Ministerial Leadership: Practice, Performance and PowerBy LeightonAndrews, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 553 pp. £99.99 (hardcover); £79.50 (ebook). ISBN: 10 3031500075; ISBN: 13 978‐3031500077
基于对150多位英国政府前部长的访谈，剖析部长从入职到离职的真实经历，揭示政治现实与领导力挑战，对现任或新任部长及其团队有重要参考价值。
Leighton Andrews' new book provides a detailed examination of the dynamics of ministerial leadership in the UK Government and the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales. The primary focus is a structured analysis by the author of many of the 150 interviews with former government ministers conducted by researchers from the Institute for Government over the period 2011 to 2023 (IfG 2025). The book deals with the reflections of ministers from the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010 to 2015 and subsequent short-lived Conservative administrations from 2015 to 2024. It also makes occasional reference to interviews conducted with prominent Scottish National Party and Welsh Labour ministers as well as one Welsh Liberal Democrat minister over the same period. This analysis is then supplemented with insights from ministerial autobiographies and more recent ethnographies and case study research undertaken by academic researchers. The book begins by locating the conceptual basis of this study in the so-called Westminster Model. As the author explains this model has guided much of the traditional thinking about how Government works. The model assumes that Parliament is sovereign; ministers are accountable to parliament; civil servants are neutral and loyal to ministers; decision-making power is located in the executive; government is legitimized by a public-service ethos and the system of decision-making is secret. However, as the author also notes this model has been subject to comment and considerable criticism since the mid-1970s when the publication of Richard Crossman's diaries drew attention to the tensions that often exist within Government departments between ministerial priorities and the established working practices of senior civil servants. This alternative view was amplified in the reflections of subsequent Labour ministers, including Tony Benn and Michael Meacher, before being satirized for a broader audience in the British television comedies “Yes Minister” and “Yes Prime Minister”. Today, the author comments that the Westminster model is more of a myth than a reality. He uses this introduction as the launching point for a detailed consideration of the experiences of ministers from their initial hopes and preparations for office, through to their selection, appointment, time in office and the inevitable endings in resignation, ministerial re-shuffle or lost election. This is followed by a final chapter which looks at ministerial and personal lives. Sandwiched between these accounts of the beginnings and endings of ministerial careers are chapters on the dual leadership model of ministers and civil servants, teamwork and collective leadership, as well as ministers as decision-makers, systems leaders and delivery minded politicians. A consistent theme throughout the book's 16 chapters is the characterization of ministers as activists who can best be understood by examining the routines they complete, the artifacts that symbolize their ministerial life and the spaces in which they perform their leadership role. This quasi-ethnographic perspective it is suggested can then be used to consider the ministerial mindset, gaze and the logics of their activism. Leighton Andrews is very well placed to undertake the analysis contained in this book as he spent many years as a political advocate in and around Westminster and Whitehall before standing for Parliament in England in 1987. He subsequently went on to be elected as a Labour Party Assembly member in Wales in 2003 before holding several ministerial roles in the Welsh Government from 2007 to 2016. Over this period, he led successful political campaigns and championed significant changes to government policy supported by legislation and changes to funding allocations. As he notes in the introduction, the lessons learned from those experiences have fed into his more recent teaching as a Professor of Practice at Cardiff University and into the understandings which underpin this book. The picture that emerges from the interview analysis is of eager and earnest politicians motivated by a desire to improve the World, or at least their part of the World, through their role as activists. These motivations are then tempered by the realities of politics. These realities are revealed initially through which of the elected representatives consider themselves and are considered by others to be what the author calls “ministrables.” This made-up word, knowingly close in syntax and perhaps semantics to the word “miserable”, is used to denote who it is thought is worthy of office. As the author explains, the dynamics of how you get to be a minister are not those that people in other walks of life would recognize or immediately applaud. It is not about skill or ability, it is about something else. That something else it would appear is affinity with the selector (Prime Minister/First Minister) and their interests as well as the personal demography of the would be minister, their geographical base, place within party factions, gender and ethnicity, and so on. It's absolutely terrifying and there is no manual (Kirsty Williams, p. 131). Having learnt how things work, or at least begun to get to grips with these things ministers then face the real challenges. Ministerial office we are told takes its toll on physical health and can worsen mental health as well as encouraging alcohol abuse and inappropriate leadership styles. The challenges for women are even more acute with relentless public and social media attention as well as misogynistic comments from colleagues and the public. Taken as a whole this book provides an excellent overview of the messy realities of ministerial life in the UK as reported by the ministers themselves. It also implicitly calls for change in what is an empathetic study of the way ministers as a collective navigate the path to power and the day-to-day of ministerial office. The study on which the book is based is very good but faces the reader with two conundrums. First, the study relies on thematic analysis of interviews conducted by others where there was understandably some variation in the questions asked and in the follow up questions pursued. This is probably unavoidable because negotiating and maintaining this level of access (over 150 interviews) with the commitment to produce public transcripts covering sensitive topics is beyond the means of a lone researcher and only really achievable by an organization like the IfG. The second issue is that the interviews have provided ministers with an opportunity to give their side of the story in an account of their time in office and as such they provide a space to celebrate successes, but they also provide an equal opportunity to ignore any shortcomings and to downplay the role of others in the leadership teams. This means that there is inevitably a gap between the conceptual issues raised in the opening chapters which focus on how relevant the Westminster Model is today to the characterization of life in Government and the questions that are asked and the answers that are provided later. As the author repeats throughout the book, leadership is not solely about leaders it is about broader processes which others might refer to as distributed leadership. Indeed, more recent critical assessments of the operations of UK governments which have focused on the failings of government have drawn attention to different perceptions of these otherwise hidden and significant elements of Government (Cummings 2024; Dunt 2023; Freedman 2024). In view of these methodological issues, it would seem sensible for the IfG to reflect on how the questions asked through this study of ministers and their wider teams might be developed in future. In addressing this question, it would also be worth considering including the reflections of the former civil and public servants who have worked alongside ministers in the development of policy and the delivery of services. This approach has begun to be developed in Wales recently through the podcast Y Pumed Llawr (The Fifth Floor) (Walters 2024). Notwithstanding these minor methodological issues which were beyond the author's control and influence, the book succeeds in achieving its claims to distinctiveness by providing “a broader examination of political leadership than is usually found in political science literature which tends to focus on the individual leader -a president or Prime Minister-with detail supplied by protagonists through their own narratives” (p. 4). It should be required reading for any current or new minister as well as the wider teams of which they are a part. The author declares no conflicts of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.