Event Highlights: An Initial Assessment of a Prime Minister with Professor Anthony King
On Tuesday, September 3, the Center for the Study of Europe and the Department of Political Science co-sponsored a talk by Anthony King, one of Britain’s most eminent political scientists and the author of numerous books and articles on British and American politics and government. One of the founders of the Department of Government at the University of Essex, which is consistently ranked in external reviews as the top political science department in the UK, King is one of first academics to take seriously study of political executives, trying to understand structure of executive leadership positions, analyzing behavior of office holders.
In his talk at Boston University, King offered an assessment of David Cameron, whom he called “one of the worst prime ministers in the last 100 years.” This bold statement was not a comment on Cameron’s policies or the ideological orientation of his administration, but an evaluation of Cameron’s performance in the job he was elected to perform. After acknowledging the difficulty of Cameron’s position and his tactical acumen in offering the liberal democrats a coalition and in calling the bluff of the Scottish Nationalists, he went on to list 12 of the reasons for his overall negative assessment of Britain’s leader, notably, his frequent holidays and habit of taking weekends off, his inattentiveness to matters of political importance including Britain’s relationship to Europe, the inefficiency and lack of central direction of his government, and his habit of undermining his ability to influence his party in the future – in short, his inability to show that he is master of his own house. Worst of all, according to King, is that Cameron never seems to learn – he goes on making the same mistakes.