Discuss whether Tony Blair has been a presidential Prime Minister or not

... eener on answering questions than engaging in party rhetoric and abuse.

Centralising power in a diffuse system like Britain's is no bad thing and placing tried and trusted people in charge are similarly sound political sense. A Prime Minister's department has been there in embryo for many years and it makes sense to make arrangements more explicit and formal in the form of a reformed Cabinet Office.

'He has diminished the importance of Cabinet': Blair has exploited his massive election victory either to push through his own demands to the exclusion of proper cabinet discussion, or to bypass such discussion via smaller decision-making groups. For example, the decision to exclude Formula One motor racing from the ban on tobacco advertising was taken after a small meeting with Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One's chief organiser, plus a few officials. Making it worse was the fact that the junior minister, Tessa Jowell, and her boss Frank Dobson, also opposed this exclusion. Former permanent secretary Alan Bailey wrote that the episode 'shows the need to involve the relevant ministers in decision making and to get back to proper Cabinet government which has been in decline for the last two decades'.

Professor Peter Hennessy, someone much concerned by the drift of the Blair style, reports that an informant from Blair's staff told him even before the 1997 election to expect a change from a 'feudal to a Napoleonic system'. This change was clearly borne out, according to Hennessy, by the updatings of the ministerial 'bible' of dos and don'ts produced by the cabinet office, Questions of Procedur ...