January 30, 2023 • 16 mins
A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Jon Davis.
Jon Davis puts the recent gyrations in the prime minister’s office in historical perspective, analyzing how various prime ministers since the postwar era have exercised authority. Rather than being entirely autocratic or collective in style, prime ministers continuously adjust their decision-making approach within their cabinets. This framework helps shine a light on the dysfunction that plagued successive British governments after the 2016 Brexit referendum, and that dysfunction's acceleration following the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Jon Davis is Director of the Strand Group at King's College London. Before joining King’s, Prof. Davis spent a total of eighteen years at Queen Mary, University of London, and rose to be Director of the Mile End Group (2004-2014), overseeing more than 100 increasingly high-profile events over more than a decade. Major project partnerships included those with No. 10 Downing Street and the Treasury. Davis worked for five years in investment banking at JP Morgan, Banque Paribas and Hambros Bank, and spent the year 2000 in the Modernising Government Secretariat of the Cabinet Office.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM The Hoover History Working Group aims to conduct and disseminate historical research on issues of national and international concern, and provide concrete recommendations on the basis of research and discussion.
Click the following link for more information https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group
The mission of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives is to collect, preserve, and make available the most important materials about global political, social, and economic change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We serve as a platform for a vibrant community of scholars and a broad public interested in the meaning and role of history.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[MUSIC]
>> Niall Ferguson (00:03):
Hello, my name's Niall Ferguson.
I am the Milbank Family Senior Fellowhere at the Hoover Institution, and
I am also the Chair ofthe Hoover History Working Group.
And this week we've been very fortunateto be joined by Professor Jon Davis,
who's Director of the Strand Groupat King's College London.
Before that, for many years, Jon Davisran an extraordinarily interesting
(00:29):
project at Queen Mary,University of London, the Mile End Group,
which involved bringing all kinds ofluminaries from British politics,
including at least twoformer prime ministers,
to a kind of large scale research andseminar project.
He also taught at award-winning specialsubjects on the Blair government,
(00:52):
and published a book on that subject,Heroes or
Villains? (00:55):
The Blair Government Reconsidered.
Jon's currently working on a new book onthe British prime minister as institution.
And his paper for us was entitled RecentGyrations of the Prime Minister's Office
and Decision-making inHistorical Perspective.
Jon, welcome to Hoover.
(01:17):
Let me open with a question aboutthe nature of British politics itself.
Simon Kuper has an entertaining book outcalled Chums, in which he argues that it's
really all about a tiny number ofpeople who went to Oxford together.
And British politics is justa competition between that group to
(01:38):
see who can get to be prime ministerto the top of the greasy poll.
Is there any truth to that?
Or is there something more goingon here than just Oxford's student
politics writ large?
>> Jon Davis (01:50):
I think it's [LAUGH] inescapable that there's something to this
particular argument.
I'm not saying that I buy it completely,but if you take the idea that
Britain is a conservative countrythat sometimes votes Labour.
And so, Conservatives are in for a goodtwo-thirds, if not more of the time,
(02:11):
certainly in the 20th century andinto the 21st century.
So you're looking at the ConservativeParty, then you look at the makeup of
the Conservative Party, andmany of them have been to Oxford.
There's no doubt about that.
And then from that, many of themdo a particular course at Oxford,
(02:31):
PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
A course which gives, as its name says,
gives a broad view overthe great politics,
great philosophers, great economists.
And what it does is,it sort of gives an idea, an introduction.
(02:57):
But because it's at Oxford,that introduction gets greater cache.
And so, linked to that is the confidencethat you've made it to Oxford and
you're amongst very impressive,clever people.
So a confidence starts to breed from this.
And so what you've got here,especially when you bear in
(03:21):
mind that Oxford has a preponderanceof fee-paying school entrance,
fee-paying schools that educatearound about 7% of the UK population.
I think the thesis holdsa great deal of awesome.
