The official website for BBC History Magazine
Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?
Over two decades ago, a BBC poll named the wartime British prime minister as the Greatest Briton. Now, on the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, David Reynolds ponders whether he deserves to remain as top dog in the pantheon of British history
In a much-publicised poll in 2002, the BBC asked viewers to rank figures from British history, as part of the television series 100 Greatest Britons. The poll was in no way scientific, but simply reflected votes – more than 1.6 million of them – from people who chose to contact the BBC, following presentations championing famous individuals ranging back in time from the 20th century to William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. As is well known, Winston Churchill came out a clear first, garnering close to 457,000 votes. Two decades later, as we mark 150 years since he was born, it’s interesting to revisit that moment, and to reflect on how perceptions of Churchill have changed over time – and also on what is meant by historical ‘greatness’. Because Churchill’s craving to make himself ‘great’ lies at the heart of his extraordinary story. In the run-up to the BBC poll, politician Mo Mowlam – Churchill’s advocate – insisted that “he was the greatest Briton because he showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different”. Let’s unpack that claim a bit. Did Churchill really make such a difference in 1940 – and, if so, how? The answer to the first part is surely: yes – most of all through his energy and drive. Although the tempo in Whitehall would have intensified anyway with the end of the ‘Phoney War’ and the German invasion of France, Churchill’s appointment as prime minister had a galvanising effect, dramatically symbolised by his famous red labels stuck on urgent documents: ACTION THIS DAY. Equally important, Churchill took a firm grip on military strategy. Mindful of the confusion and infighting of 1914–18, he appointed himself minister of defence. There was no ministry – that did not come until the 1960s. Churchill simply wanted the authority to deal with the chiefs of staff directly rather than via their politician ministers. He yearned to be a war leader, unlike Neville Chamberlain – his predecessor as PM – or Lord Halifax, the alternative when Chamberlain lost the support of the Commons. Neither of them had any appetite for such a role, whereas Churchill – a soldier by training – had dreamed of it since childhood. Read more | Neville Chamberlain is underestimated, argues author Robert Harris Churchill was also an accomplished communicator. Often he’s remembered for his soundbites – ‘fight them on the beaches’, ‘finest hour’, ‘special relationship’ – but these were only the icing on the cake. Churchill regarded his speeches as tools of public education, helping the British population understand what became known as ‘the people’s war’. When Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Churchill gave a radio address on the BBC about what he called “the Fourth Climacteric”, connecting it to three earlier turning points in the war. He spent hours preparing his speeches in a way that may seem inconceivable now in the days of tweets and social media. There isn’t space here to do full justice to Churchill’s impact, but one other point should be mentioned. Most British premiers had received a classical education, informed by Latin, Greek and philosophy; few had any grasp of science and technology. By contrast, Churchill loathed the classics but was fascinated by gadgets and science fiction – by the world of HG Wells. That’s why he quickly grasped the value of Ultra – the operation to intercept enemy signals intelligence – and ensured that the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were provided with an abundance of money and gifted personnel. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory The people’s war Yet there’s another side to the story of 1940 that was not voiced by Mo Mowlam. More important than Churchill’s “courage and determination” in protecting Britain from invasion after France fell were decisions during the 1930s by governments of which he was not a part. Key among these was the development of a new generation of fast monoplane fighters – Hurricanes and Spitfires – linked to the Chain Home system of radar stations giving crucial early warning of when and where enemy bombers were crossing the Channel. Churchill was aware of these developments, and contributed to some of the discussions, but these were his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he was out of office. The decisions were made while the ‘appeasers’ were in power – and they were vital in winning the Battle of Britain. That highlights a deeper point. Technological innovations such as radar and Ultra could have been developed only by an advanced industrial state – by what historian David Edgerton has called