“The Office of Prime Minister”, a book by the American academic Byrum E Carter, has the English historian Asa Briggs questioning the role of the person who runs the country. Carter intends to provide an authoritative history of the position, and looks at the previous occupiers of the prime minister’s office in the past 50 years. He claims that his book fills an important gap in political commentary, assessing “all of its ramifications, institutional, and extra-institutional”. Briggs is scathingly critical of Carter’s work, describing it as “a scissors-and-paste book” formed of older biographies and footnotes that adds nothing to our knowledge of the role. He sees the author as an outsider whose lack of authority on British politics leaves him unequipped to examine the “Potteresque elements of ‘Prime-ministership’”.
American writing on politics falls into two distinct categories. The first is analytical and speculative, daring and effervescent, influenced by a heady mixture of sociology and journalism. The second is descriptive and derivative, cautious and pedestrian, influenced by professors of political science in universities. Mr Byrum Carter’s well-intentioned study of Britain’s “key political institution” falls within the second category. It has been written largely from other people’s biographies, and its sumptuous footnotes, which bolster every remark, have been checked by the proper academic authorities. The result is a scissors-and-paste book, which adds nothing to our knowledge of the prime minister’s office. Surely, political science is by now a mature enough study to dispense with scissors and paste: certainly penetrating American writers, like Key or Herring, would never have given their blessing to a book of this kind.
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