Merely the ‘art of winning elections’? Regrounding the statecraft interpretation of British politics

Introduction

Jim Bulpitt’s (1999: 691) ‘statecraft interpretation’ has made ‘a parsimonious and stimulating contribution to our academic understanding of British politics’. Most associated with Bulpitt’s (1986) own analysis of Thatcherism, statecraft has been fruitfully utilised and further developed by a number of scholars and has featured prominently in the pages of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR). Within the journal’s pages, scholars have used statecraft to pursue studies of political leadership (James, 2018; Middleton and Thompson, 2024), the governing strategies of specific political leaders (Buller and James, 2012; Byrne et al., 2017, 2021; Pike and Diamond, 2021), and British policymaking (Ayres et al., 2017), particularly foreign policy and economic policymaking in post-war Britain (Buller and Flinders, 2005; Burnham, 2001; Wei et al., 2023). Furthermore, in underpinning the seminal contributions of Burnham (2001, 2006) to the depoliticisation literature, statecraft has cast a long shadow over the work of scholars publishing on depoliticisation within the BJPIR (Kettell, 2008; Kuzemko, 2015; Rogers, 2009; Warner, 2019; Warner and Luke, 2023).

However, statecraft has also been subject to a number of criticisms. Scholars have alleged that statecraft does not pay sufficient attention to the role of ideas in politics (Griffiths, 2016) and have suggested that statecraft lacks a clear theoretical underpinning (see Buller, 1999). In response, several scholars have sought to move beyond Bulpitt’s original work in order to rid the statecraft interpretation of some of its defects (see Buller, 1999; Hayton, 2014; James, 2016). Yet even in light of this ‘neo-statecraft’ account, criticisms remain. As summarised by Griffiths (2016), statecraft has been diagnosed as offering a narrow and politicist account of politics. Griffiths (2016: 740) argues that Bulpitt’s focus on ‘the Court’ and ‘court politics’ provides ‘only a partial picture of British politics excluding analyses which are potentially fruitful’ and that ‘for statecraft analysts only the high politics of a few actors matters’. This mirrors Rhodes’s (1988: 31) earlier criticism of statecraft: that it has ‘a tendency to assume a singly national or internal centre when in fact there can be multiple centres’. In other words, in the context of the shift from government to governance, and the rise of fragmented and complex policymaking networks, a focus on a few actors is ‘unduly restrictive’ (Griffiths, 2016: 740). Griffiths (2016: 737) also notes that statecraft is seen to offer a ‘narrow account of the goal to which politics is directed’. For Marsh, this ‘politicism’ means that within the statecraft interpretation ‘policy change is [seen to be] driven by strategic political and electoral judgments’, which means that other factors such as ‘the economic context in which such choices are set [are] largely irrelevant’ within the framework (cited in James, 2012: 73). Under this view, successful statecraft is reduced to ‘the strategies involved in winning elections’ (Wei et al., 2023: 5–6), ignoring the plethora of other factors which may motivate the behaviour of political elites.

In this piece, I respond to the criticisms identified above by returning to Bulpitt’s own corpus, contrary to the efforts of neo-statecraft theorists. I do this because I argue that criticisms of statecraft are often rooted in a somewhat narrow, partial reading of Bulpitt’s ideas, which is unmoored from and under-appreciates his other works. I therefore engage in a close reading of Bulpitt’s work, which seeks to reground the statecraft interpretation, rooting it more firmly in its creator’s own ideas and corpus in order to address criticisms that statecraft is politicist and narrow. I do this by examining in particular the key concepts of the Court and relative autonomy within Bulpitt’s work. In doing so, I provide an overview of some of the main advantages of the statecraft interpretation, engage with some of its different applications, and discuss its continuing relevance as a means of studying contemporary Britain.