the ‘warfare state’ – often neglected in accounts of modern Britain because of a preoccupation with the welfare state. The war that Churchill waged was possible only because of a long series of decisions and developments going back to the industrial revolution. This provides a salutary reminder that an intense focus on individual leaders can blind us to structural factors that also shape historical change. Victory or bust Surviving 1940 was one thing; winning the war was very different. Three days into his premiership, Churchill told the Commons that his goal was “victory at all costs”. Yet after the French signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, that sounded like fantasy. France had been Britain’s principal ally throughout the First World War, its army anchoring the western front. Britain was now alone – and there was no western front on the continent of Europe. Britain and its empire – from Canada to India, from the Caribbean to Australasia – made a major contribution to the war, but eventual victory over Hitler and the Axis depended substantially on the Soviet Union and the US. Put simply, the Soviets provided the manpower, the Americans the firepower. Read more | 1942: Churchill's darkest hour Between June 1941 and June 1944 – from the opening of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until D-Day – more than 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. The US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, producing an abundance of munitions and supplies, much of which was shared with its allies through Lend-Lease aid. And the arrival of the US and Soviet armies in Germany in 1945 was a prelude to the Cold War division of Europe between these two superpowers. Read more | Churchill's evolving perspective on D-Day Of course, Churchill was no mere spectator in all of this. The stereotype of the ‘bulldog’ can easily blind us to his remarkable skills as improviser. Even before the fall of France, he was assiduously courting president Franklin D Roosevelt with messages, later followed by personal visits to the US. He did the same with Joseph Stalin from 1942, becoming the essential intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. During a photo shoot at the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone remarked that the ‘Big Three’ looked like the Holy Trinity, Stalin responded: “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.” The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½. Strategy for greatness All that being so, the reason why he looms so large in accounts of the war, almost obscuring anyone and anything else, is because of Churchill the historian. We remember him in part because he was utterly determined not to be forgotten. That had been true all his life. Right from the start, he had a clear strategy for greatness: hit the headlines as a soldier or a politician, then be sure to write your own account. Deeds and words: both were essential to ensure that his story became history. That’s what he did in the Second World War – a hefty six-pack of volumes published between 1948 and 1954, less than a decade after victory was won. No other war leader was a serious competitor. Roosevelt died before the war ended; Stalin published no autobiography; and the trilogy of war memoirs by Charles de Gaulle did not appear until 1954–59. So Churchill got into print quickly and in formidable detail, determined to shape the public narrative before others could do so. He was careful to say that his work was not history but “a contribution to history which will be of service to the future”, told mainly from the vantage point of Number 10. But the heavy ballast of quotation from his own minutes, memos and telegrams, and the absence of replies (partly to avoid long wrangles about copyright), had the effect, as the cabinet secretary put it, of “creating the impression that no one but he ever took an initiative”. Read more | Did Churchill and Hitler ever meet? And the choice of title – The Second World War rather than War Memoirs – enhanced the sense that Churchill’s personal story enfolded the whole global conflict. The hardback sold 2 million copies in Britain and a similar number in the US. And Churchill’s take on the war reached even larger audiences around the world through book translations and newspaper serialisations. That was not the end of Churchill’s history-making – only the end of the beginning. Before his death in 1965, he commissioned an official biography, based on privileged access to his papers. His son, Randolph, authored the first two volumes before his own death in 1968; the work was completed by the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert, with the eighth and final volume appearing in 1988. The furrows that Churchill had dug through the war were deepened further by 23 volumes of documents, a project started by Gilbert and rounded off by wealthy acolytes in the US. Screen portrayals of the 1930s and the