Revolving door politics?
Civitas, 24 January 2011
Last Thursday Alan Johnson quit front-line politics, and with it his position as shadow chancellor of the exchequer. His replacement by Ed Balls was coupled with a major shadow cabinet reshuffle which saw Douglas Alexander becoming shadow foreign secretary, Liam Byrne becoming shadow work and pensions secretary, Tessa Jowell becoming the shadow Cabinet Office minister and Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper becoming shadow home secretary.
While Johnson’s resignation and Balls’ subsequent elevation to the post caused a great deal of media and public interest, there was less interest in the wider significance of the cabinet reshuffle. Resignations or replacements in British politics are not usually isolated events. This is often a facet of the system, whereby all seem to ‘move along the queue’; in this case Balls moved up, so Cooper had to move, as did Alexander and Byrne etc. This is sometimes highlighted as a weakness, or a failing of the British system that ministers, and shadow ministers seem to change their office so often.
The perception that ministers are prone to moving, and so build up little experience or expertise in their departments, is reflected in popular and cultural opinion. ‘Yes Minister’ was built upon the premise that civil servants hold the real power in Government because ministers do not tend to hang around very long. ‘The Thick of It’ similarly sees ministers and their advisers fretful of being demoted or ‘shuffled’, more concerned about their next ministerial portfolio than the job at hand. While these television programmes obviously dramatize and exaggerate the clichés of British politics, they undoubtedly reflect certain popular perceptions. Intriguingly the complaint that ministers or politicians in a department are out of touch with the policy area is one often heard in private, or sometimes in public, voiced by civil servants and other policy makers.
Do such criticisms or concerns have a robust basis in fact? Hoping to provide some answers to this question I have done a quick back of the envelope calculation examining the average time spent by politicians in four ministerial or shadow ministerial posts since 1990. The results are detailed in the table below:
The table indicates that Chancellors and Foreign Secretaries, on average, spend a great deal of time in their posts, 58 and 41 months respectively (mean). There is less longevity in the other positions both in government and opposition, however all positions (except shadow health secretary in terms of the median time spent) see politicians, on average, spend more than a year in office, in most cases significantly more than this.
Alas these results do not allow any firm conclusions to be reached. Importantly I have only examined four different cabinet and shadow cabinet positions and only over a 20 year period. Furthermore having picked four relatively important positions, it would be foolhardy to suggest that these results could be extrapolated beyond these offices. Nevertheless what is interesting is the fact that government ministers on average remain in their offices longer than their shadow politician counterparts, and Foreign Secretaries and Chancellors on average remain in office longer than Health or Home Secretaries. Such differences could point to further interesting areas of research and it would be very interesting to look at results for more positions across a greater period of time. Although further examination could reinforce or query the notion, it could be that the idea of a revolving doors policy operating across British politics, may need to be questioned.