The Court

A key aspect of the statecraft interpretation is its focus on court politics. For Bulpitt, this focus on the activities of what he calls the Court is a key strength of his approach. Bulpitt stressed the importance of ‘principal actor designation’ within political analysis (see Buller, 1999: 695, 2000: 7). Without a clear statement of whose activities will be focussed upon, Bulpitt (1999: 694) argued, one’s analysis is likely to yield ‘an unmanageable mass of complex, ad hoc and often contradictory empirical evidence’. For analysis to proceed on a strong footing, political scientists ought to be clear about who they will focus on, and this should be an actor with cohesiveness (Bulpitt, 1985: 141–4). By cohesiveness, Bulpitt (1995: 518) meant that the set of agents focussed upon should ‘behave in a unitary (united) fashion’. Only if a group acts ‘as if they were a single entity’ is ‘the collectivity meaningfully interpretable as unitary’ (Frey, 1985: 142). For Bulpitt, the Court represented a cohesive actor whose key position within British politics rendered them worthy of analytical focus.

However, this designation of the Court as the analytical focal point within the statecraft interpretation raises questions: In what sense does the Court occupy a key position within British politics? And relatedly, who makes up the Court? As noted above, much of the research that has drawn on statecraft in more recent times has focussed on political leadership (Buller and James, 2012; Byrne et al., 2017, 2021; Pike and Diamond, 2021). This has led some to suggest that statecraft fundamentally focuses on ‘the activities of party leaders’ (Hayton, 2014: 7), and how they ‘secure office and power’ (Byrne et al., 2017: 203). In this vein, several studies have used statecraft to evaluate the performance of British Prime Ministers (e.g. Buller and James, 2012; Byrne et al., 2017). This to some extent dovetails with Bulpitt’s own research agenda, with his most prominent work ultimately constituting an assessment of Margaret Thatcher’s time as premier (Buller and James, 2012: 538). Yet here the partiality of some scholar’s readings of Bulpitt becomes clear. As is noted by Buller and James (2012: 539), ‘Bulpitt was an elite theorist who gave analytical priority to the existence of a leadership clique in his research’. Thus, while Bulpitt considered the PM as ‘a key individual’ within the Court, the concept of the Court encompasses ‘a number of other figures including senior party leaders, advisers and top civil servants’ (Buller and James, 2012: 539). Indeed, the use of the term the Court invokes the image of a royal court comprising not only the monarch but also the key advisors and courtiers who make up the monarch’s inner circle. As such, while sometimes defining the Court in relation to ‘party leaders’ (James, 2012: 67), within his wider corpus, Bulpitt (1983: 3, 1985: 134) typically defined the Court as the ‘political-administrative community of senior ministers and top civil servants, operating in and around Cabinet’.

This definition of the Court offers ‘a more realistic appreciation of political leadership in Britain than those studies that focus just on the PM’ (Buller and James, 2012: 539). Yet, this more realistic view has also not escaped criticism. Scholars who have focussed on how British politics has been transformed by the shift from government to governance and the supposed ‘hollowing out of the state’ have raised concerns about the validity of a focus on a small leadership clique within the core executive in light of these shifts. For those who have proclaimed that the British state has been hollowed out, Britain now constitutes a ‘differentiated polity’ in which political decisions emerge out of the interactions of networks of different actors, and in which the ‘centrality of Westminster has been challenged by the introduction of devolved government’ (Elliott et al., 2022: 99). This proliferation and empowerment of networks, it is argued, has meant that ‘the capacity of the British core executive has been eroded’ (Rhodes, 2007: 1248). This in turn suggests a focus on the Court, understood as ‘the formal Chief Executive, plus his/her political friends and advisers’ (Bulpitt, 1995: 518), and risks focussing on an actor whose power and significance has been markedly curtailed. This is articulated by Rhodes (1988: 31) in his own critique of statecraft in which he notes that statecraft assumes ‘a single national or internal centre, when, in fact, there can be multiple centres’.

