Is our Brexit government really the most ill-disciplined cabinet in British political history?

Believe it or not, the number of cabinets that have failed to function in the principal role the constitution provides for it – to govern the nation – are few and far between

The critics are right; this is the most divided, useless cabinet in almost a century.

What a way to break an omerta. Not only is Julian Smith the first government chief whip to blab, but he also used the magnificent “knackered” to describe his physical and emotional conditional, and, obliquely, the state of the second May administration (2017 to…not much longer).

So it is, too – not a very controversial point of view when you think about it. Check out the video of Theresa May outside Number 10 back in the summer of 2016 when she decided to take the job on and end the “burning injustices in society”; an unfortunate phrase as it was to turn out.

I hope this is not a sexist remark – I’d say the same about the greying of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown in office – but she looks about 20 years younger in 2016 than she does today. “Knackered” is about right.

Smith also says that that the cabinet of today is not just knackered, but broken: “As you are aware, discipline is not as good as it should be. This is I think the worst example of ill-discipline in cabinet in British political history.”

He is pretty much right. The British cabinet, for all its faults, is an institution that has proved remarkably durable over the decades, not least during big political crises. Think back.

The cabinet of today is certainly more leaky and disloyal even than that of John Major. When Amber Rudd, David Gauke and Greg Clark wrote a newspaper article publicly threatening resignation that was certainly unprecedented. Times have changed.

Most surprisingly, Major’s cabinet managed to stay in one piece during the tribulations of the Maastricht Treaty’s ratification in the 1990s. The Eurosceptic dissidents in Major’s cabinet room were awkward and famously indiscreet to the press, obviously jostling for the succession that they always thought imminent and which never arrived. Major, in an unguarded moment, called them “the bastards”, when he thought a TV mic was off. Spoken in 1993, the words have a powerful echo today.

“Just think it through from my perspective,” he urged. “You are the prime minister, with a majority of 18, a party that is still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented. You have three right wing members of the Cabinet who actually resign. What happens in the parliamentary party?”

“I could bring in other people. But where do you think most of this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble.

“We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there. What’s Lyndon Johnson’s maxim?...”

Major may have been thinking, variously, about hardliners such as John Redwood, Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo, yet none of them could quite summon up the courage to quit – except for Redwood after Major himself resigned to hold a “back me or sack me” Tory leadership election. Portillo, Lilley and Howard were still in office in May 1997 when the Tories went down to their worst defeat (so far) since 1832.

Brexit is arguably greater in scale than previous dilemmas facing cabinets, and at turns both more binary yet also more complicated.

Under Margaret Thatcher, the cabinet also found itself badly divided over Europe. The loss of two senior cabinet ministers in 1989 and 1990 precipitated her own resignation as prime minister. In that case the departure of Thatcher allowed the government and party to re-unite, though the respite was only temporary.

The Thatcher-era dispute over policy – specifically the European Monetary System, which was the manifestation of a deeper disquiet about European integration – marked the beginning of a long civil war on Europe that has done so much to destabilise the Conservative Party and its leaders. Only during a brief halcyon period when it heeded David Cameron’s advice to “stop banging on about Europe” did the public arguing and resignations stop – for a while.

Contrast leaving Europe under a Tory government with entering it under a different type of Conservative administration, that of Edward Heath in the 1970s. He was a more passionate prime minister about Europe than any before or since – and probably the only one to actually believe in it as an article of faith rather than an estimate of net economic advantage.

Heath’s passion for the European project secured cabinet unity (Getty)

His cabinet took the decision to enter Europe, momentous enough in itself, at a time when industrial and economic crises and terrorism made many wonder whether Britain was in fact governable. In the event, though, Ted’s crew stuck with him in good times and bad, and not a single member of his top team quit over policy.

The disastrous and illegal Iraq War prosecuted by Tony Blair in 2003 provoked just two of his cabinet to quit – Robin Cook and Clare Short. The Iraq War of 1991 made no-one resign. The 1982 Falklands War saw the foreign secretary go; Lord Carrington’s being a notably noble and principled resignation. The Suez crisis of 1956, another national humiliation on the scale of Brexit, saw no-one leave the cabinet, and only one mister of state quit his job.

Appeasement in the 1930s was opposed by only two cabinet ministers to the point of resignation. The IMF crisis of 1976 bitterly divided James Callaghan’s Labour cabinet into three factions, yet he somehow managed to forge a compromise and retain the likes of Tony Benn, Shirley Williams and Denis Healey in the same administration.

Yet Brexit is arguably greater in scale than previous dilemmas facing cabinets, and at turns both more binary yet also more complicated.

Unlike, say, the poll tax, or Thatcherism, or immigration, or the loss of Empire or nuclear weapons, it is big, it matters, it drills below party loyalties to national and tribal feelings, and it is peculiarly complex to the points of being insoluble. Hence the historic nature of recent and coming events.

Splits, rows and leaks have been going on since cabinet government evolved into its modern form in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Sometimes they are so grave they can force a prime mister out, after which there is some semblance of reconciliation and unity.

We are beyond that sate of relative normality now. May has suffered a record number of resignations from her two governments. The list of those who have resigned from the cabinet during her second government (ie since the snap election of 2017) is along one, albeit some for reasons unrelated to policy: Michael Fallon, Priti Patel; Damian Green; James Brokenshire; Justine Greening; Amber Rudd; David Davis; Boris Johnson; Dominic Raab; Esther McVey. Not to mention about 30 other assorted ministers, ministerial bag carriers and odds and sods.

Not quite the “strong and stable” government she had in mind for us.

Major – and May – should recall the fate of Macdonald. He saw his old party, Labour, smashed; kept out of office until after the second world war, his very name a byword for class treachery.

But the rapid turnover is not all we should focus on. The 2019 cabinet is failing to function in the principal role the constitution provides for it – to govern the nation. A mere change of prime minister would not alter that truth, because it would not resolve the questions posed in this crisis.

In peace time, you really have to go back to the financial crisis of 1931 to find a cabinet so fundamentally and irreconcilably divided that it simply could not function as a decision-making committee. On that occasion something had to give, and the cabinet did indeed split.

Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald took a minority of his cabinet and his party with him to form a cross-party National Government in concert with Conservatives and Liberals to deal with the economic problems of Britain in the great depression. Hence, perhaps, Major’s suggestion of a “national unity” government today.

Major says the new administration should be “time limited”, and temporary; but that is what was assumed back in 1931. It proved more permanent than that, at least for Labour. The bulk of the Labour party and the trades unions would not have its traitors back, and Labour was formally divided.

Major – and May – should recall the fate of Macdonald. He saw his old party, Labour, smashed; kept out of office until after the second world war, his very name a byword for class treachery. The “ghost of Ramsay Macdonald” haunts the party to this day.

More widely though, and especially at the time, he was lauded as the man who put country before party, saving the nation from bankruptcy.

Likewise, May perhaps knows in her heart that the only way she can get any kind of Brexit through the Commons today is by ditching some of her allies, splitting her party and reneging on some of her manifesto promises.

Her Ramsay MacDonald moment is approaching, his ghost stalking the cabinet room. Will she put country before party?