Prime Ministers and the Constitution: Attlee to Blair

This article surveys the thinking about and impact on the British constitution of the different Prime Ministers since 1945—from Attlee and Churchill to Thatcher, Major and Blair—giving an inside view perspective on the constitution, and casting light on the pattern of change, adaptation and stability, the impact of party and the pressures making for constitutional reform. Prime Ministers of both parties have been mostly constitutional conservatives, believing in the established institutions and orthodoxies of the Westminster model and supporters of the status quo, not constitutional innovators. Blairs modernisation rhetoric cannot disguise a strong personal attachment to the fundamentals of an executive-dominated parliamentary regime.