I was intrigued when I saw this piece in the latest issue of the British Journal of Political Science: “'Off With Their Heads': British Prime Ministers and the Power To Dismiss”. Given that Canada's system of government is very similar to Great Britain's, I wanted to see what this piece might tell me about Canadian prime ministers and their relationship to Canadian cabinets. I was further intrigued because the article summary notes that, in examining the practices of British prime ministers from MacMillan to Blair, Thatcher was the one who seemed to most easily fire cabinet minister. Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, and many in his cabinet are big fans of Thatcher. Indeed, when Harper made his first overseas trip in 2006, one of the first things he did up arriving in London, England, was to meet Thatcher. (Jason Kenney, then a lowly secretary of state, accompanied Harper on that visit with the baroness, if memory serves). If there is an ideological affinity between Thatcher and Harper, might there be something to learn from her relationship with cabinet about the way Harper interacts with his ministers?
Ideological affinities aside, Harper is dealing with a situation that is very different than Thatcher's: He leads a minority government and, as a result, cannot, it seems to me, be firing ministers at every whim. Indeed, in four years in government, the only cabinet minister to be fired is Helena Guergis and what she did was so offensive to Harper, Harper not only fired her but he called in the cops, becoming the first Canadian prime minister in nearly 25 years to call the police on a member of his own cabinet.
Harper, in fact, has been exceedingly loyal to those he has appointed to cabinet with the following exceptions:
- Maxime Bernier resigned as Foreign Affairs Ministers after leaving top-secret documents at his girlfriend's house. He's still out.
- Gary Lunn was demoted from Natural Resources Minister down to Minister of State for Sport after the 2008 election.
- Gordon O'Connor, a former general, went from Defence Minister to chief government whip, a demotion attributed to O'Connor's inability to finesse communications about the Afghan detainee issue.
- Lisa Raitt lost Natural Resources in the most recent cabinet shuffle, moving to Labour, a secondary portfolio in Human Resources and Social Development Canada.
- Rona Ambrose was demoted from the job of Environment Minister to Intergovernmental Affairs but the gradually promoted back up the cabinet chain, to Labour Minister and now to Public Works Minister.
- Greg Thompson (Veterans Affairs) and Carol Skelton (Revenue) both resigned their positions in cabinet but continued to sit as MPs when they announced their retirement from politics.
With that preamble — here's some excepts pulled from the article:
Extract: The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses the way that prime ministers have exercised, in particular, their power to dismiss and finds that Thatcher was far more likely than others to sack cabinet colleagues on ideological or policy grounds. The article emphasizes that prime ministers’ relationships with especially powerful ministers – ‘big beasts of the jungle’ – are crucial to an understanding of British government at the top.
[From article]…in Austria, ‘the Chancellor’s power of nomination is restricted, as one of the principles of the Austrian coalition government is that each party has full autonomy in the selection of its cabinet members’.7 The same has historically been the case in such countries as the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland and even in France and Germany when the incumbent administration in one or other of those two countries has depended for its parliamentary majority on more than one party. Until recently, the Australian Labor party (ALP) and the New Zealand Labour party excluded the prime minister entirely from the selection process: the two parties’ parliamentary caucuses elected all the members of the ALP and New Zealand Labour party cabinets. In 2007, however, Australia’s newly elected Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, broke with tradition and chose his own cabinet.8 Moreover, whereas British prime ministers, like American presidents, take for granted their power to dismiss ministers from their cabinet, heads of government in many other countries are afforded no such luxury.
…. the prime minister’s power of appointment and dismissal is almost certainly even more significant now than it was a century ago or even half a century ago. In the first place, governments are now larger than they used to be, with the prime minister having more posts to fill – and, of course, to empty. Gordon Brown appointed seventy-five House of Commons ministers in June 2007 compared with Ramsay MacDonald’s thirty-eight in 1929 and Harold Macmillan’s fifty-four as recently as 1957.14 In the second place, the incidence of career politicians – men and women who are not content to remain on the back benches but aspire to ministerial office – is almost certainly higher now than it was in previous generations.
It would be impossible to investigate in any detail prime ministers’ reasons for sacking junior ministers: the sheer number of such dismissals has been very large, and in most cases the reasons underlying them were at the time, and remain, wholly obscure . . .
