1. And how they are limited by the Cabinet
Powers of the PM
And how they are limited by the Cabinet

2. Primus Inter Pares
Is the traditional phrase associated with the powers of the Prime Minister – he is “First Among Equals”. This denotes that she is first of all an MP, then a Minister. She is First among the Ministers in the Cabinet. This is to imply that the Cabinet have power over the Prime Minister too – she is not all powerful over them.
However in recent decades the nature of the Prime Minister’s relationship with cabinet has been questioned, and some have argued that there has been a “creeping presidentialism”, which would suggest that the Prime Minister is getting stronger, while the Cabinet are reduced in their ability to control her.
Is the Prime Minister still First Among Equals?

3. No job description
A complication in analysing the role of the PM is that there is so little written down about what they have to do. This is in contrast for example with the role of the President of the USA which is very clearly defined in the US constitution. For the PM there is no such rule book. There is plenty that they probably should do, and lots that they can do, but very unclear on what has to happen.
This means that a large part of the role of the PM depends on the personality of the person in the job, and therefore there have been many different types of PMs, who have used the powers in very different ways.

4. Zig Zagging Personal Style
Authoritarian Centraliser
Consultative-Delegator

5. Hiring and Firing
The first and possibly most important power the PM has, which immediately sets her above her cabinet is the power to hire and fire ministers. The PM is in charge of shaping her gov.
Most people who become MPs may be seen as people who might like to progress to become government ministers – this means that they may be likely to show loyalty to the whip. This gives the PM the opportunity to award loyalty and shape her gov with people who follow her ideological viewpoint.
Government salaries are higher than normal MPs salaries, and the role of a minister has a higher profile and status attached to it. The Prime Minister has about 100 Ministerial roles to fill, including the top 22/23 cabinet roles, which are the highest profile heads of the big departments. Therefore the Prime Minister has a big opportunity to award the loyal

6. Status
Furthermore, the different status attached to different departments allows the PM even more opportunity to shape the government.
Within Cabinet the table is oval shaped. The Prime Minister sits at the centre. She is in charge of the seating plan in Cabinet, and will place his most important and trusted Ministers closest to her. This means they are given more say within cabinet meetings.
The highest status job is Chancellor of the Exchequer, then the high ranking departments are the ones that spend most money – so there is Health, Home Office, Defence, Work and Pensions, Education, Foreign Office. These are all seen as big important and respected roles in Cabinet – though sometimes the roles of Home Secretary and Health Secretary are seen as “poisoned chalices” which are most often hated by the public – so these may be given to people the PM sees as rivals.

7. Collective Responsibility
Another reason why the PMs ability to hire and fire gives her power over the cabinet, is the doctrine of collective responsibility.
This basically means that if anything is decided on in cabinet – then no matter what the Minister’s personal view might be, whether they love or hate the idea, they must support it in public. They are held collectively responsible for all decisions of the government.
This is a great way for the PM to control potential rivals within her own party.
Remember all of these people are politicians, they all really want to be PM. The PMs greatest rivals for the job may not be in the other party, they may be in her own party. They may be waiting in the wings for a weakness or failure on the part of the PM, so that they can jump in and take over.
Collective responsibility allows the PM to keep her friends close, but his enemies closer.

8. However…
There are limits on the PMs ability to fully use these powers.
Firstly the ability to hire and fire can be seriously constrained. The PM has about 100 posts to fill, and if she is lucky there may be about 350 MPs to fill them. That means there is only a maximum of 3.5 MPs to choose from for each role. There will be some who have to be discounted because there are some who do not want to be Ministers, or who are not capable of the role. There is also the fact that many MPs are elected several times in a row and may spend many years in Parliament – this means that there is not a lot of “new blood” for the government, a lack of fresh ideas and perspectives, moving further away from the people.
This means that there aren’t that many choices the PM can make.
The same is true of Cabinet – quite often Ministers just get moved around departments, there aren’t that many spaces to fill, but there aren’t that many ready to do them.

