Prime Minister
The prime minister emerged as a distinct figure in Britain in the early 18th
century and Sir Robert Walpole is generally credited with having been the first
prime minister. Originally the term was one of abuse since it carried the
connotation that the politician in question was in some sense arrogating power
that ought properly to belong to the monarch. As the 18th century passed the
office became more defined and the prime minister became accepted as the
channel for the communication of advice from the cabinet to the monarch, as
the chairman of cabinet meetings and, in the 19th century as parties developed,
as the leader of the government party.
In Britain the office of prime minister remained almost informal until 1937
when a Ministers of the Crown Act recognized the term in law for the first
time. Otherwise the official style of the prime minister was ‘First Lord of the
Treasury’. The older Commonwealth countries which modelled their con-
stitutions on Britain’s—for example Australia, Canada and New Zealand—had
little difficulty adapting the office to their own political systems. Some
countries such as the first two of these, however, have allowed the office to
develop slightly differently and in Australia, for example, there is a prime
minister’s department which serves the prime minister alone and gives support
in the central policy-making process. In the United Kingdom such a depart-
ment, although suggested from time to time, is thought to be a dangerous step
towards the personalization of power and to underminecollective respon-
sibility; indeed, confrontations occurred between cabinet ministers and prime
minister Margaret Thatcher owing to her extensive reliance on personal
advisers. In a genuine system ofcabinet governmentlike that of the UK
the prime minister can, ultimately, only wield power with the acquiesence of
their cabinet colleagues, and even the strongest individuals can, quite suddenly,
lose their power and their office if they stretch the loyalty of those colleagues
and of their party’s members of parliament, or even members in general, too
hard, as was demonstrated by Thatcher’s sudden fall from power in 1990. The
governments headed by the Labour leader Tony Blair from 1997 were regarded
as suffering from too much detailed intervention by the prime minister and his
immediate circle in the day-to-day running of the separate departments; the
problem was not so much a clash between the prime minister and the
ministers, who were largely Blair loyalists, but a clash between Blair’s political
appointees and the established civil service.
Many countries in continental Europe adopted the term during the 19th
century. Here, however, the powers of the prime minister have sometimes
been at odds with the claims of thepresident. In France, for example, where
the office of prime minister emerged after the restoration of the monarchy, the
balance of power between prime minister and head of state has fluctuated. In
Prime Minister