In asserting the contemporary relevance of the statecraft approach, I wish to strongly suggest that the shift from government to governance has not rendered research focussed on the Court irrelevant. This is because the British state has not been hollowed out so much as to be rendered ‘incoherent’. This dynamic is nicely summarised by Richards et al. (2023: 32), who note that, while devolution and New Public Management reforms have created a ‘fragmented governance context’, Britain ‘remains highly centralised’. Thus, Britain’s ‘governance system combines centralised government with a sclerotic patchwork of overlapping, devolved and local government arrangements that mitigate against co-ordinated policy delivery’ (Richards et al., 2023: 34). It is here that the incoherence emerges: between a centre that has significant discretion over policymaking, but which operates in a context wherein policy delivery is highly fragmented and decentralised. It is also here that the continued role of the centre or Court in the context of governance becomes clear.

The concept of meta-governance is crucial to understanding this. Meta-governance refers to the efforts of the central government to direct networks and relevant stakeholders involved in policy delivery therein (Sørensen et al., 2011: 379). Meta-governance is therefore pertinent to this discussion because it ‘indicates a continued role for the [central] state in the regulation of . . . networks’, and ‘casts doubt on the view that the vertical hierarchies of the old social structures of the state have been replaced or subsumed by such networks’ (Fawcett, 2009: 37). This is even acknowledged by scholars, such as Rhodes, who were central to promoting the notion of the hollowed-out state. Indeed, Rhodes has acknowledged how in the context of the ‘massive proliferation of networks’ involved in policy delivery, the core executive still fumbles to exert control and a sense of direction (Bevir and Rhodes, 2006: 74), and has noted how this bargaining between the core executive and policy networks resembles a modern form of ‘court politics’ (Rhodes, 2007: 1248, 2013). In light of this, ‘how politicians govern at a distance becomes a – if not the – central question of contemporary statecraft’ (Dommett and Flinders, 2015: 2). A continued emphasis on the Court in the contemporary period is therefore justifiable, so long as analysis centres on the Court’s attempts to navigate the fragmented governance context it finds itself within and direct the networks of different actors involved in policy delivery, rather than on the Court alone.

Here, returning to Bulpitt’s own corpus is useful and the contemporary relevance of the statecraft interpretation becomes clear. Indeed, contrary to the criticism that within Bulpitt’s work ‘only the high politics of a few actors’ – those within the Court – ‘matters’ (Griffiths, 2016: 740), Bulpitt actually ‘criticised . . . the uncritical assertion of a coercive centre’ and placed considerable emphasis on understanding how the Court has sought to manage the mass of actors involved in policy delivery (Bradbury, 2006: 561). This concern is most clear in Bulpitt’s first major work Territory and Power. Therein, Bulpitt takes a Court-focussed perspective, but his analysis centres on how the Court relates to an increasingly empowered set of actors outside of central government. Bulpitt suggests that, at times, this relationship is one of ‘uneasy detente’ (Richards et al., 2023: 34), insofar as ‘the centre is prepared to allow considerable autonomy to peripheral governments and political organisations’ where strategic (Bulpitt, 1983: 68), for example, to prevent political overload or where issues are ‘potentially awkward’ (Bulpitt, 1986: 27–8). However, Bulpitt (1983: 64) also noted that the Court may sometimes find it necessary to manage, direct, or even coerce peripheral forces towards certain objectives. Thus, in Territory and Power, Britain ‘appears less as a unitary state than as a complex matrix of diverse and negotiated patterns of rule’ (Bevir, 2010: 445). In this way, the value of regrounding the statecraft interpretation in Bulpitt’s wider corpus and especially his analysis of territorial politics in Britain, which has as yet ‘played [only] a limited role’ in ongoing debates about governance and ‘remains very little known’ (Bradbury, 2010: 319), becomes clear. By engaging with Territory and Power when exploring the statecraft interpretation, I have demonstrated that rather than offering only a limited, partial analysis of a few actors, statecraft seeks to understand not only the behaviour of the Court, but also how the Court manages and relates to a whole series of different actors at the periphery. From this perspective, statecraft is well attuned to contemporary issues related to meta-governance and the incoherent state.