9. Furthermore
The PM may have people in his/her party who are too important and popular to leave out of cabinet. And sometimes these Ministers are so powerful that they can pretty much demand which role they want.
These people might be too powerful to leave on the backbenches, as they might cause too much disruption in arguing against the government and be seen as troublemakers. They may even challenge for the leadership of the party at Party conference time, as they may have a lot of backbench support in the party– this can de-stabilise the PM, who will be seen as weak if she cannot control the members of the party. The PM might see it as being the best thing to do to include these people in cabinet and bind them by collective responsibility.
Gordon Brown had significant power within the Labour Party while Tony Blair was PM, he had to be included in cabinet, and the only role he would accept would be the highest status and most powerful role of Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Prime Ministers also have to think about issues like number of women, ethnic minorities and making sure that the Minister for Scotland is Scottish – which left Theresa May with little choice as there was only one Scottish Conservative MP elected in 2015.

10. Theresa May’s Cabinet
Theresa May has had the added complication of having to balance her cabinet among people who were in favour of leaving the EU (Brexiters) and Remainers.
As the party (and the country) was so split by the Brexit referendum, she now has to try and bring the two sides together – she must make sure that powerful positions in the cabinet are given to politicians from both sides of the argument.
So Phillip Hammond has the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer – he was a remainer, Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary– he was a Brexiter. David Davies is a highly respected Conservative MP who had resigned from cabinet posts many years ago as he didn’t want to compromise his ideological stance – he has however, taken on the role of Brexit Secretary – so this gain’s May a lot of respect from the backbenches

11. Threats from within
Prime Ministers who have been in power for some time tend to find that they have this problem of cabinet ministers becoming powerful and making a name for themselves in cabinet.
When a PM is new he/she tends to have much more control over their party, when they have been in power for a while and people have become more established they tend to see different power bases being established as people in the cabinet line up to replace them.
At the moment, Theresa May has not been in power for long, and she is popular in the country, there seems to be a lack of opposition in her own cabinet – she is very powerful at the moment – but this will change over time.

12. Chair of the Cabinet

13. Agenda setting
The Prime Minister is the Chair of Cabinet this means that at the weekly Cabinet meetings, cabinet ministers will meet together and discuss the items that are put on the agenda.
If an item is not on the agenda, then it won’t be discussed, this is an important power. Tony Blair used this power to keep the issue of the Iraq War out of cabinet discussions, so Ministers like Clare Short and Robin Cook found it difficult to express their opinions against the war and eventually had to resign from Cabinet

14. Set the number of meetings
Another important ability is the power to actually call meetings. Under Clement Attlee PM in the 1940’s, there would be about 80 meetings of the cabinet per year, and each meeting would last 2 hours. Under Tony Blair this reduced to about 40, and each only lasted 45 mins. He always had the same 4 open items on the agenda, and limited discussion as far as possible – there was no real time for questioning of policy.
In that time there was nowhere near enough time to talk about all the important aspects of the work of all departments.
David Cameron called for a return to Cabinet government – he increased the number of cabinet meetings to one a week (still not the same number as Attlee), but each one lasted for 2 hours.

15. “Take the feel of the meeting”
The Prime Minister as Chair of the cabinet is under no obligation to take votes in Cabinet on decisions. If the majority of people in cabinet are against a decision, the PM may still decide to go the other way – all she does is “take the feel of the meeting”, and this means that there are some people whose opinions she values more than others – so they will have a greater say in the decision that she makes.

16. Cabinet no longer making decisions
In the past Cabinet meetings were an opportunity for the heads of all the departments to come together, talk about what was happening in their departments – ask questions, and also to make suggestions about what other departments should be doing. They were an opportunity for full and frank debate before the collective responsibility outside cabinet would kick in.
But cabinet changed over time. In reality under Thatcher’s time most decisions were taken by “cabinet committees”. It was argued that there is too much going on in gov for every dept head to know everything about what is going on in other depts.

17. Sofa government
Tony Blair was accused by the Butler review of operating “Sofa government”. This meant that when a decision had to be made in government, he didn’t have a cabinet meeting where everyone would discuss and official minutes (notes) of what was said would be taken – as should be the case with cabinet government. What he did instead was invite the minister round to have a coffee. They would sit on a sofa and have an informal chat, and no minutes would be taken, but they would agree the policy, no-one else in government would know what was going on.
This was a massive criticism of Blair, and a big blow to the power of cabinet. David Cameron moved away from this system, because initially he led a coalition government, so he had to keep the lib dems on board. There are signs that Theresa May is becoming much more of a centralising Prime Minister, and making decisions on her own, or with a small group of Ministers.

