Cameron's six month dog's breakfast

I only saw a headline for this yesterday but David Cameron has announced that he wants there to be a six month limit for new Prime Ministers who come to office without having been subject to a General Election. After this limit they would be forced to dissolve parliament and go to the country.

This has set a number of thoughts/questions off in my mind:

• I cannot find any mention of this policy in the Conservative Manifesto. They only published it two weeks ago. Why is it not in there?
• We have a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. Although I think it is probably better that a PM gets their own mandate it is not necessary and it would seem odd to compel this to happen in isolation without other reforms.
• For example, what is to happen if a PM dies in office? I don't think it is a good idea under these circumstances for a successor PM to be forced to go to the country. In a properly Presidential system we might see something like a Vice President who runs on the same ticket as the Presidential candidate and in effect inherits the mandate upon the death of the President. Would we have something like that here? A Vice Prime Minister? And if so, what powers would that person have whilst the PM was still alive? We would also need to think about how a successor Vice PM could be chosen under these circumstances too.
• Incoming PMs usually have a honeymoon period. They vary in length but an effect of this would probably be for a PM who accedes outside of an election to go to the country within a few weeks to capitalise on their likely high ratings. They would have little to lose given that they would be forced to do so in a few months' time anyway.
• For a party that bangs on about stability in government all the time this seems like a potential recipe for a less stable situation.
• If we go down this road, we are making our system more and more presidential. There will be unforeseen consequences to this as our unwritten constitution adapts to accommodate it. Now these consequences may not necessarily be bad but surely it would be better to plan out things like this properly rather than just fiddling with little bits of the constitution without any broader idea of the likely effects.

And I think that last point sums it up for me. This smacks of the worst kind of tinkering of the sort Tony Blair was frequently guilty. I remember how he wanted to abolish the position of Lord Chancellor and indeed if I remember correctly it was actually announced. Then someone pointed out that this was not actually constitutionally possible and they quickly had to scurry around in the background making rushed changes to their proposals so that they could work.

I had hoped that the Conservatives would have learned from things like that announcements on the hoof that are ill-thought through often leave more problems in place than they solve but apparently not.

The Prime Minister and pills

Stephen Tall wrote an impassioned piece yesterday on Lib Dem Voice arguing that Andrew Marr was "wrong, wrong, wrong" to ask Gordon Brown whether or not he was taking pills yesterday on his morning TV show.

Stephen does make some good points, for example he suggests that if this was a Tory Prime Minister then the reaction of the right-wing blogosphere would likely be very different and the"scarcely contained glee" of some of the blogs at the question having been asked is certainly not edifying. He also asks what Marr's sources are for asking the question in the first place suggesting that unless he has substantial evidence then the question should not be asked.

But whilst Stephen puts a good argument forward I am afraid that ultimately I do not agree with his conclusion. He concludes:

..the only people qualified to make the decision to quit, or not to quit, are Mr Brown and his closest family, friends and advisors. If his feelings of depression were linked to his job as Prime Minister, and the only way he could break the link would be to resign his office, then so be it. I imagine we would all respond with sympathy and understanding to such a decision. However, if his depression were nothing to do with the job – perhaps linked to frustrations with his failing eyesight, or the tragic death of his first child – then resigning would make no difference to his depression, indeed may just make it worse.

There are any number of reasons why the Prime Minister should quit, and just as many again why he deserves to lose the next general election. None of them are related to his health. And in making it an issue on the basis of no evidence, Andrew Marr and the BBC have done a real disservice to serious political reporting.

I probably need to tread carefully here as it is a delicate issue so let me first outline a couple of caveats.

Firstly I have nothing but sympathy for people who have mental health issues. There can be few people in this country whose lives have not been touched by problems of this nature either personally or through friends or family. They absolutely deserve sympathy and support.

Secondly I am very unhappy about the stigma that mental health problems still have attached to them in this country. Just because somebody is suffering with issues of this nature does not mean that they are incapable of contributing to society and prejudice in this respect is thoroughly unhelpful.

However, just because I have sympathy for somebody in adverse circumstances and I do not wish to see that person unneccessarily discriminated against does not mean that I agree with the conclusion that in the case of the Prime Minister it is nobody else's business but his own. Let me explain why.

The Prime Minister of the UK is in a very special position. He/she is in theory "First amongst equals" but in practise that is no longer how it works. What has happened over the last few decades is that power has become more and more centralised in the hands of the Prime Minister. The cabinet and parliament are supposed to act as checking and balancing bodies but in practise all too often they do not work like that. There is also the question of the "Royal prerogative" powers which although nominally vested in the head of state, in practise are executed at the whim of the Prime Minister. There are also huge powers of patronage.

What has effectively happened is that we have moved much closer to a sort of presidential style of government but without a codified constitution to underpin this.