It is worth noting that, even as I have described it here, the statecraft interpretation is a somewhat narrow approach in the sense that it ultimately focusses almost solely on activities occurring in arenas typically considered political. It is well-noted that to define politics in strictly arena-based terms is problematic in that it excludes from analysis a series of processes and power relations beyond the state which are worthy of study (Hay, 2002: 72–5). However, Bulpitt never offers an abstract definition of politics in his work. As such, I argue that we should consider the focus the statecraft interpretation has on arena-based politics as a justifiable analytical choice, which reflects the key role that arena-based politics continues to play in political life. This analytical choice can be maintained while acknowledging the importance and political nature of processes beyond traditionally political arenas. It need not be seen as indicative of an ontological view of the political, which suggests that only matters which occur within arenas typically considered as political warrant political analysis.

Furthermore, while the focus Bulpitt gives to the Court has been criticised for a lack of definitional precision regarding who comprises the Court (James, 2012: 67), I argue that this fluidity should also be seen as a strength of the statecraft interpretation. Specifically, I suggest that the differing definitions of the Court offered by Bulpitt at different times are not indicative of a lack of conceptual clarity. Rather, they reflect Bulpitt’s keen awareness of the fact that the contours of the Court shift (Buller, 2000: 8). That is, just like a royal court, over time certain actors fall out of favour and are cast out, while others rise and are inculcated into the fold. This is significant because it means that the statecraft interpretation is well placed to grapple with other key dynamics within contemporary British politics. Specifically, the contemporary period of British politics has been noted to have been characterised by a wave of ‘executive centralisation’ (Ward, 2021; Ward and Ward, 2023). This centralisation has been two-fold. On one hand, centralisation has been external, involving central government’s repatriation of powers and responsibilities previously hived off, strict management of government communications, increased party discipline, and the avoidance of scrutiny by external bodies (Ward and Ward, 2023: 1181). But on the other, centralisation has been internal, involving ‘organisational restructuring’ to narrow those involved in decision-making at the centre of government (Ward and Ward, 2023: 1179). Both Johnson and Truss in particular have been seen to have adopted this fortress mentality, relying on a small set of special advisors and allies when taking decisions (Ward and Ward, 2023; White, 2022). In short, to put it in Bulpitt’s terms, the contours of the Court have narrowed in contemporary British politics but may yet widen again as both the Conservatives and Labour seek to distance themselves from the chaos of the Johnson–Truss period. The flexibility of the Court, and Bulpitt’s sensitivity to how different prime ministers rely on a smaller or wider set of key advisors leaves statecraft well placed to capture these critical dynamics.

Relative autonomy

Having defended the validity of statecraft’s analytical focus on the Court and emphasised the utility of its way of understanding the Court in relation to contemporary political debates, I will now turn to Bulpitt’s understanding of the aims and motivations of the Court. For Bulpitt (1986: 27), the central objective of the Court is to achieve ‘relative autonomy . . . on those matters which they define as “high politics” at any particular time’. In other words, the Court seeks to insulate and distance themselves from societal forces to achieve a degree of discretion or wiggle room over decision-making on key issues.

