Prime ministerial predominance can enable the prime minister to lead, if not command, the core executive, and, in concert with others, to direct, if not control, its policy development. Leadership predominance facilitates prime ministerial predominance within the executive, and prime ministerial predominance reinforces leadership predominance within the party. Such predominance arises from the prime minister's ability to access a series of personal and institutional power resources. The more resources, the more powerful and predominant the prime minister is; the fewer resources, the less powerful and predominant they are. Such resources are necessarily transient, being accumulated and inevitably dispersed, acquired and lost, and are never permanent. When possessed, they can grant the prime minister considerable, if never overwhelming, intra-executive authority and influence, and the opportunity to be a stronger, but not the only element within the core executive.In exposing the deficiencies of the traditional Westminster model, the core executive model suggests UK government consists of a number of interdependent, interacting actors and institutions within numerous overlapping, interlocking networks (Dunleavy and

Institutions cannot be understood without exploring the actors who occupy them, while actors cannot be understood without examining the institutions they inhabit. Ultimately, the actions of both institutions and actors cannot be understood separate to the political, social and economic context within which they are located. Tony Blair, rightly cited as an example of a powerful prime minister, does not have a monopoly of power, but he does have an extensive authority. The prime minister requires two things to operate effectively within Whitehall and Westminster: first, power over their parliamentary majority; and second, power within the government they lead. Because this power is contested and challenged, the age-old question, the actual degree of collegiality within government, is as central to contemporary debates about the working of the core executive as to the ancient debate about prime ministerial versus cabinet government. The prime minister is therefore best modelled as a strong, but sometimes weak, parliamentary chief executive.

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Reviews a wide range of evidence to demonstrate three things. First, election campaigns have become more candidate-centered, with parties offering leaders greater prominence in their election campaigns and the media devoting greater attention to them. This development seems to have taken place since 1960, which coincides with the spread of mass access to television in Britain, and the erosion of class politics. Second, today’s major-party leaders are in significant ways more strongly placed to exert intra-party power than they were in 1980, much as we might expect of electoral-professional organizations. Third, and perhaps most important, it seems likely that the potential for prime ministerial power within the state’s political executive has been enhanced because of structural changes that have generated a larger and more integrated ‘executive office’ under his or her control since 1970. Of course, these developments have occurred in the context of a highly partified form of parliamentarism. Thus, it is not contended simply that Prime Ministers have become completely indistinguishable from Presidents, but rather, that a number of changes have occurred that are mutually consistent with the working logic of presidentialism.