>> Niall Ferguson (03:37):
So I'm not going to stick up for PPE, but
perhaps I should stick up for Oxford.
It's been providing prime ministers fora very long time, and I wonder if
part of the story you're telling us isa story of a decline in, well, what?
Is it the quality of prime ministers,or is it the governability of Britain?
(03:59):
What's changed since,let's say, the 1990s,
since Tony Blair's time,that you could call the problem?
I'm not sure whether it's structural orjust a matter of inferior quality people.
>> Jon Davis (04:16):
I'm not gonna lay into Oxford neither.
I mean, just before your 1990s,Margaret Thatcher,
I think arguably the mostimpressive of prime ministers,
certainly since the World War II,was a famous Oxonian of Oxford.
Now in terms of quality, so we'veexplained why so many come from Oxford and
(04:37):
into that incredible, sort of like,upward escalator from Oxford,
into the Conservative Party, andnot just into the Conservative Party,
but often into the higher reaches of theConservative Party, really quite quickly.
If we're talking about, has therebeen a declining quality overall?
(05:00):
I think, I really don't wanna say it.
I really don't, cuz I'm always looking.
I'm so conscious of the old idea of,same as it ever was,
that there was a golden age a time ago.
Also conscious ofthe years passing myself.
But I think, talking with so many people,looking at these things from so
(05:21):
many different angles,I think it is the case that the overall
quality of British politicianis not as strong as it once was.
Huge, many great exceptionsto what I'm saying there.
But I think overall,the quality is not as strong.
(05:43):
And I think you just go intoall kinds of issues here
around the ideas of publicintrusion into private lives,
I think that actually itbecomes a relatively less
remunerated job contraryto what the popular idea
(06:04):
is of very rich politicians who areearning fortunes, is simply not the case.
And so, you put all these things together,the social media pressure,
especially on women, I don't thinkit's as nice a job as it once was.
>> Niall Ferguson (06:24):
Let's talk about Brexit, because obviously, the thing that
upended British politics in 2016 wasthe result of the Brexit referendum.
And it hasn't felt as if British politicshas been stable since culminating,
of course, in the year ofthree prime ministers in 2022.
(06:46):
How far do you think it's reallybeen that issue that has driven
the political turmoil, andthat even the most talented politicians
would have struggled to stabilizeBritain economically and
politically if they'd been primeminister the day after the referendum?
>> Jon Davis (07:05):
I think its inescapable that that's exactly what has happened.
What I would start to describeas the Brexit revolution,
this incredible decisionby the country to take
a referendum outside of a generalelection, a binding 50-50.
(07:27):
You should get that 51% or
52% in actuality,
that would completely upend 40,
50 years of ever closer union in legal.
It just goes on.
(07:48):
It's the most gargantuan decision.
And it was taken against a ruling partyby a civil war within that ruling party.
And so,the morning after the referendum that
David Cameron had called,he resigns immediately.
(08:09):
And then, one by one,the big supporters of Brexit, sorry,
of remaining, are removed fromthe Conservative Party one by one,
until you've got a cabinetunder Boris Johnson,
who largely was chosen notbecause of ability, but
(08:30):
because of fealty to this Brexit idea.
And then what's happened from it?
It took several years, three years,to actually get Brexit done.
Theresa May, I think, in retrospect,
actually put togethera great deal that might have,
that might have stabilized things,a really good deal.
(08:53):
But it was rejected because it becamea logical conclusion that we had to go for
the hardest break possible.
Now, we all know that Britain'shistory is half-in and
half-out when it comes to Europe.
When we were outside,we desperately wanted to be in.
When we're in, [LAUGH] some ofus desperately want to be out.
(09:13):
I think Britain's destiny isto be in a halfway house, and
that's what I think is now coming.
>> Niall Ferguson (09:20):
One of the themes of your work going back many years is
the role of the civil servicein British political life.
And I think, for many people,British politics is still summed
up by the sitcom Yes, Minister andlater Yes, Prime Minister.
