Modern Prime Minister

To what extent is it reasonable to describe modern British prime ministers as presidents in all but name?
Few, if any, now doubt that the office of prime minister dominates the British political system. As long as the holder of that office is not faced by too many limiting factors, such as a small parliamentary majority or a divided party, the British system has moved away from the traditional ‘cabinet government’ model to a ‘prime ministerial’ model. We argue that the system has now become ‘presidential’. * PMs perform most of the functions of a head of state:
The prime minister has come to be, effectively though not legally, the head of State, the leader of the nation, irrespective of party allegiance. This is not the same as national…show more content…
Their contemporary roles demand that they project themselves into the public sphere not merely as representatives of their respective organisations but as expressions of wider notions of social consciousness and cultural identity. In effect, prime ministers are expected to have an ability to connect visibly and even intimately with individual concerns and national moods. In doing so, they are expected to demonstrate the responsiveness of governing process, to reveal an understanding of populist impulses and to affirm a personal accessibility to the wider public. This leads to prime ministers having to be adept at embedding themselves in the national consciousness, ensuring a high level of news management skills, mastering techniques of popular communication and associating themselves directly with such themes as “the public interest”, “the people” and “the nation”. Like presidents, modern prime ministers can generate different political resources through these different roles and the techniques required by them. At the same time and in similar fashion to presidential politics, prime ministers are increasingly monitored and assessed according to criteria that are quite different to those experienced by senior colleagues, also like Presidents a modern day prime minister is often voted in due to factors that have nothing/ little to do with their political agendas, for example in 1997 Tony Blair…show more content…
This is a relatively new theory of prime ministerial power (and, indeed, of power in general) developed by Michael Foley in his important work, ‘The Rise of the British Presidency’ in 1993. It suggests that political systems are increasingly led by leaders who consider themselves to be distinctly separate from the rest of the government. This separateness gives rise to the term spatial. In it he looks at leaders such as President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Above all, he suggests these leaders deliberately make themselves into outsiders within government. They separate themselves from its other members and so are able to act independently, but also remain part of government itself. Thatcher and Reagan took this a step further: they even criticised governments of which they were the head, suggesting that they tended to be insufficient, wasteful and simply tried to do too much. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher was promising to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state;, was roundly criticising the civil service for its conservatism and wastefulness and was not averse to openly opposing her own ministers. Blair chose to adopt certain areas of policy as his own – foreign affairs, Northern Ireland, education and health – and attempted to dominate the political agenda by introducing his own policy initiatives above the heads of the relevant ministers. In areas where he did not choose to become involved – the