Scholars have suggested that within the statecraft framework the key way that the Court secures relative autonomy is electoral. Under this view, Bulpitt (1988: 188) is seen to suggest that because of Britain’s majoritarian winner-takes-all electoral system, and centralised state, ‘losing office . . . means the political wilderness’. This results in a ‘frenetic, preoccupied, restless, querulous set of national politicians’ who must aim to win general elections above all else ‘because the consequences of defeat . . . are so awful’ (Bulpitt, 1988: 188). As such, ‘British governing is [in effect] one long electoral campaign’ (Bulpitt, 1996: 224–225), and successful statecraft comprises ‘winning national office, avoiding too many problems while there and getting re-elected’ (Bulpitt, 1996: 225). The dominant understanding of relative autonomy, then, reduces statecraft to a framework for analysing ‘the strategies involved in winning elections’ (Wei et al., 2023: 5–6). Again, given scholarship on statecraft has primarily focussed on Bulpitt’s (1986) assessment of Thatcherism, it is perhaps understandable that this way of thinking about relative autonomy has taken root. After all, in this piece, Bulpitt (1986: 21) defines statecraft as ‘the art of winning elections’ and presents statecraft ‘in the form of a . . . cycle . . . the starting point [of which] is the party in opposition, and ‘end game’ is the party winning another election after a period in office, when the cycle begins once again’ (Bulpitt, 1986: 22). Under this view, politicians secure relative autonomy periodically at election time, with Britain’s centralised political system meaning that, once they have won power, they have the discretion necessary to do as they please (until the next election).

This account of relative autonomy has been another source of criticism for the statecraft interpretation. Again, Griffiths (2016: 737–738) provides a useful summary of the charges, noting that statecraft has been criticised for offering a ‘narrow account of the goal to which politics is directed’, and leaves ‘little room for other explanations of politicians’ behaviour aside from electoral success’. This criticism is also elaborated by Marsh. In their review of different explanations of Thatcherism, they suggest that ‘the chief problem with Bulpitt’s analysis is that it is totally politicist, policy change is driven by strategic political and electoral judgments’, which ignores other factors such as ‘the economic context in which such choices are set’ (Marsh cited in James, 2012: 73). This view is also seen to problematically discount the role of ideas/ideology in motivating the actions of the Court, casting ideology only as ‘a means to getting into power’, rather than something which might lie behind the desire for power in the first place (Hayton, 2016: 730). As with statecraft’s focus on the Court, I want to show that statecraft can be defended against accusations of politicism by examining the notion of relative autonomy more closely and holistically within Bulpitt’s work and wider statecraft-related literature.

Within any reading of statecraft, winning elections is certainly a key focus for political elites. As explained above, Bulpitt notes that losing elections in Britain is particularly disadvantageous given the nature of Britain’s parliamentary system and the discretion a party enjoys if they have a parliamentary majority versus the relative weakness and powerlessness of being in opposition. This is not a particularly controversial claim. Even Bulpitt’s critics acknowledge that ‘politics is clearly, in part, concerned with winning power’ (Griffiths, 2016: 738). Criticism therefore relates to the idea that Bulpitt places a near exclusive focus on winning elections over and above other factors which occupy the minds and motivate the actions of politicians. This I argue is an unfair reading of Bulpitt. Indeed, while Bulpitt (1986: 21) does at points define statecraft as the ‘art of winning elections’, he notes that this is a ‘crude’ definition of the concept. Bulpitt’s full definition of statecraft even in his 1986 piece ‘is that it is the art of winning elections and achieving some necessary degree of governing competence in office’ (21, emphasis added). Thus, as well as being interested in the strategies the Court pursues to secure popular legitimacy, statecraft is also interested in ‘the politics of governing’ (Buller, 1999: 695), and how the Court ‘confront and respond to governing challenges’ (James, 2016: 86).

Returning to Bulpitt’s most famous work is useful here. In his assessment of Thatcherism, Bulpitt does not only view Thatcher as successful insofar as she rediscovered a winning electoral formula for the Conservative Party. Rather, within the piece, Bulpitt (1986: 33) presents an iconoclastic analysis of post-war British politics, suggesting that there was ‘precious little difference between monetarism [i.e. Thatcherism] and the politics of Keynes’ demand management’. For Bulpitt, to the extent that British policymaking was ever Keynesian, it was in the sense that politicians adopted Keynes’s politics. Bulpitt (1986: 27) suggests that Keynes’s political aim was to render British capitalism more efficient by instituting ‘macro demand management by an insulated political and bureaucratic elite’:

Thus Keynes’ ideas did not involve any direct government interference in the economy: the policy elite would merely set the overall framework – by pulling levers in the Treasury . . . This meant that . . . demand management, from the Treasury, could similarly be carried on by governments as a relatively autonomous activity . . . Thus economic management did not require any continuous bargaining or politicking with powerful interest groups. In short, Keynes’ ideas involved ‘the euthanasia of politics’. (Bulpitt, 1986: 27, emphasis added)

The problem with Keynesianism as a political project, for Bulpitt (1986: 27), was that this ability to avoid ‘continuous bargaining or politicking with powerful interest groups’ gradually broke down. In the face of ‘seemingly intractable balance of payments problems [and] the problem of rising wages and the threat of rampant inflation’ (Burnham, 2006: 304), simply ‘pulling demand and exchange-rate levers in the Treasury and the Bank of England was no longer thought to be enough’ (Bulpitt, 1986: 29). Thus, ‘politicised solutions and greater government ‘interventionism’ in the economy were pursued (Clarke, 1988: 294–304). However, these interventions failed to meet expectations or address underlying economic issues. This in turn led to further ‘industrial and political unrest’ and a crisis of governability wherein the Court became overwhelmed by the competing sectoral demands placed on it regarding economy policymaking (Clarke, 1988: 304).

Bulpitt’s surmising of Keynesianism and its demise reveals his overall view of relative autonomy and the politics of governing. For Bulpitt, successful governing (which Keynesianism initially assisted in) involves the Court being able to take decisions on key issues on their own terms, not at the behest of the interests of societal groups. In other words, when governing the Court struggles ‘to secure its interests and objectives in the face of constraints and resistance to societal forces’ (Buller, 2000: 9). The breakdown of Keynesianism and the emergence of monetarism in Bulpitt’s analysis can also be understood through this lens. Indeed, Bulpitt suggests that for the Court, monetarism offered ‘in the mid-1970s a superb (or lethal) piece of statecraft’, in that by delimiting the role of the state in the economy as one of regulating the money supply, monetarism acted as ‘a technique for taking certain decisions out of politics’ and signalled a move away from corporatist bargaining which had become ‘impossible to defend’ (Bulpitt, 1986: 33). Monetarism therefore provided an ‘opportunity to rebuild that relative autonomy of the centre seemingly lost forever’ in the era of governmental interventionism and corporatist bargaining with interest groups, especially trade unions (Bulpitt, 1986: 33).

For Bulpitt then, the search for relative autonomy is not periodic and electoral, rather it is constant and involves the Court seeking autonomy when governing in order to implement their own agenda in the face of the various interests which try to exert influence over policymaking and change the direction of the government’s agenda. Bulpitt (1986: 27–28) emphasises that when governing the Court constantly makes recourse to a ‘variety of . . . tactics’ in order to buttress their autonomy, including: ‘the employment of Parliament as a talk-shop and essential intermediary with peripheral forces; depoliticisation of potentially awkward issues; and the “peripheralization of many matters of “low politics” to government agencies outside the centre’. As the above makes clear, alongside these longstanding tactics already in their political arsenal, the Court also seeks to institute policy frameworks (Keynesianism, monetarism) and institutional arrangements (corporatism) which also preserve their autonomy. All of this serves to underscore the extent to which when one engages with Bulpitt’s work closely, the search for relative autonomy is consistently portrayed as a constant struggle which underpins all of the Court’s decision-making when governing, not as periodic and electoral in nature.

