Everyone enjoys making and perusing lists of ‘greatest’ — nineteenth-century novels, Beatles LPs, generals, opening batsmen, and so on. The choices inevitably reflect the compiler’s tastes and prejudices, and are always fun to dispute. I have spent the last few months considering the claims of Britain’s Prime Ministers, a process from which four semi-finalists ultimately emerged.
How to choose? I realized straight away that I had to put personal politics aside. After all, no committed Socialist would include Margaret Thatcher, and no red-blooded Tory would consider Clement Attlee. Yet both would make most objective observers’ lists. Sadly, I also had to disregard some favourite characters. If you wanted an engaging dinner party guest or a companion for a night on the town, then Disraeli or Palmerston would both fill the bill admirably — but neither made the final cut. Others were easier to exclude: Derby, Rosebery, Balfour, MacDonald, Chamberlain and Douglas-Home (to name but some of the duds) never even came into consideration.
In order to compare like with like (difficult enough, in all conscience), I decided to draw the starting line at 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act, before which time politics and the job of Prime Minister were almost unrecognizable by modern standards. After 1832, party divisions became stricter, politicians had to appeal to a more substantial electorate and governments changed more often as the result of general elections. Thus the great Walpole, the arch fixer who first established the position of Prime Minister, was excluded, as were the Pitts, father and son. I drew the finishing line at 1990, after which I reckon History ends and Current Affairs begins.
With some misgivings, I also decided to exclude Churchill. This was partly because with him in the running, the result would be a foregone conclusion. He regularly tops lists of ‘Greatest Britons’, but I feel that this reflects his unique role in the country’s hour of greatest danger rather than the qualities he brought to the role of Prime Minister. He was a great war leader, but in his second, peacetime premiership his hands were scarcely even capable of grasping the levers of power.
The Prime Minister I was sorriest to exclude from the final foursome was Robert Peel. Although not the most engaging of men personally — O’Connell’s jibe about his smile being like ‘the silver plate on a coffin’ has the ring of truth — Peel was in many ways the first modern Prime Minister. Compared to his aristocratic predecessors, Grey and Melbourne, he was immensely businesslike and hard-working. He rescued the Tory party from irrelevance, composed the first ever party manifesto and laid the foundations for the astonishing prosperity of Britain in the Victorian age.
Others on my substitutes’ bench were Salisbury, an agreeably cynical reactionary and the last peer to hold the job, yet a man who was able to come to terms with the modern age; Baldwin, a reassuringly solid figure in the troubled 1920s and ‘30s and the first Prime Minister to master the mass media; Macmillan, a consummate showman and the epitome of Liberal Toryism; and Wilson, a wily tactician, winner of four general elections and great communicator.
I was left with four semi-finalists: William Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of the Victorian age, four times Prime Minister and an MP for an astonishing sixty-two years; David Lloyd George, the Welsh Wizard who won the Great War and battled for social justice; Clement Attlee, who held together a fractious Labour party for twenty years and created the Welfare State; and Margaret Thatcher, who remade Conservatism in her image and dedicated herself to putting the Great back into Britain. All four made the political weather of their own era and left an enormous legacy behind.
If you want to find out more about these four and discover who emerges as the winner, the greatest Prime Minister of them all, I suggest you buy my book. And I don’t expect you to agree with me.
Greatest British Prime Ministers by George Chamier is published by Endeavour Press and is available on Amazon for £3.99
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