Is Cameron the real power?

Analysis
By Nick Assinder
Political correspondent, BBC News website

It has been said that when a prime minister wakes in the morning, he considers what he is going to do that day - an opposition leader wonders what he is going to say.

Mr Cameron has ousted PM as most powerful in Britain

It sums up one of the most frustrating aspects of a job which is often described as the worst in British politics.

An opposition leader can spend every waking hour telling us how much better he would run the country than the government. But only a prime minister can actually make things happen, and run it.

Yet, according to GQ magazine, David Cameron is the most powerful man in Britain - one place ahead of the prime minister.

The explanation offered for this apparently counter-intuitive decision is that the Tory leader has "stayed on the front foot" since promising to slash inheritance tax and stamp duty last autumn.

It says: "It is Brown's responses to the Tories' initiatives that are the real driving force behind current Government policy-making."

Undoubtedly the prime minister would disagree and point to recent events, such as the Tory announcement on police stop-and-search powers, to suggest Mr Cameron is actually stealing government policies.

Miles ahead

In fact, in an age of promiscuous political cross-dressing, the very notion of original thought is pretty much redundant. They are all magpies.

Never mind. The question raised by the GQ decision is whether it is possible for an opposition leader, or any other politician, to be more powerful than the prime minister.

For starters, what exactly constitutes power?

Mr Brown has been buffeted by events

If power is taken as the ability of an individual to effect external change in accordance with his or her will then, in relative terms, the prime minister appears miles ahead of any other politician.

But - and this seems to be the point - no politician, except perhaps a Hitler or Stalin, has that level of unconstrained power. So, the ability to influence events may be just as significant as constrained power.

And on that basis, any number of other individuals enter the frame.

Most recently, for example, it was claimed that Tony Blair's power to effect change was limited by his chancellor Gordon Brown's control of the purse strings.

Towards the end of John Major's government in 1997, it was opposition leader Tony Blair who was being feted by business, the city and the media, all of whom believed he was soon to be in power.

In office

John Major, on the other hand, appeared powerless in the face of the "bastards", as he called them, on his own benches.

Former chancellor Norman Lamont, in his 1993 resignation speech, summed it up to devastating effect for the prime minister of the day.

"'We give the impression of being in office but not in power," he said.

At that particular instant, Mr Lamont was clearly more powerful than Mr Major, who could only sit and listen. His speech certainly helped influence events by adding to the prime minister's powerless image over the next four years.

And there are any number of examples of men and women in power whose ability to make things happen has been influenced or even controlled by others.

Then there is the debate over whether real power lies in the hands of governments at all or others - financiers, business leaders or media tycoons for example.

And, of course, even the most powerful can still be battered by that curse of all politicians - events.

Gordon Brown might care little about all this, but he may well be bothered by the notion that a magazine like GQ seems to think he is no longer THE power in the land and that crown must now go to the man who hopes to be "in power" before too long.

After all, if there is one thing that can be just as important as real power it is the impression of power, particularly when it is lost.

Who do you think are the 10 most powerful men in Britain?

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