This chapter analyses the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, against Boris Johnson – the prime minister at the time of the office’s 300th anniversary. The two PMs bookend 300 momentous years of history, but what has changed about the office of prime minister? Comparing personal and political, the chapter examines the machinery of government, from patronage in Parliament to departmental power as well as the core driver for the role of prime minister. While the country and office have changed, some core functions and political realities remain the same in the British system.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

Public petitions to the Commons were part of a broader subscriptional culture. This chapter examines the nature and extent of petitions to other authorities to reassess the evolution of the UK state during the nineteenth century. During this period, petitions were transformed from being generic requests to power to their more modern meaning as expressive and participatory practices linked to representative institutions. Accordingly, other types of petitions to Parliament concerning contested elections and private bills were hived off into specialised processes. Petitions to the House of Lords, though smaller in scale than the Commons, reinforced the upper house’s authority during an era of democratisation and allowed peers to claim popular backing for their veto power. Addresses to the monarchy were a major form of interaction between monarch and subjects, and called upon the monarch to exercise their political supremacy over the other branches of state. Memorials to government provided a discrete mechanism for interest groups to lobby ministers and officials, and were increasingly adopted by pressure groups. The relationship between the state and the people was recast through petitionary interactions that underpinned and renewed the legitimacy of different branches of the state even in the absence of electoral or institutional reforms.

This chapter is concerned with the last period of Churchill’s premiership and leadership of the Conservative Party. It focusses not just on the last part of his ‘Indian summer’ when back in office but also on the tempestuous moves and motives of the Conservatives to compel his retirement in an age before party leadership elections. It also examines Churchill’s manoeuvres to frustrate these ambitions and continue in power. While many studies have examined how British politicians gain the leadership of political parties, there has been less analysis of their inevitable fall. The chapter is written primarily from the Conservative perspective since, until the 1965 Douglas-Home Rules which established leadership elections and procedures, so-called customary processes existed to enable, largely without public knowledge (and even beyond the engagement of many Conservative politicians themselves), the emergence, and removal, of leaders ‘for the good of the party’.

In Australia, executive power is concentrated in the roles of the prime minister and the Cabinet – the body of senior ministers who provide leadership for the government and departments of state. Executive power is the capacity to ‘execute’ or implement political decisions and legislation. Although the Australian Constitution formally vests executive power in the Queen, which is then ‘exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative’ (Australian Constitution, Chapter 2, article 61), this executive power is chiefly symbolic. Real executive power resides in the elected government of the day, led by the prime minister and the Cabinet.

In this chapter, we begin with defining executive power and distinguishing between the political and administrative wings of executive government. We continue with a consideration of the functions that the executive government serves. The chapter then delves deeper into the heart of Australia’s executive government, examining the key features of the roles of the prime minister and the Cabinet, and the relationship between them. We end by considering the tensions between executive power and accountability.

This chapter demonstrates how a series of institutional reforms since 1994 have transformed the Japanese prime minister’s relationship with other actors in the Japanese parliamentary system and expanded his power. His power grew in terms of discretion in making ministerial appointments as well as policy formulation capacities. It further discloses that his power has grown even more since the formation of the second Abe administration in 2012 because of such opportunities as the civil service reform of 2014.