war also kept him centre-stage, initiated by Robert Hardy in the ITV series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1981, for which Gilbert was co-scriptwriter. Read more | Books interview with Boris Johnson: "Churchill was a tremendous bully in some ways, but we needed a bully" Later depictions featured Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm, 2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour, 2017). Popular biographies took the same approach, encapsulated by Boris Johnson’s entertaining contribution, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014). Creating an icon As historians Allen Packwood and Warren Dockter have observed: “Churchill the writer played a key role in creating Churchill the icon,” adding that “ironically, in doing so he also raised his own profile to such a level that challenges to his reputation became inevitable.” Even before Churchill died, an edited version of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, wartime chief of the Imperial General Staff, revealed some of the challenges of working with this volatile genius. Within a year of Churchill’s death his doctor, Lord Moran, went into print with Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, provoking a storm of controversy about the ethics of a physician writing about his patient. And in 1970, Robert Rhodes James, formerly one of Randolph’s research assistants, published a biography of Churchill up to the Second World War. In it he argued that, had Churchill died in 1939, his life would have been deemed A Study in Failure. Seen that way, the war premiership stood out as an aberration. Like any historical personage, over time Churchill was becoming a figure of controversy, and the mass of documents published by the Churchillians fed the debate, both for and against. In any case, historical perspectives inevitably shift with time. Mo Mowlam, his BBC champion in 2002, was born in 1949. For people of that generation, and for those who lived through the war, the conflict still seemed all too present – not least in the urban wastelands and prefab housing that bore witness to the Blitz in many cities, and in the emotional power of Remembrance Sunday. Yet for ‘Gen Z’, born in the late 1990s and 2000s, the Second World War can seem almost prehistoric. Britain today is far more ethnically diverse than the predominantly white country led by Churchill in 1940–45, largely the result of postwar immigration from the former British empire. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Earlier statistics are not precise, but census returns for the past few decades show that the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying themselves as ‘white’ fell from 91.3 per cent in 2001 to 81.7 per cent in 2021, by which time 9.3 per cent of residents described themselves as Asian, 4 per cent as black and 2.9 per cent as mixed race. Although many of these people had been born in Britain, they often had a different sense of their heritage from Mowlam’s generation, influenced by parents or grandparents who grew up in the Caribbean or south Asia. In recent years, there has been a passionate debate about India’s war. For that nation, the focal wartime trauma was not the Blitz but the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which killed perhaps 3 million. Causes and contributing factors are complex and hard to balance, including floods, crop disease and wartime inflation in Bengal, the disastrous fall in rice imports after Japan’s conquest of Burma, the slow reaction of the British authorities, and the shortage of shipping in 1943–44 because of the Allied build-up for D-Day. But in Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010), Indian-American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee blamed much of the policy failure on the PM. Churchill’s contempt for what he called (privately) in February 1945 the “foul race” of Hindus was noted by many British politicians and officials of the time, and drove his conviction that Indians were not capable of self-government. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war The debate was fanned anew by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the UK after 2019. Accusations of genocide were levelled at Churchill, and his statue in London’s Parliament Square was daubed with “was a racist”. Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change. A rival perspective It’s often said that Churchill’s attitude to India was just part of the mental baggage of Victorian England. A glance at Clement Attlee, his successor as PM in 1945, offers a useful corrective. In fact, examining Attlee’s rise to power provides an intriguing perspective on Churchill’s world view. Born in 1883 – thus also a Victorian, though eight years younger than Churchill – Attlee grew up in a prosperous professional family in the south-west London suburb of Putney. Whereas Churchill’s imperialist ideology was shaped by service as a soldier on the frontiers of Victoria’s empire, Attlee’s crucible was London’s East End. Attlee lived in a social work settlement for nearly a decade before the First World War. This opened his eyes to urban deprivation, but also to the potential of many adolescents in London’s docklands if given discipline and motivation. He became a lifelong socialist. Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Unlike many Labour men of that era, Major Attlee was no pacifist. He served as an officer in the Gallipoli campaign and on the western front. But he was not an imperial diehard like Churchill, who never set foot in India after the 1890s. Two extended tours around the Raj with a parliamentary delegation in 1928–29 convinced Attlee that India must follow Australia and New Zealand along the path to self-government and eventual independence. And he acted on that conviction as prime minister in 1945–51. With the death of Churchill in January 1965, Attlee penned a reflective tribute, judging him to have been “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known”. Not because he was the greatest warrior or strategist, but because “he was able to solve the problem that democratic countries in total war find crucial and may find fatal: relations between the civil and military leaders.” Attlee had in mind the 1914–18 feuds between ‘Frock Coats’ and ‘Brass Hats’, but maybe also the ‘Bonapartist’ tendency of successful war leaders to seize political power. When Churchill put himself before the electorate in 1945 and was resoundingly defeated, he accepted their verdict, despite deep resentment at being kicked out. Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Attlee regretted the fact that Churchill did not retire from politics in 1945. “I had seen enough of him during the war to be sure that, unless there was a war on, he would not make much of a prime minister,” he wrote. Instead, “what Britain required when the war was over was an architect, somebody who could build new parts into our society, and repair damage.” Attlee was, of course, positioning himself as the architect trying to repair the damage of two world wars and rebuild British society on socialist lines. Both Churchill and Attlee were deeply patriotic, but they differed about the essence of national greatness. For Winston it was the empire, whereas Clem saw imperial overstretch as an outdated burden. Despite the eventual bloodbath over the partition of India, Attlee was proud of bringing the Raj to what he saw as a long-overdue end, and of helping transform empire into Commonwealth. At home, what mattered for him was the concept of social security he had evolved in the East End, and “the duty of the state to act as the coordinating factor in making all individual effort work for the good of the citizen”. Commonwealth and socialism defined his sense of what it meant for Britain to be great. In this piece I’ve emphasised the importance of seeing Churchill in context – against the wider dynamics of the Second World War and in relation to his contemporaries. Back in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling rebuked those who held a myopic view of English history: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Adapting Kipling, we might ask today: “What should they know of Churchill who only Churchill know?” By definition, a biography tends to isolate its subject as good or bad. Placing a leader in context is surely the task of any historian. For me, the question of who was the greatest ever Briton makes no sense. But I’ve no doubt that, in his ‘finest hour’, Winston Churchill did win the immortality he craved. David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023) This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why was Spencer Perceval assassinated? Inside the killing of a Georgian prime minister
The assassination of the prime minister Spencer Perceval on 11 May 1812 was greeted with celebration as well as dismay. Professor Gordon Pentland explains why…
How was Spencer Perceval assassinated? It was early evening on 11 May 1812, and the prime minister was running late. He was rushing to get to a session of evidence on a question that had been disturbing his busy government: whether sanctions to counter Napoleon’s Continental System (a form of economic warfare pursued through an embargo on British trade with Europe) were doing more harm than good. Perceval’s mind was probably elsewhere when he was confronted in the lobby by a well-built and well-dressed man, who raised a steel pistol to the prime minister’s chest and shot him at near point-blank range through the heart. A Mayfair solicitor, Henry Burgess, witnessed the event: “I heard a hoarse cry of ‘murder, murder’ – and he exclaimed ‘Oh’ & fell on his face.” Perceval was dead within minutes. Who was Spencer Perceval, and was he liked? Perceval, like most prime ministers, fiercely divided opinion. He had come to politics from a legal background in the 