18. Brexit limitations
Theresa May is limited in the ability to control the agenda of cabinet meetings, as for at least the next two years, the whole business of government will be taken up by the negotiations to leave the EU.

19. So in summary…
The PM has power to control Cabinet through setting the agenda, deciding on the number and length of meetings. Cabinet meetings no longer make important decisions as the PM tends to listen to only a small number of ministers.
However, the ability of the PM to control cabinet will be limited by events in the country/world- they will often be responding to issues going on over which they have no control - so Global Financial Crisis/Brexit have controlled the agendas of PMs in recent years.

20. Ability of the PM to direct law-making in the UK
Policy Making
Ability of the PM to direct law-making in the UK

21. Mandate
Traditionally, upon election of a majority government, we would expect that government to be able to put into action all of the policies that were included in the party’s manifesto.
We expect a PM to be able to govern and make decisions, this is the way that British Politics has worked over the past century.
However, we have a Prime Minister who has not faced a General Election yet, so she has difficulty in claiming legitimacy for any of her policies.
Also, there will be little time for Theresa May to try and push forward any policies which are not to do with Brexit – as there is such a complicated process of negotiations, and so many laws to replace in the near future.

22. Cabinet Committees
In the past the cabinet would be the place where ministers would come along and discuss the work of the whole government – it would not just be a place to keep others informed of what you were doing, other ministers would have an opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions about the work of departments. Under Margaret Thatcher this changed significantly, it was felt that government did too much for ministers to be so aware of the work of other departments so she set up “cabinet committees”, this was smaller groups of ministers who would be consulted on particular issues. So when she went to war in the Falklands, she had a cabinet committee which included the Minister for Defence, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to have more in-depth discussions and make decisions, and then report back to full cabinet. Cabinet Committees are where most government policy is decided before full cabinet.

23. Cabinet Committees
The tradition of cabinet committees has continued and increased over the years. There are some permanent cabinet committees and some that are just set up in times of a particular crisis
At any one time there are about 50 different cabinet committees going. When there was flooding in Jan 2014 there was a cabinet committee set up to help deal with it. There is a permanent Cabinet committee called COBRA which deals with any threats to National Security.

24. Cabinet Committees – sign of strength
Because the PM gets to decide who is in each cabinet committee this is a sign of strength for the PM, it means that she can shape government decisions by placing the people he wants in the most important committees.
She can marginalise the people he is not so impressed with.
However, as the country and the Conservative Party is so split by the issue of Brexit, the PM must make sure that she includes people from both sides of the debate in all important cabinet committees – she has to try and bring her party together.

25. Image

26. Face of the government
Because the PM is the person most associated with government, this gives them a sense of power and authority in the country.
The PM is most likely to be featured on the news regularly, many people cannot name that many members of the cabinet, but most people know who the PM is, and what he looks like.
Although this might be seen as a source of power over the rest of cabinet, it could also be an area in which the PM is weak, as if the government are being seen as making poor decisions and getting stuff wrong, then it is the PM who will soak up the blame in the eyes of the public.

27. Electability
It has been suggested that the power of a PM over cabinet is directly related to how likely they are to win the next election.
A PM that is popular in the country is a lot less likely to face rebellion in cabinet.
However if the party get the sense that the PM is unpopular amongst voters, they are more likely to be more difficult to control.
For example Margaret Thatcher was forced out by her own cabinet, when it was clear she had lost popularity.
Tony Blair was basically forced to step down by Gordon Brown, because he had become so unpopular due to the Iraq war.
Gordon Brown was plagued with constant calls to resign by members of his own cabinet – like Caroline Flint
David Cameron was known to be more popular than his party in the opinion polls, so he faced very little rebellion in cabinet.

28. However…
David Cameron could not ignore his party when there was an issue which was as important as Brexit.
In order to cut off a threat from UKIP he had to agree to a referendum
His cabinet forced him to allow them to decide as individuals whether they could campaign for Brexit or remain – he suspended collective responsibility
He lost the referendum and had to resign – so the cabinet can have power over the PM, even when they are popular, if the issue is big enough.

29. Conclusion The PM has been accused of presidentialism in recent years
The power of the PM can depend on their personal style, and their popularity in the country
The ability of the PM to direct policy can be affected by important global events
Cabinet will replace the PM if they become a liability.