In his work on the emergence of Thatcherism and the crisis of Keynesianism, Bulpitt identifies the need to achieve a degree of relative autonomy from societal forces, such as trade unions, seeking to influence policy ‘from below’. Critical political economists have used the statecraft interpretation in tandem with insights into the structural dependence of the state on capital in a way that has not been much acknowledged within debates about statecraft (see, for example, Burnham, 2001, 2007, 2011; Copley, 2017; Rogers, 2009). This vein of scholarship begins with the work of Burnham (2001: 127), who notes that the problems of governing the British economy were ‘well recognised by Jim Bulpitt’ (1996: 225):

who argued that the aim of government is to achieve, in the eyes of the public, a level of governing competence, and in terms of economic management, at least not make things any worse. Rational politicians in office, Bulpitt noted, ‘will pursue governing strategies and employ supportive manipulative techniques to ensure, as far as possible, that they achieve their crude, subsistence-level objectives. In combination, these governing objectives, strategies and manipulative mechanisms can be labelled ‘Court statecraft’. (Burnham, 2001: 127–128)

In their use of statecraft, these scholars demonstrate that, alongside dealing with pressures which emerge from below, the Court must also maintain ‘market confidence’ in order to ‘create credit or leeway in policy terms’ (Burnham, 2001: 128). That is, the Court ‘are constrained in what they can do by the need to sustain economic conditions that promote investment’ (Wickham-Jones, 1995: 466), and only by sustaining these conditions does the Court achieve a degree of leeway to pursue their own agendas. Failure to maintain such conditions would lead to economic crisis and destabilise the Court’s ability to govern.

This in turn implies that the Court does have ideas or an ideology regarding how governing should be approached, but that their ability to implement and act on these ideas depends on their ability to ‘achieve . . . a relative autonomy’ from ‘both domestic and external pressures’ who wish to see their interests and ideas reflected in government policy (Bulpitt, 1986: 27). As James (2012: 70, 2016: 87) notes, in his later work Bulpitt coins the notion of the ‘rate of governability’ to capture this dynamic. If the Court can arrive at a situation where they successful wrestle a degree of relative autonomy over policymaking, then the rate of governability can be said to be favourable. In such moments, the Court may possess the discretion to act ideologically and seek change. However often, the rate of governability may be unfavourable, and in such moments the Court ‘may be so constrained by their surroundings that ‘ad hoc-ism’ and ‘muddling through’ may be the best that can be achieved under the circumstances’ (James, 2012: 70).

In discussing all this, it becomes clear that the concept of relative autonomy has significant value beyond directing attention towards the electoral constraints the Court must periodically navigate in order to maintain power. Gamble offers a useful way of encapsulating the more expansive definition of relative autonomy, which I have expounded here. Although not often seen as within the statecraft tradition (see, for example, Killick and Mabbett, 2021), Gamble’s (1994, 2015) seminal analysis of Thatcherism (1994), and his more recent discussion of austerity (2015), both explicitly draw on Bulpitt’s work. For Gamble, successful (Conservative) statecraft involves two sometimes contradictory issues: the politics of power and the politics of support. A focus on the politics of support aligns with the dominant view of the statecraft interpretation, focussing on the Court’s need to ‘win support from voters, organised interests and . . . party members, [in order to mobilise] a coalition that can win elections and establish a claim to political, moral and intellectual leadership’ (Gamble, 1994: 8). But crucially, for Gamble, an analysis of how the Court engages in the politics of support is not the beginning and end of a statecraft analysis. Indispensable too is an analysis of how the Court engages in the politics of power: how they ‘govern successfully, which involves harmonising their popular mandate with the realities of managing the state machine and coping with the pressures placed upon policy by the structural constraints of the domestic polity and the world political economy’ (Gamble, 1994: 8). A statecraft analysis must account for how the Court engages in both the politics of support and the politics of power. What I have argued here is that it is clear from close engagement with Bulpitt’s work that, as Gamble correctly judges, Bulpitt did not see relative autonomy in solely electoral terms. Rather, the statecraft interpretation demands an analyses of the politics of governing, not just the politics of winning elections when assessing the achievements of British governments.