1790s, into the heat and light generated by debates over the French revolution. Perceval was a convinced evangelical, a family man with a fairly inflexible morality and one who embodied the long transition to Victorian ‘seriousness’ by always dressing in black. To some people, he was ‘Christianity personified’, a beacon of true and vital religion in an age when conservatives were lamenting the spread of infidelity and immorality. To others, such as journalist William Cobbett, he was ‘Old Hypocrisy Personified’, a fervent anti-radical who had been involved in some of the reactionary cause célèbres of the age and in the imprisonment of a number of prominent radical leaders (including Cobbett himself). Read more | Is it true that an angry mob of Dutchmen killed and ate their own prime minister in 1672? Perceval came to the premiership in 1809, at a challenging period marked by war and the political instability that had followed the deaths of two political giants, Pitt (Perceval’s mentor) and Fox, in 1806. Given that the foreign secretary and the war secretary of the outgoing ministry had fought a duel on Putney Heath, Perceval, equipped with forensic debating skills and a shrewd managerial style, can be credited with bringing some stability back to high politics. And while he perhaps lacked the breadth of vision to become a truly ‘great’ prime minister, Perceval is increasingly recognised as one of those hard-working but unsung architects of Britain’s eventual victory over Napoleon. What happened after Spencer Perceval was shot? Panic was quick to spread around parliament and searches were promptly ordered to ascertain that the murder was not the start of a general onslaught. Such a response was hardly surprising: not only was Britain at war, but the government had also been coming under pressure from two domestic movements. First, a revived radicalism had coalesced over questions of corruption in high places and was increasingly rallying around the leadership of the wealthy and charismatic radical MP, Sir Francis Burdett. The sense of political instability created by Burdett’s calls for political reform was compounded by the second movement, Luddism, which spread from Nottingham from the spring of 1811. The followers of the mythical ‘Ned Ludd’ engaged in a range of creative and often violent protests aimed both at certain types of machinery and at individuals. Less than two weeks before Perceval’s death, Luddites had murdered a mill owner in West Yorkshire. There seemed to be plenty of reasons for jumpy parliamentarians to suspect that the killing of Perceval was part of some wider conspiracy. Perceval’s assassin, however, quite calmly gave himself up – “a mouse might have secured him with a bit of thread” according to Burgess – and handed over his pistols. This demeanour of calm detachment and resignation was marked in the assassin – John Bellingham – across the week that followed, as his story was unfolded in newspapers, pamphlets, and accounts of his trial. Who shot Spencer Perceval? Perceval's assassin was a man called John Bellingham. In many ways, he was utterly unremarkable: a middle-aged, middle-class man, with a wife and two children. He was a man, however, who carried with him a long-simmering grievance. In the summer of 1804, Bellingham – a commercial agent – had arrived at the Russian port of Archangel on a business trip. He was prevented by the authorities from either returning on or loading his goods onto the ship he had chartered and was instead detained for an alleged debt of 4,890 roubles. His detention in various Russian penal institutions was to last five years. Throughout, Bellingham maintained that he was not liable for the debt, but had been fitted up by two Russian merchants as payback for what they thought was Bellingham’s role in exposing a fraudulent insurance claim. When he was finally released in October 1809, Bellingham had an overpowering sense of injustice. Not only had he been wrongfully imprisoned by the Russian authorities, but he had also been let down by his own government and, in particular, by Granville Leveson-Gower, the British ambassador in St Petersburg. On his return to England, his attempts to secure a public discussion of his case and to have it addressed in parliament became nearly a full-time job. He petitioned and was rebuffed by nearly every branch of government that might possibly have some interest in the matter. Britain's Greatest Prime Minister Member exclusive | Which of Britain's Prime Ministers deserves the title? Find out in our podcast series Listen to all episodes now Utterly frustrated, he began to visit the gallery of the House of Commons. He also purchased a pair of steel pistols from a gunsmith and visited a London tailor, who made him a pocket designed to accommodate these weapons. Bellingham’s murder of Perceval was his last desperate attempt to secure some ‘airtime’ for his cause. He was clear in writing to his business partner that “I could