Thank goodness Theresa May has restored cabinet government – or has she?

It is usually hailed as a return to traditional cabinet government if you agree with the outcome, whether it is Hinkley Point, Heathrow or a hard Brexit

Theresa May holds her first cabinet meeting, in Downing Street in July

Relief all round that the new Prime Minister has revived traditional collegiate government. “She has brought back proper cabinet government with formal committees,” reported Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s Political Editor. She has “started well”, said Lord Tebbit, getting away from “ad hoc decision making amongst a few chums”.

Much was also made of Theresa May’s declaration, when she paused the go-ahead for Hinkley Point nuclear power station: “I actually look at the evidence, take the advice, consider it properly and then come to a decision.”

This all sounds lovely, but it is the purest moonshine. Even at this early stage, we can see that her cabinet is neither more “collegiate” nor more “presidential” than those of most of her predecessors. And taking her time over decisions is either a good thing or a bad thing depending, usually, on whether you agree with what she decides in the end.

Personally, I am agnostic on Hinkley and am opposed to the expansion of Heathrow, but I don’t think the way the decisions were arrived at was relevant. In fact, she stopped Hinkley so abruptly that she put Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, in an awkward position, because he was still reassuring the Chinese investors it was going ahead. That was hardly collective decision-making.

The Heathrow decision, on the other hand, wound its way laboriously through the full pomp and ceremony of a cabinet committee followed by a formal decision of the full Cabinet. However, the main reason for that was to avoid a legal challenge to the procedure from the anti-Heathrow lobby. And even that was hardly “traditional cabinet government”. While the cabinet committee was meeting on Tuesday, journalists already knew what the decision would be, and were competing with each other to announce the point at which it had actually been made.

As soon as the full Cabinet meeting was over, Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, was on TV explaining why it was “the right decision for Britain”. Which meant that a couple of hours later his Labour shadow – pub quiz question – was able to fulminate about ministers announcing decisions to the media before coming to the House of Commons. If you realise that opposition spokespeople have made this complaint for longer than I can remember, I suppose you could say that Andy McDonald (the answer to the pub quiz question) was merely upholding the ancient traditions of the unwritten British constitution.

In any case, not every stuffy traditionalist has been so impressed with May’s restoration of constitutionalist sticklerdom. Kenneth Clarke, a traditional cabinet government man down to his suede shoes, complained in the Commons the other day that the Prime Minister had announced the timetable for invoking Article 50, the procedure for leaving the EU, at Tory party conference without consulting the Cabinet.

For every plaudit for May’s return to collegiality there has been a complaint about her centralising control-freakery, about how she takes important decisions in a tight circle of her advisers.

As I was reminded twice this week, it was ever thus.

On Wednesday the Strand Group of King’s College, London, organised a conference at the Treasury to mark the 40th anniversary of the IMF crisis in 1976. Then, James Callaghan held nine cabinet meetings in three weeks before the final one that agreed the spending cuts needed to secure the IMF loan. That was either a “masterclass in cabinet government”, in the words of Baroness Jay, Callaghan’s daughter (who was later a cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s government), or a show of weakness in the words of the late Edmund Dell, Trade Secretary in Callaghan’s Cabinet. The conference was reminded of Dell’s memoir, in which he said Callaghan should have told the Cabinet that he and Denis Healey, the Chancellor, had decided the cuts were needed, and that, if they didn’t agree, they could resign – “which they wouldn’t”.

The balance of opinion was in Baroness Jay’s favour: that Callaghan succeeded brilliantly in holding his government and party together at a time of national stress.

Then on Friday Jon Davis, my King’s College colleague, invited Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, and Lord Hennessy, the great constitutional historian, to talk to his class on Prime Ministers and No 10. They traced the ebb and flow of collegiality versus presidentialism over the ages, from Walpole to the present day. I’m not sure the noble lords would see it this way, but what I took from the seminar is that what matters is not procedure, which is always flexible, but what Professor Hennessy calls the emotional geography of power. Strong personalities tend to dominate government, but even the supposedly most collegiate prime ministers are more first than equals. For example, Clement Attlee, often held up as the model of the chairman type, went behind the back of his Cabinet – because he thought most of them couldn’t be trusted – to authorise the building of Britain’s nuclear weapons.

Most new prime ministers claim to be restoring cabinet government. John Major did after Thatcher. Gordon Brown did after Blair. David Cameron did after Brown. But in all cases the extent to which a prime minister works collaboratively with colleagues depends on their ideological unity and the nature of the challenges facing them.

Cameron, for example, was forced to work closely with Nick Clegg in a coalition government, but the way he did it was not traditional cabinet government, it was the “Quad” of two leading Tories and two Lib Dems, a device improvised as they went along.

May faces the unique challenge of managing Brexit, with a Cabinet divided 15-7 between those who backed Remain and Leave in the referendum. She has cut down the number of non-cabinet ministers attending cabinet meetings, sensibly enough, but even in 1976 the Cabinet was not where the decision was really made. The repetitive meetings were a form of “group therapy”, as Baroness Jay put it, required to bring people together around a decision that was unavoidable.

Interesting though procedures may be, let us judge Theresa May’s policies on their merits, not on how the decisions were reached.