Given all of this, I think the public has a right to know about the health of the person holding this office.

It is instructive at this point I think to look at what happens in the USA regarding their Presidents. They have an annual health check and the results are made public. They obviously feel that the health of their primary political leader should be in the public domain. I think this is right for a situation where one person has so much power vested in them.

This is not to say that I think the way this was broached is correct. To have the Prime Minister of our country asked a question like this out of left field was not the way I would have liked to have seen this happen. However I can't imagine that Gordon Brown or any future Prime Minister would volunteer this information. Indeed it seems that the way Tony Blair played down his heart problems a few years ago was not entirely straight and it was a bit more serious than his office made out at the time. Therefore it was probably always going to take a journalist asking this question to provoke the debate as it has done.

I would just conclude by saying that if we had a less top-down style of government with much of the prerogatives and patronage removed from the hands of one person then I would not see the need so much for us to know about the health of any one individual. Unfortunately we are not in that position and I therefore reluctantly conclude that this is one of the those situations where although it to an extent goes against my liberal instincts I think we should know.

UPDATE: After some vigorous discussion in the comments below and also on Jennie's blog here I am inclined to have a bit of a rethink of my comments here. Andrew Hickey (below) has come up with some good points about flaws in my reasoning and has made the point that disclosure could actually be counter productive. As I say in the comments in both posts my aim was to try and overcome constitutional problems with so much power being concentrated with one person who is ultimately his/her own arbiter of suitability to continue in office.

I still think we should do something to make it easier for a PM to be removed from office if they become incapable, perhaps along the lines of the US 25th amendment but accept that my comments about making health information public may not be the best way to achieve this.

Making better use of Prime Ministers after office

In 2006, Tony Blair refused to immediately call for a ceasefire in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict against the feeling of many in his own cabinet. Some think that the unrest this inaction provoked within the Labour party was the catalyst for the so called "Curry Coup" that a few weeks later led to the resignation of a number of junior members of the government and forced Blair to bring forward his retirement announcement.

The reason I am highlighting this point of history is that it is telling that many of Blair's cabinet were urging him to come up with a stronger line on Israel but his response was silent at first and then very muted later.

I wonder if one of the factors here was what Blair was going to do after he left office. Since he has, he has earned lots of money from the US lecture circuit and his close ties with the country have been beneficial to him in other ways including a directorship with US company JP Morgan Chase and a prestigious lecturing position at Yale University. I have to ask myself whether all these opportunities would have been as forthcoming if Blair had taken a much stronger line on Israel and other US related issues whilst in office.

Blair knew that he would be out of office by around 2007 or 2008. He was still our PM and should have been taking decisions and issuing statements in the best interests of the UK. And yet can we be sure this is what he was doing? He is only human and it is only natural for him not to wish to bite the hand that he hoped would eventually feed him - even if only subconsciously.

I should make clear here that I have no direct evidence for any of this, it's all circumstantial. Blair may well have taken exactly the same line even if there had been no financial or other incentive to do so for him later. The point is that we just don't know and a pretty strong potential conflict of interest was present for him to contend with amongst everything else.

This ties in with something that I have thought for a while. We do not make very good use of our ex Prime Ministers. They have been at the pinnacle of political life for in some cases (Thatcher and Blair) over a decade. They know how our political and diplomatic systems work better than almost anybody else. They have unrivalled contacts and networks and in some cases large supporter bases and yet they are effectively left to make their own arrangements post-office and all that experience is lost to the country. The days of ex-PMs serving in the cabinet under future PMs (e.g. Douglas-Home under Heath as Foreign Secretary) seem to be well and truly over.

Why can't we be better at harnessing this expertise though? I was never a fan of Margaret Thatcher when she was PM but after her defenestration she cut a very sad figure. I read an article which explained that an aide would brief her on the news and political events every day and she would give her views which he would diligently note down as if they really mattered any more and were going to have an effect. It was to create the illusion that she was still doing something useful. That seems a waste of her vast experience.

Some ex-PMs like John Major and Harold Wilson have/had a decent hinterland but even they would I am sure have wanted to continue to contribute to the political and diplomatic life of the country had they been given the opportunity instead of finding themselves in the political wilderness.

The US seems to be (a bit) better than us. They tend to find ambassadorial roles for their ex-Presidents and they often head up their own foundations that are taken quite seriously by the US establishment and contribute to the ongoing debates of the day.

I have no doubt that some use is made of former PMs through informal mechanisms, from time-to-time. However surely we can find a better use for our former leaders than largely consigning them to the scrap-heap as far as the public life of the country is concerned when they often have many years (and in some cases decades) of their useful working life still ahead of them at retirement?

Perhaps if that was the case it could be a win-win situation with the potential conflict of interest that Blair and others face in office between what is best for their country and what is best for their own future no longer existing and the country making better use of its most experienced politicians once they leave office.