stand it no longer and resolved to finish the affair by an appeal to a criminal court whether government can refuse justice or no”, and spoke of his “tranquillity of mind” in knowing that his grievance would finally receive some discussion. What happened to Spencer Perceval's killer? He was tried on 15 May 1812, four days after the assassination. He refused any idea that he might plead insanity and stuck to his own reasoned defence of his actions. He even came close to claiming that the government had sanctioned the assassination: “I even had a carte blanche from the British government to right myself in any way I might be able to discover. I have done so.” The speed of the trial allowed for no evidence to be brought to attest to Bellingham’s supposed insanity (his father, for example, had been mentally ill and there was some suggestion he had committed suicide) and Bellingham was found guilty of murder. He was executed on Monday 18 May, exactly one week after he murdered Perceval. What was the reaction to Spencer Perceval's assassination? Security was tight around both the trial and the execution, and with good reason. Even as Bellingham was being taken from the crime scene to Newgate there was evidence of support for the murder. A crowd had gathered to boo the soldiers and cried “Burdett for ever,” clearly believing the event to be an act of political radicalism. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge later came across men in a London pub drinking to the assassination and toasting Burdett. Evidence of other celebrations came from far and wide. The journalist William Cobbett witnessed the execution from his cell window at Newgate and offered a memorable account: “Demonstrations of joy, the most unequivocal, amongst the people in several of the most populous parts of England… at Nottingham the church bells were rung, at Leicester there was a supper and songs; at Sheffield there were sheep roasted whole.” Read more | Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period Even if accounts such as those of Cobbett (who was in Newgate for seditious libel against Perceval’s government) were overdrawn, it is hard to ignore a certain level of sympathy for the assassin rather than the victim. For example, over the coming months the assassination was referred to time and again in anonymous threatening letters (a staple of Luddite activity) to the unpopular prince regent and others. Former ambassador Leveson-Gower, who Bellingham had identified as the real cause of his grievances and would rather have murdered, was one prominent target of hate mail: “Dreadfully are you deceived in thinking Bellingham had no accomplice… before many days are passed you’ll meet the fate poor Bellingham designed you.” For many, however, this “savage joy” was profoundly shocking. Perceval’s death was greeted with sincere lamentations (Viscount Castlereagh apparently broke down in the Commons when speaking about the murder), with numerous sermons and with reflections on what such a dreadful act said about the ‘state of the nation’. For many, assassination was, as a former foreign secretary George Canning put it, “foreign to the character and abhorrent to the feelings of Englishmen”. While it might be the kind of thing which was regrettably too common in other countries, if such a means of settling political and personal grievances were adopted in Britain then something was very seriously wrong. This sense of national tragedy is best captured by the monument in Westminster Abbey, voted and paid for by Perceval’s parliamentary colleagues shortly after his death. It depicts Perceval as the classical statesman, cruelly murdered in the senate in the midst of his public duties. Where is Spencer Perceval buried? A more personal and human sense of loss is communicated by the inscription below Francis Chantrey’s monument at Perceval’s burial place, in St Luke’s church in Charlton: “But the hand of the assassin not only broke asunder the brilliant chains of duty which bind a Statesman to his native land and made a void in the high and eloquent councils of the nation. It severed ties more delicate, those of conjugal and parental affection, and turned a home of peace and love into a house of mourning and desolation.” In spite of these monuments (and others like them in Northampton and Lincoln’s Inn) the murder seems to have been quickly forgotten. There was no immediate or obvious change to the almost non-existent security provided for front-rank politicians. Six years later it was only luck and his habit of bounding up stairs that saved Palmerston from an attempted assassination by another disappointed petitioner. As for Perceval, he is probably only remembered now during pub quizzes for the dubious distinction of being the only prime minister to have been murdered in office. Bellingham seems barely to be remembered at all. Gordon Pentland is a professor in history at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on the history of Britain since the French Revolution This article was first published in the May 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Harold Wilson: 5 facts about the Labour Party prime minister
