Chapter 23

Ten Great Prime Ministers

In This Chapter

Leading with aplomb

Reforming and improving

Taking care of the people

The role of prime minister (PM) is the top job in British politics. Although technically just a Member of Parliament (MP) and a servant of the monarch, the reality is that the PM has huge powers, from appointing the heads of government ministries to negotiating treaties with foreign powers. Of the 51 people who’ve been British PM, plenty of them have been mediocre performers, and some have made a downright bad fist of the job. Yet a select band of men and one woman have been, well, rather special, making an extraordinary contribution to shaping Britain and the wider world.

In this chapter I look at the brightest stars in the prime ministerial sky. If you want to know who’s made the biggest splash while occupying 10 Downing Street, this is the chapter for you.

Our Finest Hour: Winston Churchill (1940–45 and 1951–55)

Although this chapter is about the greatest prime ministers, one stands head and shoulders above the rest. In the BBC’s poll of the Greatest Ever Britons, conducted at the end of the last millennium, Winston Churchill came top.

As prime minister during the Second World War, Churchill proved the truth of the maxim ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’. An avowed hater of the tyrannical Nazi regime (which had overrun neighbouring France in May 1940), Churchill, through his force of character and will, galvanised the British people into believing that they could win the war and that what seemed like the darkest hour of the Blitz bombing of London in 1940–41 was actually the nation’s finest hour.

When the Allies won the war in 1945, Churchill was recognised as a truly great world leader, yet the electorate still voted him out of office in favour of a Labour Party that promised to construct a welfare state. Churchill wasn’t finished, though: he won the 1951 election and, although past his best as a politician, he bestrode the international stage as a colossus, forging stronger relations between the UK and the United States.

Even with politics out of the equation, Churchill was still a great person; a journalist, wit, brave soldier and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature – his was a life less ordinary. It’s easy to see why the word ‘Churchillian’ means strong, committed leadership.

The Welsh Wizard: David Lloyd George (1916–22)

War is a crucible of politics that exposes leaders prone to dithering and incompetence and brings to the fore those who are highly capable and charismatic. In 1916, with the First World War going badly for Britain, the nation needed new leadership. Herbert Asquith, the prime minister at the time, was largely seen as indecisive and not up to the task. In his cabinet, the munitions minister David Lloyd George had dramatically overhauled the production of artillery shells and he seemed like the only man with a plan.

Lloyd George deposed Asquith as prime minister and set about reforming government with the sole objective of winning the war. Britain won in 1918 and Lloyd George was instrumental in constructing the peace at the Versailles Conference that followed in 1919. Lloyd George served as PM until 1922 and granted votes for certain women in 1918 (full female suffrage was granted in 1928).

For much of his political life Lloyd George was an outsider. For starters, he was the only PM whose first language wasn’t English – it was Welsh. He also didn’t come from an aristocratic background. Lloyd George was seen by many colleagues as deceitful in his dealings and as PM he was embroiled in a scandal over the sale of honours. He was also the last leader of the Liberal Party to make it to the post of prime minister.

The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher (1979–90)

Britain’s one and only female PM makes it into the list not because of her gender but because she’s widely recognised as the single most important driving force in British politics since Churchill. Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer from Grantham in Lincolnshire, went on to study chemistry at Oxford University. In a sexist environment, in the most old-fashioned of political parties – the Conservatives – Thatcher managed to get herself selected as a parliamentary candidate, elected as an MP and into the cabinet. She became leader of the party in 1975 following the Conservatives’ two election defeats the previous year.

In the 1979 general election many of the senior men in her party were expecting Thatcher to fail in the heat of battle, but she managed to win a majority in parliament. She stayed in the role for 11 years, fighting a successful war in the Falkland Islands against Argentina, reforming public services, passing anti-union laws, lowering taxes and overseeing a rebirth of British business. By any estimate, she was a great PM.

However, Thatcher was a deeply divisive figure; she didn’t like criticism from colleagues, could be domineering of her cabinet and was intolerant. Many people in the industrialised north of England see her as responsible for the destruction of their jobs and communities. The miners’ strike in 1984 (about the planned closure of pits) that led to the defeat of the strikers and a victory for Thatcher embodied a bitter, divided Britain overseen by the PM dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’.

