First Lord or First Among Equals?

Well, James, hang on a minute. The three “schools of thought” you identify in relation to last night’s Tory rebellion on Europe are not three distinct schools at all. That is, one may consider the Tory party “unmanageable” on europe and believe that the leadership got caught up in the madness yesterday. But it is your final school that really have it wrong:

The third lot are the ones who have grasped the significance of last night’s events. Despite being loyalists, they are in no doubt about the need for Cameron to change his style of party management. They want him to stop acting like a medieval monarch and start behaving in the manner of someone who is first among equals when it comes to his parliamentary colleagues.

Up to a point. Doubtless Cameron really does have a problem with some of his backbenchers and some of them are never likely to warm to him. To the extent these concerns can be assuaged by a more emollient leadership style and so long as flattering the backbenches costs nothing more than the odd cheap cut then so be it, that’s fine and dandy.

Any more than that, however, and the Prime Minister will be in real trouble. Not with his obstreperous backbenchers but with a rather larger, more significant constituency: the country. It may be true, in a technical or constitutional sense, that the Prime Minister is merely “first among equals” in his party (and cabinet) but in political, or real, terms this long since eased to be the case.

Whether one approves of the development or not, our elections have become increasingly Presidential. Party loyalty has waned and the cult of the leader has grown. Technically of course only the voters of Witney have chosen David Cameron to be an MP and even they have not put him forward as Prime Minister. Actually, of course and as we all know even if it is sometimes nice to pretend otherwise, millions of people voted Conservative because they wanted David Cameron to be Prime Minister, not Gordon Brown.

So, yes, the British Prime Minister these days is something of an elected monarch. He is not first among equals in any meaningful sense.

Sure, he should act with a certain measure of grace and humility but much though I’d like to see the executive’s powers clipped the fact remains that the Prime Minister is the main show in town and, in electoral terms, what’s good for the Prime Minister is most often going to be good for the Conservative party.

Which is why the one thing Cameron must avoid is being perceived to be giving in to or being run by his more recalcitrant – or, to use the technical term, bonkers – backbenchers. Nothing could more swiftly or surely undermine Cameron’s authority in the country. Most of Britain wants to see a proper Prime Minister, not one in thrall to or cowering before a cabal of monomaniacal backbenchers whose obsession with all things european most of the country finds pretty weird most of the time. We know this and we know how these things helped cripple John Major.

It is true that when asked a majority of people support the idea of some kind of referendum on the EU. It is also true that the Tory right’s attitude on these matters has more mainstream support in the press and elsewhere than anything Labour’s lefties believed in the long years of the Blair ascendancy. Nevertheless, all these things can be true and it can still be the case that just as it was useful for Blair to be able to play against his left-wingers so it is useful – politically speaking – for Cameron to distance himself from the extremists in his own party.

Whatever his faults, Cameron tends to be more popular than his party (itself a reminder that the detoxification project remains incomplete) and the party might be well-advised to remember that. Where he can, Cameron should manage his party more politely and with greater consideration but where it counts or becomes necessary he should be ruthless with them, remembering that the country does not like political parties very much but is, whatever it claims, quite OK with persoanlity and Presidential-style politics. Again, you may think this regrettable but that doesn’t matter very much either.