The Prime Minister lets his hair down

By Norman St John-Stevas
At the British Academy annual banquet at the Fishmongers' Hall last week the Prime Minister let his constitutional hair down, and in a long, rambling and to me fascinating address gave us his views on the working of the Cabinet as the centrepiece of the Constitution.
Some of the assembled academicians were not amused at the conversion of an afterdinner toast into an academic seminar and slumped disapprovirtgly into their port. but 1 confess I enjoyed every moment of it, and my only fear was that Mr Wilson might skip some of his manuscript, which had all the bulk of a generous adaptation of War and Peace.
I need not have been concerned: the Prime Minister was determined to let us have it all and as far as I could see did not omit so much as a paragraph. The toast accordingly lasted for nearly an hour; a feat of Gladstonian proportions if not always of content.
Mr Wilson made it clear that in the current controversy on whether we have Prime Ministerial or Cabinet government he is firmly on the side of the Cabinet. He prayed Bagehot in aid in his support and dismissed the theories of the late Mr Richard Crossman out of hand.
I believe that the correct answer to the conundrum is that when things are going well and the Prime Minister does not need his power, it is in fact at its greatest. but that when things become difficult. Prime Ministerial prerogative tends to ebb away and the collective power of' the Cabinet reasserts itse11.
I suspect also that Mr Wilson was a much more powerful figure in his first administration than in his second. By now, of course, he is older, wearier and more cynical, but he also has colleagues of much greater experience than he had when he bounced into No 10 for the first time way hack in 1964. Then, apart from Mr Griffiths, who was in an outpost as Secretary of State for Wales and Mr Patrick Gordon Walker. who had lost his seat at Smethwicks he did not have a single colleague who had previously served in a Cabinet.
Team of veterans
In 1974 it was very different and he was able to draw on a team of veterans. Mr Wilson apparently has a high view of the quality of his Cabinet, and indulged in some hyperbole which need not be taken too seriously. The present Cabinet, he 'proclaimed, was more brilliant than that of the great Liberal administration of 1906, and he went on to say that if they all walked under a bus tomorrow he would be able to form an equally good one from the second rank (provided, of
course. he added characteristically, that the bus had missed him.)
These dazzling stars have been shooting off in different directions of late and Mr Wilson declared that this display of fireworks would not be allowed to go on once the referendum was over. when the doctrine' of collective responsibility would be restored. I don't believe that it is going to he as easy as that. In the first place the appetite for dissent will have grown. Colleagues who have been slanging one another for months are not going to he able to turn themselves into cooers and bilkers just because June 5 is past. The cracks in the Labour Party have become fissures and as soon as unpopular economic decisions on public spending
have to be taken their depth will be revealed.
Furthermore to maintain discipline a Prime Minister has to he prepared to get rid of recalcitrant colleagues a course which Mr Wilson is temperamentally averse to. After all, his whole career has been built on fudging issues rather than defining them. Collective Cabinet responsibility will prove easier to dissolve than to restore,
Mr Wilson revealed that he regards the Prime Minister's most powerful weapon within the cabinet as the right he enjoys to sum tip. This summing up enables the Prime Minister not only to have the last word but to give a subtle shift of emphasis towards his own point of view. One can easily believe that Mr Wilson would be able to take full advantage of this.
Registering dissent Again the Prime Minister has control of the agenda for Cabinet meetings and ultimately of the minutes and their form. Apparently Mr Wilson some time ago directed that dissent was not to be recorded in the Cabinet minutes and the onus of registering dissent was placed on ministers who had to write to the Prime Minister personally to express their disagreement. "You can imagine what I do with them," said Mr Wilson, The Constitution apart, Mr Wilson's speech was a riveting study in self-revelation. I was somewhat alarmed at the selfobsession and the almost paranoid need for selfjustification which are stronger than ever, and which are hardly ideal psychological attributes with which to approach our ever worsening economic problems.
He declared that there was less intrigue in politics (at any rate in the Labour Party) than in any other sphere of life, that he was innocent of it, and capped it by announcing that he was a master of counterintrigue!
He expressed his affection and admiration for Mr Macmillan — and indeed they arc similar political figures, who both rate survival highly and in whom the dross and the gold are oddly co-mingled. He took a side swipe at Mr Heath (without naming him) by condemning Prime Ministers who fill their Cabinets with cronies, and gave some very clear hints that he intended to continue in office for many years to come.
All of which might be thought to have been saying a mouthful, but hardly a line of what he said appeared in our illiterate press, perhaps because there was no handout, It's a reflection on the state of our institutions that such a remarkable occasion should have passed virtually unnoticed by those who are meant to inform in rmtihh eepwubolrd.ilcof what is going