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Core Executive Politics in the Cameron Era, 2010–16: The Dynamics of Whitehall Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Patrick Diamond Open the ORCID record for Patrick Diamond [Opens in a new window]
Patrick Diamond*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
*
Corresponding author. Email: p.diamond@qmul.ac.uk
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Abstract

By the early 1990s, the core executive was established as the ‘new orthodoxy’ in the study of British government at the centre. Thirty years on, this article avers that its main assumptions are increasingly questionable in the light of more recent empirical evidence. The core executive approach may well have outlived its usefulness. This claim is derived from analysis of the Cameron premiership from 2010 to 2016. The focus is on how Whitehall reform radically altered the relationship between politicians and civil servants, reshaping prevailing public service bargains and rules of the game. Ministers identified mechanisms to rebuild political capacity, augmenting partisan control of the bureaucracy. They drew on resources from outside the core executive while politicians increased their sway over civil service appointments. As a result, officials felt they should be ‘responsive’ to ministers. The cumulative effect was to replace interpersonal and institutional resource dependency with a ‘them and us’ model. Consequently, the risk of policy disasters and fiascos grew.

Keywords

governancecore executivebureaucratic politicspublic policymeta-governanceUK politics
Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 516 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited

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