The study's authors, Anthony King and Nicholas Allen, find, in the period 1957-2007, that there were 131 cabinet ministers who departed cabinet “for reasons other than their political party’s loss of a general election, the loss of their own seat in the House of Commons or death.”
They then trawled through the political biographies, memoirs, and contemporary press accounts to determine the reasons each of those departures and conclude, after that review, that there was “a total of 87 occasions when we believe the individual in question was dismissed outright, resigned pre-emptively or else was constructively dismissed.”
After analyzing this data, the author's conclude:
The average number of dismissals from the cabinet, as distinct from departures on other grounds, has also tended to increase. Thatcher dismissed her colleagues at the same high rate as Macmillan and Wilson (during the first of his two premierships); and both Major and Blair, year on year, dismissed more of their colleagues than any of their post-1957 predecessors. It would seem that in recent decades British politics at the top has become somewhat tougher and more turbulent than in the past. The explanation probably lies in some compound of prime ministers’ increased ruthlessness and the inability of a gradually increasing number of ministers to meet the demands that the prime minister, the media and their sheer administrative workloads place upon them.
Nonetheless, Margaret Thatcher stands out, when it comes to her propensity for firing cabinet ministers, not from a quantitative point-of-view but from a qualitative point-of-view:
…she sacked twice as many cabinet ministers on policy-related grounds as all of her post-1957 predecessors and successors put together; and she sacked almost as many cabinet ministers on policy-related grounds as on grounds of incompetence, age, scandal or whatever. She did not axe ministers at a significantly higher rate than several other prime ministers in our study, but she axed far more of them because, quite simply, they disagreed with her and she with them. Her behaviour reflected both the ideological divisions within the Conservative party during her time and her own determination, as she famously put it, ‘to have togetherness’: ‘As Prime Minister, I could not waste time having internal arguments.’ Had she wasted time having internal arguments, it is at least arguable that she would not have accomplished as much as she did from her point of view.
And then there is this delightful section from the authors, who conclude that, in any event: Sacking a minister is often not the big deal with the electorate that it is with the political class and political journalists. (In fact, thinking only of Harper, his sacking of Guergis, and the current federal cabinet, this paragraph feels broadly correct to me, as well)
Most cabinet ministers, it must be said, are expendable, and both the prime minister and the ministers in question know it. Despite their formal eminence and large motor cars, most ministers, even cabinet ministers, are relatively small creatures – gerbils, so to speak – in the political jungle. Their departure from office is likely to be agonizing for themselves, and, if their personal relations have been close, the business of sacking them may even be agonizing for the man or woman who sacks them. But otherwise nobody much notices. Most cabinet ministers’ governmental competence is unremarkable and unlikely to be any greater than that of whoever succeeds them. Their political utility is likely to be minimal or non-existent. Their presentational skills are also likely to be unremarkable, and most of those who are inclined to disagree with the prime minister on policy matters usually keep their mouths shut; and, whether or not they do that, they are very likely – for the reasons just given – to be eminently dismissible from the prime minister’s point of view.
Now that is what the author's think of most cabinet ministers, but not all. A select group they refer to as the “big beasts of the jungle”, cabinet ministers to whom any prime minister must give careful consideration because of the political influence and following that these “big beasts” have that is not due simply to their position in cabinet or relationship to the prime minister. In the Canadian context, Paul Martin was clearly the “big beast” in the cabinets of Jean Chretien just as, the study's authors note, that Gordon Brown was a “big beast” in Tony Blair's cabinet.
And, in a long section closing their paper, they make what, to me at least, a convincing argument that the presence and importance of the “big beasts” in cabinets of the British prime ministers is a reasonable counter-argument to those who believe British politics is become more presidential or republican.
It is, of course, possible that occasional future prime ministers will, for all or parts of their premierships, not have to accommodate big beasts, but the concatenations of circumstances that produce such situations seem likely to be rare. In short, we are on the side of those students of Britain’s ‘core executive’ who maintain that British government at the top comprises a set of relationships of mutual dependence and is far from being monocratic in character. In the words of Martin J. Smith, ‘British government is not prime ministerial government or cabinet government. Cabinets and prime ministers act within the context of mutual dependence based on the exchange of resources with each other and with other actors and institutions within the core executive.’62 We would only add the obvious point that some cabinet ministers have significantly more resources than others, by virtue of who they are, not merely by virtue of the offices they hold.