I've often wondered,if the civil service is so powerful,
(09:41):
why were they unable to stop Brexit,
which can't have been somethingthat any civil servant wanted?
What's the answer to that?
>> Jon Davis (09:50):
I'm sure that there were some civil servants who did, but
it's certainly the case that many did not.
I actually think thatwhat's happened since Yes,
Minister and Yes, Prime Minister,in a small way possibly,
because of Yes, Minister andYes, Prime Minister,
what's happened is that the power ofthe civil service has reduced over time.
(10:16):
I think that Yes,Minister parodies a time of the 1960s and
70s where you had the pendulumpolitics of Labour, then Tony,
then Labour, then Tony, where the civilservice was obviously to the fore.
And they were in charge,in all kinds of ways.
Not totally, but they were.
(10:38):
There was a great dealmore influenced around.
What I think has happened,since Thatcher, is a return of democracy.
That what's happened,whether you like [LAUGH] democracy or
not, what has happened isthat the popular will is now
transferred by prime ministerswho are unprepared to listen,
(11:03):
to defer to civil servants in a way that,that parody that Yes,
Minister brings out may well havebeen true in that earlier period.
But I also commend you, you'll recall,as a great expert on Yes, Minister and
Yes, Prime Minister, remember howJim Hacker becomes prime minister?
(11:27):
It's because he attacks Europe,and says that we
gotta protect the great British Banger,if my memory serves correct.
>> Niall Ferguson (11:35):
And in that sense, it was prophetic as well as funny.
>> Jon Davis (11:40):
[LAUGH].
>> Niall Ferguson (11:41):
I'll ask a last question,
which is perhaps an unfairone about the future.
Where does Britain go from here?
You sit in London at a time of, I think,
considerable depression,despondency about the outlook.
Economically, things aren't great.
(12:02):
It almost feels as if we'vegone back to the 1970s with
high inflation and a rash of strikes.
It's a little hard to say who'llbe the next prime minister.
But give me a sense of where youthink Britain goes from here.
Is Brexit actually gonna end up beingreversed or are they, we, stuck with it?
>> Jon Davis (12:24):
If you look at opinion polling right now, in late January 2023,
the opinion polling is starting to, well,I mean, it's been nudging all the way.
It's now starting to nudgetwo-thirds of people who
are convinced that it was a mistake.
This is being seen massively in theconstituencies that Boris Johnson won for
(12:49):
the Conservatives for the first time,in many cases from the Labour Party,
that that vote has become very soft andis showing great deal of regret,
Regrexit, [LAUGH] asthe current phrase says.
Look, where do we go from here?
(13:09):
It's undeniably truethat what is happening
is a great despondency that hasdescended upon British politics.
I think that not only are we predicted to
grow less, that if there is a recession,
the recession will be deeperthan close partners or
(13:34):
competitors, comparators.
That's on the economic side.
I think when you look at foreign policy,yes,
we were out-front over Ukraine,but it's not.
Apart from Boris Johnsonvisiting Zelenskyy so often,
it doesn't feel like we'reat the forefront of things,
(13:57):
and nor will we, I think, ever be again.
So I think that what we're seeingis a hastening of decline.
You'll recall that Liz Truss,in a leadership campaign,
aped Margaret Thatcher from the 1970s,not just the way that
(14:17):
she was dressing like her, butalso this hatred of decline.
But I think that Mrs.Truss has actually hastened,
in some respects, that decline.
I'm a natural optimist, Niall,and so from my point of view,
I think that however far we go down,I do still think that
(14:40):
there hopefully is a returnnot to where we were, not to,
if I look back and I think about Blair,whatever you think about him,
in the months after 9/11,he bestrode the globe.
He was everywhere andpeople were listening, listening to him.
When you think back toMargaret Thatcher and Gorbachev,
(15:04):
a man we can do business with.
You go further back to the Falklands,
and how Britain could putquite a mighty fleet together,
none of these things are true anymore.
