Christopher Byrne

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor in British Politics at University of Nottingham

Research on British politics has traditionally been too reliant on a single model for understanding its field of inquiry—initially the Westminster model and then, since the 2000s, the governance-focused ‘differentiated polity model’. It has also been criticised for being preoccupied by the institutions that make up the Westminster system in terms o...

Theresa May’s premiership is widely acknowledged to have been a failure, but political commentators and the scholarly literature have, thus far, tended to focus on May’s misuse of her agency. This article argues that May’s premiership presents a particularly powerful example of the need to disentangle structure and agency when assessing prime minis...

The aim of this chapter is to reassess Edward Heath from a leadership competence and capability perspective. The chapter utilises a modified version of Stephen Skowronek’s account of leadership in ‘political time’ to the evaluation of Heath as Prime Minister. It is conducted via the following approach. First, by drawing upon his speeches as Leader...

As prime ministers in the 1970s, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, and James Callaghan grappled unsuccessfully with the deepening vulnerabilities, tensions, and contradictions, and the breakdown of the mixed-economy Keynesian welfare-state regime. Faced with growing public disillusion, they seemed unable to develop successful strategies for rebuilding o...

This chapter presents a first case study of disjunctive prime ministerial leadership, focused on the period between 1923 and 1940. It begins by specifying the characteristics of the interwar regime and then moves on to identify the general vulnerabilities this regime encountered after 1923. The premierships of Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, and...

This concluding chapter reviews and extends the analysis of the preceding chapters. It makes four significant contributions. First, it compares British disjunctive leaders with their counterparts in the US. Second, it proposes refinements to Skowronek’s characterisation of disjunctive leadership and political time. Third, it returns to the question...

The premierships of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Theresa May were each preoccupied with vulnerabilities of the neoliberal regime. These included severe economic problems (only one of which was the 2008 global financial crisis), substantially increased electoral volatility, shifting social attitudes on a range of issues, and, overlaying these, B...

Governments have become increasingly concerned with improving the employability of university graduates in recent years, but most existing studies of what graduate employers look for are limited by their reliance on self-reported preferences. This study, which focuses on the UK context, aims to develop our knowledge of the determinants of perceived...

‘The extent to which prime ministers make the political weather or succumb to it has always puzzled political leadership scholars. Confronting such a question, this book presents meaningful comparisons of the circumstances and challenges of prime ministerial leadership, within a framework of disjunctive leadership. Byrne, Randall and Theakston expe...

Understanding the power of the prime minister is important because of the centrality of the prime minister within the core executive of British government, but existing models of prime ministerial power are unsatisfactory for various reasons. This article makes an original contribution by providing an overview and critique of the dominant models of...

This article aims to bring some definitional clarity to the study of neoliberalism by investigating the three most common conceptualisations of the project as an ideology, mode of regulation, and market-oriented governmentality. It is argued that the heretofore somewhat marginalised governmentality perspective offers the most untapped potential for...

This article contributes to the developing literature on prime ministerial performance in the UK by applying a critical reading of Stephen Skowronek’s account of leadership in ‘political time’ to evaluate David Cameron’s premiership. This, we propose, better understands the inter-relationship of structure and agency in prime ministerial performance...

This article reports the findings of a large-scale survey investigating the experiences of the large number of MPs who left parliament following the 2010 general election. We have found that: the widely-held perception that MPs make a smooth transition into lucrative private sector employment after leaving Parliament is largely mistaken; the MPs’ e...

Introduction This chapter approaches the concept of depoliticisation from a broadly Foucauldian perspective. It aims to re-conceptualise depoliticisation as central to the rolling out of new forms of power and regulation associated with neo-liberal governmentality. In doing so, our aim is to synergise the available scholarship on neo-liberal govern...

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to the debates applying Foucauldian theory to contemporary British Politics and invigorates the debate through a discussion with Bulley and Sokhi Bulley Develops understandings of contemporary British Politics under the Coalition government, particularly in light of the ‘Big Society’ project...

Premised on the assumption that depoliticisation is a crucial aspect of neo-liberal governmentality, this paper attempts to synergise these two, previously disparate, concepts. Borrowing from Foucault's theorisation of governmentality and drawing from inclusive definitions of politics/the political, this paper argues for a reformulation of our unde...

Through mapping the provision of teaching gender and sexuality studies on politics/political science and international relations (IR) programmes, this article asserts that the top-ranked politics and IR departments in the UK offer very little provision of such teaching. We argue that this lack of gender and, more so, sexuality teaching is highly pr...

This article provides a comparative analysis of the opening sessions of Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) for the last five Prime Ministers in order to test a general perception that PMQs has become increasingly a focal point for shallow political point scoring rather than serious prime ministerial scrutiny. Our data appear to confirm that PMQs has...

For the past two decades at least, ‘modernisation’ has formed a pivotal part of British political discourse. Tony Blair, who became the living embodiment of New Labour, characterised his political raison-d’être as a crusade to modernise the Labour Party before taking on the more sizeable task of modernising the whole of British society. The UK cons...

This article represents an early and, largely speculative, attempt to make sense of Cameronism as a distinctive political project. Herein, we present three separate, but potentially overlapping, narratives that could be employed to locate the significance of Cameronism within broader trends in British and global party politics. In this respect, we...