At the same time, Bulpitt does not provide an exhaustive analysis of relative autonomy (who it is sought from, over what issues). As I have argued throughout, while one factor at play in the search for relative autonomy is clearly the need to achieve electoral success, ‘this is not to say that politicians do not also hold multiple other objectives’ (Hayton, 2016: 731). This leaves the concept open and flexible, and what I have tried to draw out above is that different scholars have taken this in different directions. Scholars interested in political leadership have focussed on the need to achieve electoral success. Less acknowledged is the work of critical political economists who have used statecraft to produce fine-grained accounts of how governments have navigated governing the British economy in the context of the structural dependence of the state on capital. Gamble (1994: 8) arguably offers a hybrid of these two strands of statecraft analysis: electoral constraints are considered alongside ‘the structural constraints of the domestic polity and the world political economy’. Thus, as is argued by Hayton (2016: 731), despite accusations of being ‘overly restrictive’, a number of scholars have not had any problem utilising the statecraft interpretation ‘to guide [their] analysis and accommodate a plurality of factors within them’.

Rather than offering a politicist account of politics which offers little space for alternative explanations then, my reading of statecraft presents it as an open framework which can and has been used in tandem with complementary alternative approaches. One which allows the researcher to foreground the motivations behind the Court’s actions which they view as most significant, while acknowledging that electoral success alone is not the end of politics for the Court.

Conclusion

In summary, this piece has provided an overview of the statecraft interpretation of British politics. This has proceeded through a close analysis of some of Bulpitt’s key works such as Territory and Power and his 1986 analysis of Thatcher’s statecraft, alongside engagement with Bulpitt’s wider corpus and other literatures which have drawn on statecraft. In doing so, I have sought to defend statecraft against some of the most common criticisms levelled against it. In engaging with the concepts of the Court and relative autonomy within Bulpitt’s work, I have argued that criticisms of the statecraft interpretation as narrow and politicist ultimately rest on a partial reading of Bulpitt’s work. I have argued first that Bulpitt did not adopt a sole focus on the behaviour of the Court, but was instead sensitive to how the Court relates to a whole set of other actors involved in political decision-making. Second, I have argued that, while Bulpitt does not provide an exhaustive list of the factors which motivate the behaviour of the Court and their approach to governing, statecraft is far from politicist or unmindful of the role of the economic context in shaping the decision-making of the Court.

In advancing these arguments, I have made a number of points regarding the contemporary relevance of the statecraft interpretation, which are worth reflecting on in rounding out this piece. In noting Bulpitt’s concern for the ‘complex matrix of diverse and negotiated patterns of rule’ which exist between the Court and a host of actors involved in policy delivery beyond central government (Bevir, 2010: 445), I have argued that statecraft is well attuned to contemporary discussions of the incoherence of the British state and the core executive’s attempts to direct this incoherent morass through practices of meta-governance. In discussing the concept of the Court, I also noted that Bulpitt’s flexibility in defining who comprises the Court is indicative of a sensitivity to how the contours of the Court change over time. This has significant contemporary relevance given the fortress mentality of the Johnson and Truss governments, and the pertinent question of how the contours of the Court may shift again given Starmer’s commitment to a more open and accountable government (Labour, 2022), and the desire to draw a line under the Conservatives’ increasingly centralised approach. Finally, in discussing relative autonomy, I have explored how this concept provides an open and dynamic lens for analysing the politics of governing in Britain, which can incorporate changing ideas of what motivates the Court’s efforts to govern. By engaging with critical political economy literature which has drawn on the statecraft interpretation, I have demonstrated how statecraft has significant utility in being a framework that can be combined with or supplemented by other approaches and theoretical traditions. Far from a ‘straightjacket’ (Griffiths, 2016), then, I have ultimately attempted to provide a view of statecraft here that emphasises its flexibility and openness, which I see as key to its continuing value and relevance as an analytical framework. As I noted at the outset of the piece, the BJPIR has been at the forefront of shaping debates within which the statecraft interpretation has been used to provide the dynamic picture of British governance, which I describe. Given the statecraft interpretation’s clear relevance to a number of key contemporary debates regarding British governance, Bulpitt’s work will hopefully maintain a prominent presence in the work of the journal into the future.