And so,I think that it's gonna be a hard lesson,
but I think that Britain'sdestiny as a mid-rank
(15:27):
European nation has only been hastened by,for
what some people thought Brexit,was a return to greatness.
>> Niall Ferguson (15:40):
Jon, thank you so much indeed for joining us.
Your paper, Recent Gyrations ofthe Prime Minister's Office and
Decision Making in Historical Perspective,is available
from the Hoover History Working Groupwebsite as a Hoover History Working Paper.
It's been a great pleasure to host you and
we look forward to the bookwhen it comes out.
(16:00):
I won't ask you for a pub date yet.
Jon Davis, thanks very much indeed.
>> Jon Davis (16:06):
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
>> Niall Ferguson (00:03):
Hello, my name's Niall Ferguson.
I am the Milbank Family Senior Fellowhere at the Hoover Institution, and
I am also the Chair ofthe Hoover History Working Group.
And this week we've been very fortunateto be joined by Professor Jon Davis,
who's Director of the Strand Groupat King's College London.
Before that, for many years, Jon Davisran an extraordinarily interesting
(00:29):
project at Queen Mary,University of London, the Mile End Group,
which involved bringing all kinds ofluminaries from British politics,
including at least twoformer prime ministers,
to a kind of large scale research andseminar project.
He also taught at award-winning specialsubjects on the Blair government,
(00:52):
and published a book on that subject,Heroes or
Villains? (00:55):
The Blair Government Reconsidered.
Jon's currently working on a new book onthe British prime minister as institution.
And his paper for us was entitled RecentGyrations of the Prime Minister's Office
and Decision-making inHistorical Perspective.
Jon, welcome to Hoover.
(01:17):
Let me open with a question aboutthe nature of British politics itself.
Simon Kuper has an entertaining book outcalled Chums, in which he argues that it's
really all about a tiny number ofpeople who went to Oxford together.
And British politics is justa competition between that group to
(01:38):
see who can get to be prime ministerto the top of the greasy poll.
Is there any truth to that?
Or is there something more goingon here than just Oxford's student
politics writ large?
>> Jon Davis (01:50):
I think it's [LAUGH] inescapable that there's something to this
particular argument.
I'm not saying that I buy it completely,but if you take the idea that
Britain is a conservative countrythat sometimes votes Labour.
And so, Conservatives are in for a goodtwo-thirds, if not more of the time,
(02:11):
certainly in the 20th century andinto the 21st century.
So you're looking at the ConservativeParty, then you look at the makeup of
the Conservative Party, andmany of them have been to Oxford.
There's no doubt about that.
And then from that, many of themdo a particular course at Oxford,
(02:31):
PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
A course which gives, as its name says,
gives a broad view overthe great politics,
great philosophers, great economists.
And what it does is,it sort of gives an idea, an introduction.
(02:57):
But because it's at Oxford,that introduction gets greater cache.
And so, linked to that is the confidencethat you've made it to Oxford and
you're amongst very impressive,clever people.
So a confidence starts to breed from this.
And so what you've got here,especially when you bear in
(03:21):
mind that Oxford has a preponderanceof fee-paying school entrance,
fee-paying schools that educatearound about 7% of the UK population.
I think the thesis holdsa great deal of awesome.
>> Niall Ferguson (03:37):
So I'm not going to stick up for PPE, but
perhaps I should stick up for Oxford.
It's been providing prime ministers fora very long time, and I wonder if
part of the story you're telling us isa story of a decline in, well, what?
Is it the quality of prime ministers,or is it the governability of Britain?
(03:59):
What's changed since,let's say, the 1990s,
since Tony Blair's time,that you could call the problem?
I'm not sure whether it's structural orjust a matter of inferior quality people.
>> Jon Davis (04:16):
I'm not gonna lay into Oxford neither.
I mean, just before your 1990s,Margaret Thatcher,
I think arguably the mostimpressive of prime ministers,
certainly since the World War II,was a famous Oxonian of Oxford.
