Has Blair Been A Good Priminister?

To spare you some embarrassment in the future, the head of democratic government with a Westminster style of parliament is known as "the Prime Minister."

Oops. I feel as stupid as I sound right now. Anyway, prime ministers are totally foreign and weird concepts to me!

They shouldn't be. Although many people in the English-speaking world, including Americans, believe the Constitution created a government on the same basis as the Parliament at Westminster, that is not in fact true.

In England, the King was the Head of State, but the true power resided in the Parliament. Therefore, the executive leader of the government would be that man who headed a majority in the Parliament, and the King would ask that man to form a government, appointing all the ministers who head executive departments. The King could attempt to get someone else to form a government, but that usually didn't work, and he would, sooner or later, be obliged to call on the leader of the Parliamentary majority to form a government. Under that system, the Prime Minister (as in First Minister, as in the highest ranking minister) was also someone who had been elected to the House of Commons, or who sat by right in the House of Lords (it has been a long time since any member of the House of Lords was the Prime Minister, and for practical purposes, only a member of the House of Commons can be the Prime Minister). Centuries ago, there was no Prime Minister--the the government would be formed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury). Later, the Prime Minister might take the Treasury portfolio, or another portfolio. These days, the Prime Minister has enough to do without adding a portfolio to his plate.

But when the Constitution was written, there was no plan in advance, and there was no reason for the framers to copy the English government. Only one delegation brought a plan written in advance to the convention, and that was from Virginia. The Virginia plan called for a single house, with representation by population, and an executive committee rather than a single executive officer. The reasons the Continental Congress had been ineffective were most importantly that they had no power to tax or collect revenues, and therefore only had money if the states voluntarily gave it to the government (yeah, fat chance); and all states had an equal vote in the Congress, which meant, effectively, that "small" states (not much population) could block measures by "large" states (big population.

So, the Constitutional Convention resolved itself into a committee of the whole (i.e., they stopped being a formal convention in order to be a committee, which freed the delegations who had come with written instructions to discuss things which had been forbidden to them, like discussing proportional representation). Several compromises were worked out which allowed the delegates of both large and small states to accept the form of government. There would be two houses in the legislature: the House of Representatives, which would have proportional representation based on population, and which was the only body which could originate money bills (the theory being that large states would provide more revenue, and therefore ought to have more say in money matters. The second house, the Senate, would be body in which sovereignty was reposed--they would approve treaties and appointments to government, and they would have equal representation, two Senators form each state (the idea being that each state should have an equal voice in issues of sovereignty, issues of the national interest).

The convention rejected Virginia's idea of an executive committee, and came up with a single magistrate, who would have some of the aspects of a Head of State (like the King), and some aspects of the Prime Minister (such as controlling the executive departments, the equivalent of ministerial portfolios). A separate judicial branch was also established (it would take pages to even begin to explain how the English judicial system came into being).

In 1787, there was no concept of political parties, either in England or in America--so no one was thinking in terms of whose party would control the House, or what party would put up a candidate for Prime Minister or President. The systems only superficially resemble each other, they are actually very, very different in conception and in practical execution.

Blair appears very intelligent and comes across as an articulate speaker, exactly the opposite of Childe George. So why does an intelligent and articulate speaker follow an American fool of a president into the quagmire of Iraq?