjoy the freedom to chuck out a Prime Minister whenever we feel like it. At the heart of our idea of liberty lies the ability to blame the tenant of 10 Downing Street for our present discontents.
The coup de grâce sometimes occurs at a general election. In the election of 1945, perhaps the most democratic moment in our history, we threw out Churchill, our victorious and world-renowned war leader, because we did not want him and his fellow Conservatives to lead the peacetime reconstruction which was required.
More often a PM is finished off by MPs from his or her own party who despair of holding their seats if they stick with the present incumbent.
But the ultimate power lies with the voters. The House of Commons is acutely responsive to public opinion. Within the last decade, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all had to go when Conservative MPs lost faith in their ability to turn things round.
Labour MPs will decide in the coming months whether Starmer too has reached the point of no return. As they struggle to make up their minds, they will be assisted by the outcome of this Thursday’s by-election in Gorton and Denton, and the results of the elections to be held in England, Scotland and Wales on 7th May.
According to Hague, voters “are left disillusioned and impotent” by frequent changes in PM, while “the whole process of government is seriously weakened by interminable changes of policy and personnel all the way down the chain”.
He omits a more fundamental reason for the rapid turnover of PMs, and indeed for the inefficiency of government, which is that we the people have not yet decided in what direction we wish to be led.
The political class is paralysed because the wider nation is indecisive. As T.E.Utley remarked in a brilliant essay in 1956,
“It is, of course, the natural vice of democracy to elude the truth that anything which is worth having is bought at a price.”
This observation is found on page 302 of A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T.E.Utley, edited by Charles Moore and Simon Heffer, published in 1989 and readily obtainable via online booksellers.
One is unlikely to read more than a page or two of that collection without bursting into delighted laughter, for Utley discusses matters of high seriousness, a whole tradition of Tory thought, with an acute sense that no Tory is free from the absurdities which are so marked a feature of liberals and socialists.
Utley despised and ridiculed all forms of utopianism, including the absurd notion of a perfect democracy. Mankind cannot be perfected. We desire contradictory things, and at elections generally opt for the lesser of two evils.
In the remark from 1956 quoted above, Utley had in mind the price of the post-war commitment to full employment, which carried the “sedulously suppressed” cost of greatly increasing the power of organised labour to decide the nation’s financial policy, a power which it naturally used to its own advantage.
What are the questions about which we are now unable to make up our minds? One such is Europe. The politicians found this issue so difficult that David Cameron resorted (as Harold Wilson had before him) to holding a referendum.
The referendum did not promote a high level of debate: each side insisted its preferred course of action would be cost-free, indeed tremendously beneficial, while its opponents’ preferred course of action would be exorbitantly expensive and rested on a pack of lies.
After this exchange of insults, the nation voted by 52 to 48 per cent to leave the European Union. It was clear from these figures that we were still split down the middle, and the embittered politics of implementing Leave’s narrow victory duly became another reason for the rapid turnover of prime ministers.
The NHS is another subject where it is difficult to do more than exchange insults. Its supporters treat it with religious veneration: any suggestion that it has been bought at a price brings charges of blasphemy.
It ought to be possible to support the principle of the NHS, namely that the poorest members of our society should be able free of charge to obtain excellent medical care, while examining how one can stop it from crowding out private and charitable provision.
A state monopoly gives monopoly power to bureaucrats who are naturally inclined to use this for their own interests, including their interest in defying scrutiny while doing as little productive work as possible.
The pretence that we have, or ever can have, a benevolent state bureaucracy which meets our every need is a pious fraud. Without the unpaid work of millions of people who from love and a sense of duty look after their frail parents or children, the NHS would collapse.
But are we ready to be told this by our politicians, or would we rather give way to wishful thinking?
Zack Polanski, for the Greens, just now has a good line in wishful thinking. Ignoring the tendency of the rich to flock to tax havens, he asserts that by imposing a wealth tax on billionaires, we can create a good life for plumbers and hairdressers.
Nor is the Right immune to the attractions of wishful thinking. The man in the saloon bar is strong on the need to spend more on defence, and weak on the cuts which are needed to pay for it.
But repeated failure at length becomes instructive. All great reforms take at least a generation to bring about, and are preceded by botched attempts from which at length hard lessons are learned.
Part of the hapless Starmer’s trouble is that until the last year or two he has never failed, or even been closely involved in failure.
Margaret Thatcher was a member of the Heath government, which was such a thumping failure that it persuaded many people of the need for a new approach.
Clement Attlee had witnessed and learned from the failures of his predecessors as Labour leader, and had experience of wartime command and control as he led from 1945 a further expansion of the state.
Winston Churchill had been a central figure in some of the great failures of the First World War, which is one reason why he had some idea what needed to be done in May 1940: “I thought I knew a good deal about it all,” as he puts it in his account of taking office in that dire emergency.
We watch Starmer and his colleagues struggling to make the unproductive and ruinously expensive state bureaucracy do their bidding, and discovering at every turn how difficult or impossible this is.
Someone will eventually learn from Starmer’s failures, work out a less bad way of going about things, and for a time be able to enlist the people’s support in this venture.
The average length of time spent in office by the 57 prime ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Rishi Sunak is about five and a third years, and at the end of any particularly confused or unstable period, we have often had a PM who served much longer than that. The chances are that this pattern will repeat itself.