Now in terms of quality, so we'veexplained why so many come from Oxford and
(04:37):
into that incredible, sort of like,upward escalator from Oxford,
into the Conservative Party, andnot just into the Conservative Party,
but often into the higher reaches of theConservative Party, really quite quickly.
If we're talking about, has therebeen a declining quality overall?
(05:00):
I think, I really don't wanna say it.
I really don't, cuz I'm always looking.
I'm so conscious of the old idea of,same as it ever was,
that there was a golden age a time ago.
Also conscious ofthe years passing myself.
But I think, talking with so many people,looking at these things from so
(05:21):
many different angles,I think it is the case that the overall
quality of British politicianis not as strong as it once was.
Huge, many great exceptionsto what I'm saying there.
But I think overall,the quality is not as strong.
(05:43):
And I think you just go intoall kinds of issues here
around the ideas of publicintrusion into private lives,
I think that actually itbecomes a relatively less
remunerated job contraryto what the popular idea
(06:04):
is of very rich politicians who areearning fortunes, is simply not the case.
And so, you put all these things together,the social media pressure,
especially on women, I don't thinkit's as nice a job as it once was.
>> Niall Ferguson (06:24):
Let's talk about Brexit, because obviously, the thing that
upended British politics in 2016 wasthe result of the Brexit referendum.
And it hasn't felt as if British politicshas been stable since culminating,
of course, in the year ofthree prime ministers in 2022.
(06:46):
How far do you think it's reallybeen that issue that has driven
the political turmoil, andthat even the most talented politicians
would have struggled to stabilizeBritain economically and
politically if they'd been primeminister the day after the referendum?
>> Jon Davis (07:05):
I think its inescapable that that's exactly what has happened.
What I would start to describeas the Brexit revolution,
this incredible decisionby the country to take
a referendum outside of a generalelection, a binding 50-50.
(07:27):
You should get that 51% or
52% in actuality,
that would completely upend 40,
50 years of ever closer union in legal.
It just goes on.
(07:48):
It's the most gargantuan decision.
And it was taken against a ruling partyby a civil war within that ruling party.
And so,the morning after the referendum that
David Cameron had called,he resigns immediately.
(08:09):
And then, one by one,the big supporters of Brexit, sorry,
of remaining, are removed fromthe Conservative Party one by one,
until you've got a cabinetunder Boris Johnson,
who largely was chosen notbecause of ability, but
(08:30):
because of fealty to this Brexit idea.
And then what's happened from it?
It took several years, three years,to actually get Brexit done.
Theresa May, I think, in retrospect,
actually put togethera great deal that might have,
that might have stabilized things,a really good deal.
(08:53):
But it was rejected because it becamea logical conclusion that we had to go for
the hardest break possible.
Now, we all know that Britain'shistory is half-in and
half-out when it comes to Europe.
When we were outside,we desperately wanted to be in.
When we're in, [LAUGH] some ofus desperately want to be out.
(09:13):
I think Britain's destiny isto be in a halfway house, and
that's what I think is now coming.
>> Niall Ferguson (09:20):
One of the themes of your work going back many years is
the role of the civil servicein British political life.
And I think, for many people,British politics is still summed
up by the sitcom Yes, Minister andlater Yes, Prime Minister.
I've often wondered,if the civil service is so powerful,
(09:41):
why were they unable to stop Brexit,
which can't have been somethingthat any civil servant wanted?
What's the answer to that?
>> Jon Davis (09:50):
I'm sure that there were some civil servants who did, but
it's certainly the case that many did not.
I actually think thatwhat's happened since Yes,
Minister and Yes, Prime Minister,in a small way possibly,
because of Yes, Minister andYes, Prime Minister,
what's happened is that the power ofthe civil service has reduced over time.
(10:16):
I think that Yes,Minister parodies a time of the 1960s and
70s where you had the pendulumpolitics of Labour, then Tony,
then Labour, then Tony, where the civilservice was obviously to the fore.
