Becoming Prime Minister

Catherine Haddon – Institute for Government

Ministerial time and attention is the scarcest resource in government, prime ministerial time and attention doubly so. An impossibly hard job is then made harder by the circumstances in which people come to it and by the absence of meaningful preparation. This paper is a wholly sensible – and rather timely – attempt to help make the transition easier and the assumption of power more effective. Potential prime ministers would do well to read and act on it.

At the same time, though, it is an implicit acknowledgment of despair. The paper shows a system which works perilously close to the margins of not working at all and a concentration of responsibility and expectations for which preparation is not just inadequate but which it is hard to see how it could be made adequate. None of that is going to change any time soon, of course, so the need for this kind of pragmatic incrementalism is very real. But there is a much bigger and much more difficult debate waiting in the shadows behind it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.