The Trailblazer: Robert Walpole (1721–42)

Robert Walpole was the first politician to be recognised by historians as prime minister – although the phrase ‘prime minister’ wasn’t used at the time. He inherited a difficult economic situation, with thousands of Britons having lost their life savings in the speculative ‘South Sea Bubble’ in 1720 (when people invested in the South Sea Company, only for the bubble to burst). His policies successfully dealt with these economic problems and the country enjoyed huge wealth. Walpole was a major figure on the international stage, negotiating favourable treaties for Britain and keeping the country out of a bloody continental war over succession to the throne of Poland.

The Walpole era is seen as a crucial one in the development of Britain as a world power, with the country consolidating its empire – including in North America – and major cultural figures, such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, doing their thing. Despite all this, probably Walpole’s biggest legacy was the establishment of the job of prime minister itself.

Robert Walpole was the first PM to occupy 10 Downing Street in London, the official residence of British prime ministers ever since. The house was originally three houses, but was knocked into one under King George II.

The Great Reformer: Clement Attlee (1945–51)

To look at, Attlee had a bald domed head and a trimmed moustache and seemed every inch the chartered accountant. But still waters run deep. Attlee – a capable deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition government run by Winston Churchill – had risen seamlessly in the ranks of the Labour Party to become leader at the election in 1945. The party’s pledge to create a welfare state helped win it a landslide against Winston Churchill’s Conservatives, and Attlee, the small man from working-class roots in Putney, was PM.

The next six years saw nothing less than the creation of what many people would consider modern Britain. The National Health Service was founded and large tracts of industry were taken into public ownership. Britain’s poor could suddenly expect financial help from the state instead of a cold shoulder. Attlee oversaw a reduction in inequality and an overhaul of the education system. Internationally, Attlee took the first steps in dismantling the British Empire, with India finally granted its independence in 1948. In six years, Attlee’s government changed Britain forever. The reward was to be defeated by a resurgent Conservative Party under Winston Churchill in 1951.

The First Spin Doctor: Benjamin Disraeli (1868 and 1874–80)

Britain’s one and only PM of Jewish heritage (pretty extraordinary in what at the time was a deeply Christian country), Disraeli was the master of the art of public relations when PR was unknown. He was the first major British politician to sell to the public the idea of Britain as a major world empire. He made Queen Victoria – with whom he shared a warm friendship – empress of India and worked to extend the British Empire into the Middle East and Asia upon which ‘the sun would never set’. He was noted for getting Britain involved again in continental European politics. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 Britain had deliberately stayed out of European affairs, adopting a policy dubbed ‘splendid isolation’. Disraeli, though, became actively involved in major treaties and negotiations with continental powers, particularly at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when, through skilful negotiations, he limited the growing influence of Russia in the Balkans. Some of Disraeli’s other foreign adventures were less successful; the British invasions of Afghanistan and the land of the Zulu in South Africa resulted in some military defeats. One of Disraeli’s domestic policy achievements was the Reform Act 1867, which increased the number of people (all men back then, of course) who were allowed to vote.

Outside Number 10, Disraeli was no slouch with the pen, writing bestselling romantic novels: from PM to Mills and Boon!

The Grand Old Man: William Gladstone (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94)

Disraeli’s arch-rival was the great Liberal politician and four-time prime minister William Gladstone. The Grand Old Man (GOM), as he was nicknamed, was noted for his very, very long speeches, and apparently Queen Victoria once criticised him by saying, ‘He talks to me as if I were a public meeting.’ His bitter rival Disraeli twisted the GOM nickname, saying it actually stood for God’s Only Mistake.

Gladstone was a giant of late Victorian politics. He was a major proponent of free trade and the removal of tariffs on imported goods, and he supported electoral reform, allowing more men to vote. To his credit, Gladstone was opposed to the expansion of the British Empire into the heart of Africa in search of natural resources, although ultimately he could do little about it. Closer to home, he wanted the Irish to have home rule (in effect, self-governance), and if he’d had his way, the troubled history between Britain and Ireland of the last century may have been very different. However, Gladstone couldn’t get his way because his Liberal Party enjoyed only a slim majority in parliament and considerable opposition to home rule existed.

Gladstone had a high moral code that was adopted by many Victorian men of means. Even as prime minister he used to walk the streets at night trying to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of life and go to church. He eventually gave up being PM aged 84, drawing to a close probably the most eventful and long-lasting political career of 19th-century British politics.