And they were in charge,in all kinds of ways.
Not totally, but they were.
(10:38):
There was a great dealmore influenced around.
What I think has happened,since Thatcher, is a return of democracy.
That what's happened,whether you like [LAUGH] democracy or
not, what has happened isthat the popular will is now
transferred by prime ministerswho are unprepared to listen,
(11:03):
to defer to civil servants in a way that,that parody that Yes,
Minister brings out may well havebeen true in that earlier period.
But I also commend you, you'll recall,as a great expert on Yes, Minister and
Yes, Prime Minister, remember howJim Hacker becomes prime minister?
(11:27):
It's because he attacks Europe,and says that we
gotta protect the great British Banger,if my memory serves correct.
>> Niall Ferguson (11:35):
And in that sense, it was prophetic as well as funny.
>> Jon Davis (11:40):
[LAUGH].
>> Niall Ferguson (11:41):
I'll ask a last question,
which is perhaps an unfairone about the future.
Where does Britain go from here?
You sit in London at a time of, I think,
considerable depression,despondency about the outlook.
Economically, things aren't great.
(12:02):
It almost feels as if we'vegone back to the 1970s with
high inflation and a rash of strikes.
It's a little hard to say who'llbe the next prime minister.
But give me a sense of where youthink Britain goes from here.
Is Brexit actually gonna end up beingreversed or are they, we, stuck with it?
>> Jon Davis (12:24):
If you look at opinion polling right now, in late January 2023,
the opinion polling is starting to, well,I mean, it's been nudging all the way.
It's now starting to nudgetwo-thirds of people who
are convinced that it was a mistake.
This is being seen massively in theconstituencies that Boris Johnson won for
(12:49):
the Conservatives for the first time,in many cases from the Labour Party,
that that vote has become very soft andis showing great deal of regret,
Regrexit, [LAUGH] asthe current phrase says.
Look, where do we go from here?
(13:09):
It's undeniably truethat what is happening
is a great despondency that hasdescended upon British politics.
I think that not only are we predicted to
grow less, that if there is a recession,
the recession will be deeperthan close partners or
(13:34):
competitors, comparators.
That's on the economic side.
I think when you look at foreign policy,yes,
we were out-front over Ukraine,but it's not.
Apart from Boris Johnsonvisiting Zelenskyy so often,
it doesn't feel like we'reat the forefront of things,
(13:57):
and nor will we, I think, ever be again.
So I think that what we're seeingis a hastening of decline.
You'll recall that Liz Truss,in a leadership campaign,
aped Margaret Thatcher from the 1970s,not just the way that
(14:17):
she was dressing like her, butalso this hatred of decline.
But I think that Mrs.Truss has actually hastened,
in some respects, that decline.
I'm a natural optimist, Niall,and so from my point of view,
I think that however far we go down,I do still think that
(14:40):
there hopefully is a returnnot to where we were, not to,
if I look back and I think about Blair,whatever you think about him,
in the months after 9/11,he bestrode the globe.
He was everywhere andpeople were listening, listening to him.
When you think back toMargaret Thatcher and Gorbachev,
(15:04):
a man we can do business with.
You go further back to the Falklands,
and how Britain could putquite a mighty fleet together,
none of these things are true anymore.
And so,I think that it's gonna be a hard lesson,
but I think that Britain'sdestiny as a mid-rank
(15:27):
European nation has only been hastened by,for
what some people thought Brexit,was a return to greatness.
>> Niall Ferguson (15:40):
Jon, thank you so much indeed for joining us.
Your paper, Recent Gyrations ofthe Prime Minister's Office and
Decision Making in Historical Perspective,is available
from the Hoover History Working Groupwebsite as a Hoover History Working Paper.
It's been a great pleasure to host you and
we look forward to the bookwhen it comes out.
(16:00):
I won't ask you for a pub date yet.
Jon Davis, thanks very much indeed.
>> Jon Davis (16:06):
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
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