Cameron challenges Heath for stability
Today David Cameron reached a new milestone – 1,258 days in office – thus overtaking the 1951-55 government of Sir Winston Churchill.
That puts him eighth in the post-war list of Prime Ministerial longevity – behind Thatcher, Blair, Wilson, Macmillan, Major, Attlee and Heath, and ahead of Churchill, Callaghan, Brown, Eden and Home.
The next milestone, on 24 January next year, will be to catch up the Heath government, which had 1,354 days in office.
I was going to say “enjoyed 1,354 days on in office”, but the Heath government can’t have been much fun.
It was buffeted from crisis to crisis, with no fewer than five officially declared states of emergency, record post-war levels of unemployment and inflation, continual industrial strife, a serious escalation of the violence in Northern Ireland, and the 1973 oil crisis.
And yet for all its troubles the Heath Cabinet was a remarkable stable body of men, and, with the notable exception of Margaret Thatcher, it WAS all men.
Of the eighteen people in Ted Heath’s first Cabinet in June 1970, fourteen still held Cabinet office when they left power in March 1974. (The exceptions were Iain Macleod, the Chancellor who died within a few weeks of the election; Lord Jellicoe and Reggie Maudling who were forced out through scandal; and Michael Noble, whose job as President of the Board of Trade was swallowed up by the new mega-ministry Department for Trade and Industry.)
What’s more, of Heath’s original team of 18, eight still held the same jobs when his government left office.
And there’s the comparison with David Cameron. Of the 23 people appointed to the Coalition Cabinet in May 2010, 15 are still in Cabinet, and nine of them hold the same posts as they did three and a half years ago.
Apart from Cameron himself, there’s Nick Clegg, George Osborne, William Hague, Theresa May, Vince Cable, Iain Duncan-Smith, Michael Gove and Eric Pickles. And these aren’t just any old cabinet ministers, but all the key, core characters in government, a degree of stability that’s even more impressive than Ted Heath managed, or any other government I can think of.
Most of the nine – if not all – will survive Cameron’s next Cabinet reshuffle, expected next year, and stay in post until 2015.
A small, intriguing aspect of Monday’s reshuffle was the return to government of John Penrose as an assistant government whip.
Penrose was sacked as tourism minister in the previous reshuffle last autumn, much to the surprise of many people who thought he’d been doing a good job. I’m told Penrose was merely a victim of Downing Street getting it’s numbers wrong – the victim of a “drive-by shooting”, and David Cameron has felt bad about it ever since.
Hence Penrose’s return to government, albeit in a lesser role to what he had before. And, of course, the comeback may help keep other sacked ministers in line, encouraging them to think there’s always the prospect of a return later.
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