All power to 10 Downing Street: Johnson's first major reshuffle and the perils of presidentialism

Despite ups and downs in prime ministerial power over the years, the general tendency has been to expect the prime minister to do more than in the past, writes Archie Brown. He traces this tendency back to Margaret Tharcher’s premiership, which gave a huge impetus to the idea that political power belongs to the prime minister rather than to the government. He explains how an expansive interpretation of this idea was taken several steps further in Boris Johnson’s first significant cabinet reshuffle.