Shaking Things Up: Robert Peel (1834–35 and 1841–46)

Robert Peel was one of British history’s great doers. Prime minister twice, he was also responsible for setting up the British police force – the police nickname Bobby is short for Robert, and they were originally called Peelers!

Peel was alarmed at the increase in crime and, in the face of fierce opposition from those who feared that the police could be used by a tyrannical government to crush any opposition, he went about replacing the old method of policing by city watches and sheriffs with a uniformed and professional police force. So next time you get stopped for speeding, you know who you have to thank!

Another crucial contribution by Peel was repealing the Corn Laws. Imported corn was taxed, which although it protected the livelihoods of many British farmers, meant that many poverty-stricken industrial workers had to pay way over the odds for that most basic of foodstuffs, bread. Scrapping the Corn Laws opened Britain up to the mass importation of foodstuffs from the prairies of North America and sent bread prices tumbling. British workers could afford bread, but many farmers in the UK went to the wall in the last three decades of the 19th century in what historians dub the Victorian agricultural depression.

Peel’s reforming zeal didn’t stop at the Corn Laws; he also introduced the Factory Act 1844, restricting the number of hours that women and children could work. Less happily, he re-imposed income tax, which had been suspended in 1815.

But it was the Corn Laws repeal that split the Tory party of the day down the middle and left Peel out of office. His own party, the Tories, had failed to support the repeal and Peel had had to rely on votes from the rival Whig party.

The Second Master of Spin: Tony Blair (1997–2007)

The fresh-faced and affable Tony Blair promised, in the words of his Labour Party election song of 1997, that ‘things can only get better’ for Britain under him as prime minister. It seemed for a few years that he was right. The country boomed economically and culturally, with the advent of Brit Pop and Cool Britannia. Britain seemed to be going through a giant make-over and would come out the other side more attractive and vibrant.

Working alongside his chancellor and successor, Gordon Brown, Blair introduced the minimum wage and tax credits for families, and made the Bank of England independent from government interference. He also helped bring peace to Northern Ireland after a quarter of a century. Britain’s relations with the European Union improved, with Blair instrumental in the expansion of the EU from 15 to 27 member states. In Africa, too, Blair made significant strides in persuading other world leaders to forgive the debts of the poorest countries and up their aid commitments. So far, so good. Then came Iraq.

On the premise that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Blair took Britain into an invasion of Iraq alongside the United States. Many British and international politicians suggested that the war was illegal and unnecessary, and the case against Blair deepened when, after Hussein’s defeat, inspectors found no actual weapons of mass destruction. A bloody civil war in Iraq followed and Blair was portrayed in some media as ‘Bliar’ and even a war criminal for his actions. What’s more, many of the media manipulation techniques that had been deployed by Blair’s powerful press secretary Alastair Campbell (check out Chapter 10 for more on him) started to backfire, and opponents and the media accused the Blair government of being more about political spin than substance.

Dogged by criticism, Blair retired as PM in 2007 to make way for Gordon Brown. His timing couldn’t have been better – he narrowly avoided the world economic crisis that started in the summer of 2008 and Labour’s election defeat in 2010. No wonder he was nicknamed ‘Teflon Tony’ for the way scandal never stuck to him.

Wiser than His Years: William Pitt the Younger (1783–1801 and 1804–06)

Just 24 when he became prime minister, William Pitt the Younger was the son of a previous PM, the aptly named William Pitt the Elder. Although barely out of his school uniform, William Pitt the Younger is one of the greats. In a time when PMs were lucky to last a few months in the role (the three previous PMs had managed just 18 months between them), he was a real survivor and was in place for a whopping 18 years, winning three general elections. Even after his resignation in 1801, he was back again three years later for another two-year term before dying in office at the age of 46.

But it’s not just political – if not actual – longevity that marks Pitt out. He was ultra-effective in the top job. He set about reducing the national debt, called for reform of the rotten boroughs (parliamentary seats with only a few electors – in effect the property of local landowners so they could get whomever they wanted elected), was a staunch opponent of the slave trade and, from 1793, was a wartime leader against France. His second period as PM saw Britain win the crucial battle of Trafalgar as well as form key alliances against France with Russia and Sweden. Pitt even introduced income tax, but the less said about that, the better!

All in all, not bad for a man given the top job at just 24 years old.