We bring you five facts about Labour prime minister Harold Wilson – from his friendship with Queen Elizabeth II to his achievements in parliament…
How much do you know about the former leader of the Labour Party? Here we bring you five facts about Harold Wilson… Harold Wilson was the youngest member of the cabinet in the 20th century Harold Wilson, full name James Harold Wilson, was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire on 11 March 1916. The son of an industrial chemist and schoolteacher, he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Oxford before being drafted into the civil service following the outbreak of the Second World War. He was a keen academic in his early life, but ultimately pursued a career in politics and became MP for Ormskirk in 1945. In 1947, prime minister Clement Attlee made Wilson – then aged 31 – president of the Board of Trade, securing his place as Britain’s youngest cabinet minister since William Pitt the Younger in 1782. Read more | A brief history of the Labour Party Wilson holds a number of other records: he was the first Labour prime minister to be elected for 13 years, following his win at the general election of 1964; he is the longest-serving Labour prime minister of the 20th century; and he won four out of the five general elections he contested – more than any other postwar British leader. He was a “modest” man, according to those who knew him In Wilson’s obituary from the Guardian, journalist Geoffrey Goodman recounted the time he interviewed Wilson shortly after his win at the 1964 election. Upon being asked how he felt, Wilson replied: "I still can't believe it. Just think, here I am, the lad from behind those lace curtains in the Huddersfield house you saw – here I am about to go to see the Queen and become prime minister... I still can't believe it." Wilson's government was responsible for abolishing capital punishment and decriminalising homosexuality Two of the most significant acts to be implemented during Wilson’s tenure as prime minister were the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 – which suspended the death penalty in England, Wales and Scotland – and the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised certain homosexual acts. Read more | A brief history of capital punishment in Britain Queen Elizabeth II maintained a good relationship with Wilson It has been noted by many historians that Harold Wilson and Queen Elizabeth II got along remarkably well. Unlike many of his predecessors, Wilson did not come from a traditional ruling class background, and consequently he has been attributed to opening the Queen’s eyes to a world beyond her social class. Royal biographer Robert Lacey noted, in particular, that he “persuaded the Queen to drop a lot of stuffy protocol that had remained since Queen Victoria”. Read more | Elizabeth II and her prime ministers Like other prime ministers before him, Wilson enjoyed weekly meetings with the Queen and held her in high regard. “He said they were the only times when he could have a serious conversation, which would not be leaked, with somebody who wasn’t after his job,” wrote Francis Beckett in BBC History Magazine's 'Queen Elizabeth: 90 Glorious Years' bookazine. “She enjoyed them too – after Churchill, Wilson may have been her favourite PM.” The Queen would often invite the Labour politician to enjoy picnics in Balmoral alongside the wider royal family, it has been reported. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-51858080-86867be-e1712821764262.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Queen Elizabeth II with British prime minister Harold Wilson, cJune 1969. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Queen Elizabeth II with British prime minister Harold Wilson, cJune 1969. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> He was a liberal politician – or at least seemed to be Wilson’s political leanings were generally liberal throughout his career. “He brought his party, bruised and battered, but intact, into the modern era,” wrote Francis Beckett in BBC History Magazine. “His governments were active in improving education, creating the Open University, building schools, and moving towards a comprehensive system.” Critics, however, have been sceptical of Wilson’s “achievements” in social reform and domestic policy. Journalist Paul Foot, for example, commented that he was “always an unprincipled opportunist and the left were naive for believing otherwise”. Wilson died on 23 May 1995 at the age of 79 from colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. His own political views can be found in his books The Labour Government, 1964–1970 (1971); The Governance of Britain (1976); and Final Term: The Labour Government 1974–76 (1979).
