The New York-born scholar Boris Johnson, currently billed as “acting prime minister” while Theresa May walks in the Swiss mountains, will know the only famous remark attributed to John Nance Garner. The sharp-tongued Texan, who had the misfortune to be Franklin D Roosevelt’s vice-president during the great man’s first two terms, once observed that the number two job wasn’t worth “a bucket of warm spit”.
Sometimes it’s quoted as a pitcher’s worth, sometimes a quart, occasionally the liquid in question is warm piss. But everyone gets Garner’s drift: he regretted taking the job. Roosevelt’s next veep, Henry Wallace, got dropped for being leftwing. The one after that lucked out. Unassuming Harry Truman succeeded to the Oval Office when the ailing president died three weeks before Hitler in April 1945. In August he got to drop the bomb.
That’s the whole point. A US vice-president’s job is basically about hanging around, to be there just in case. You don’t even get much training. It’s history’s posh lottery.
The British deputy premiership is exactly the same but different. Like most things about our flexibly unwritten constitution – so different from all those carefully written ones – being deputy prime minister has no formal status or duties, let alone an office to call one’s own. We can go for years without having one.
Where the deputy prime minister is comparable to the Washington number two job is that the incumbent (when there is one) can make a little or a lot of it and is also well placed to pitch for the succession if that’s the way he/she is inclined. Some aren’t and it rarely works anyway.
It certainly did for the first man to be called deputy prime minister. Clement Attlee ran domestic policy in the wartime coalition while Churchill ran the war. Modest and loyal, he was bumped up to deputy prime minister in 1942 and surprised everyone by trouncing the war hero in the 1945 general election. Prime minister for the next six years, the welfare state and decolonisation of the empire are his memorial.
Herbert Morrison, deputy prime minister during Attlee’s entire tenure, was neither modest nor loyal. Peter Mandelson’s grandfather thought he should have been prime minister and made no secret of it. An inveterate plotter, he even stood for leader at 67 when Attlee finally retired in 1955, but got hammered by Hugh Gaitskell, 18 years his junior.
Never mind, Herbert. It could have been worse. You might have won and made a complete pig’s ear of the job, which is what happened to Churchill’s glamorous heir-all-too-apparent, Sir Anthony Eden. As an anti-appeasement ally and foreign secretary through the war, Eden had been waiting for the old boy to call it a day for years and was made deputy prime minister (and foreign secretary) when the Tories returned to power in 1951.
Having survived a secret stroke in 1953 and resisted robust hints, Churchill, who rightly suspected the highly strung Eden wasn’t up to the job, finally went at 90. Eden took over, won a snap election and ruined himself within 18 months with the doomed invasion of the Suez canal. Being deputy prime minister with high expectations was no longer looking such a good bet. Richard “Rab” Butler, deputy prime minister (1962-63) in the dying days of Harold Macmillan’s government, was a brilliant administrator who ran Keynesian domestic policy in the 50s, but was unloved. When Macmillan was forced out after the Profumo affair, he helped stitch up the succession against Rab for the second time.
No wonder everyone went off the deputy PM habit for a while. Then in 1979 the first woman prime minister shored up her position by making her defeated rival, Willie Whitelaw, her deputy. Loyal and shrewd (“Every prime minister needs a Willie,” Mrs Thatcher explained in what may or may not have been her only joke), Whitelaw, who was also home secretary to start with, lasted until 1988, trusted, loved and unambitious.
The following year Mrs T revived the office for her estranged former ally, Sir Geoffrey Howe, a consolation prize for having sacked him as foreign secretary. Howe was furious and his team boasted that he would run a chain of powerful committees. In reality he was marginalised. When he resigned and made a devastating Commons attack on her increasingly autocratic style it was a rare example of a dormouse killing a lion. Thatcher was out within a month.
John Major, after moving into No 10, also had a deputy PM for tactical, back-protecting party reasons. Michael Heseltine, whom he had defeated, proved a loyal ally against the Eurosceptic “bastards” and was given the title after Major fought off a leadership challenge by one of them, John “Vulcan” Redwood, in 1995.
What could be more natural than that Tony Blair, a novice to high office, should do the same for John Prescott, his own defeated rival and New Labour’s ambassador to the northern working class, when he moved into Downing Street in 1997. Prezza started out with a mega-ministry, gradually disassembled amid political and personal turbulence. But he kept the deputy prime minister title and left with Blair in 2007. Again, core loyalty was a key to survival.
Gordon Brown was his own deputy prime minister, but David Cameron found it expedient to make Nick Clegg, his Lib Dem coalition partner, deputy PM with a big office and team. Clegg’s error was not to insist on having a real department like the Home Office to run. It left him out of too many loops, as he realised too late.
Theresa May shows no sign of flattering rivals, since she sacked so many of them. As for “acting PM” Johnson, his few days of glory – chancellor Philip Hammond had the train set last week – serve to remind voters that modern communications mean a prime minister is never really out of touch or control. Johnson is there to open the post, probably steaming open her private correspondence while officials make the tea for the special poisoned chalice May has given him – the Brexit negotiation cup.
So Boris’s prospects depend on what happens next and whether he can dodge the usual falling scenery. The White House offers lessons there too. Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, lost to Kennedy in 1960, but JFK’s, Lyndon Johnson, succeeded when the president was murdered in 1963. Vietnam proved to be Johnson’s Suez, forcing him out of office.
His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, couldn’t distance himself enough from Vietnam and Nixon took the White House in 1968 at his second attempt. Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush Snr, pulled off the succession in 1988 against hopeless Michael Dukakis, as Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s number two, did not against crafty Bush Jnr in 2000. Vice-presidents usually get delegated far more real responsibilities now than in John Garner’s day. It’s more of a proper school for presidents.
As for Barack Obama, the cerebral outsider, and his vice-president Joe Biden, much older and the ultimate Washington insider/dealmaker, they have unexpectedly become real friends, not just expedient business partners. When Obama expressed surprise at this development, Biden is said to have replied: “You’re fucking surprised?” But Biden decided not to run in 2016 all the same. Some pitchers of warm spit are worth more than others.