The ex factor: why David Cameron’s return isn’t unprecedented
David Cameron’s recent appointment as foreign secretary raised eyebrows among politicians and public alike. But, as Richard Toye explains, he’s far from the first former prime minister to enjoy a post-number-10 cabinet career
Rishi Sunak’s decision to appoint David Cameron as foreign secretary on 13 November sparked widespread surprise – even shock. This was partly because Cameron’s time in number 10 Downing Street left a controversial legacy – including the fallout from the Brexit referendum – from which Sunak had earlier distanced himself in an effort to present himself as the ‘change’ candidate. History quiz: British prime ministers But it was also because today we don’t usually expect former prime ministers to return from the political grave. Yet there are plenty of examples from earlier eras of ex-PMs who, having seemingly left the limelight, went on to enjoy successful second acts. The first point to note is that a significant number of premiers, having lost office once, returned as prime minister. The first holder of that role is generally considered to have been Robert Walpole, who acted as de-facto PM between 1721 and 1742. Of the 56 men and women who have followed him, 17 had two or more non-consecutive terms; 15 of these having held office before 1940. In the period before universal suffrage was achieved in 1928, changes of government often hinged less on the vicissitudes of public opinion than on the shifting balance of forces within parliament, and sometimes on the monarch’s relationship with the resident of number 10. A prime minister who lost power was not necessarily terminally discredited; it could make sense for them to bide time, waiting for the chance to return. For example, William Pitt the Younger served from 1783 to 1801, then again from 1804 to 1806, when he died in office. Lord John Russell established the record for the longest gap between prime ministerial terms, serving 1846–52 and again 1865–66. The only prime minister to have served four non-consecutive terms (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94) was William Ewart Gladstone. In the modern era, Winston Churchill was defeated in the general election of July 1945 and lost a further election in 1950 but won the following year, serving as PM until his retirement in 1955. Harold Wilson was the last to serve non-consecutive terms, in 1964–70 and 1974–76. Given the turmoil in recent politics, we might speculate that, had he not given up his Commons seat shortly after stepping down as prime minister, Cameron could now be eyeing a return to Downing Street rather than serving in the lesser role from the House of Lords. Settling for second It may seem surprising that, like Cameron, so many who once held the top place were later willing to accept subordinate positions. Certainly, some ex-premiers – such as the Liberal HH Asquith – regarded offers of lesser posts as insulting. But Asquith himself had in 1915 recruited a Conservative predecessor to his cabinet: Arthur Balfour, whose short premiership (1902–05) was rather unsuccessful, and who was later forced out of the Tory leadership. However, he was an experienced figure with a willingness to work across party lines. When the political upheavals of the First World War forced Asquith to form a coalition, Balfour was a logical choice as First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister in charge of the Royal Navy. Second only to Asquith in the cabinet hierarchy, Balfour thus outranked Andrew Bonar Law, the official leader of the Conservative Party. The following year, Asquith was displaced by David Lloyd George, who made Balfour foreign secretary in his new coalition. In 1917, with the agreement of the cabinet, Balfour issued his famous declaration stating in part that: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In 1919, he became Lord President of the Council, and finally stood down as a cabinet minister 10 years later, at the age of 80. The Lord Presidency did not come with departmental responsibilities but, in the right hands, it could be a powerful role – one held by three further ex-prime ministers. The first of these was Stanley Baldwin, who occupied the post in the early 1930s as a member of the cross-party National Government under Ramsay MacDonald – and, arguably, was the real power behind MacDonald’s throne. As that PM’s health declined, Baldwin worked hard to maintain the cohesion of the government, and in 1935, with an election on the horizon, Baldwin and MacDonald simply swapped jobs. MacDonald, by that stage a broken man, was kept in the cabinet largely because, as a former Labour figure, he helped the government maintain its thinning ‘National’ veneer. Neville Chamberlain also ended his career as Lord President after he was forced out as prime minister in May 1940, remaining in Churchill’s war cabinet for several months in that role. He stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party, too, placing him in a powerful position – and putting Churchill’s premiership at risk – as the military situation deteriorated. Churchill also wanted to recruit another of his former bosses, Lloyd George, but was unsuccessful – in part because of the ‘Welsh Wizard’s’ refusal to serve with Chamberlain, whom he loathed. “I have received a very great deal of help from Chamberlain,” Churchill told Lloyd George. “His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.” Nevertheless, Churchill may well have breathed a sigh of relief when Chamberlain, suffering from cancer, finally stood down. Home again The most recent precedent for Cameron’s appointment dates back more than 50 years. Lord Home served as foreign secretary in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government and then, when Macmillan resigned in 1963, emerged as his surprise successor. Becoming prime minister required him to disclaim his peerage and fight a by-election. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he became, served only a year in number 10 before being narrowly defeated in the general election of 1964. In 1970, Edward Heath, his replacement as Tory leader, gave him the top job in the Foreign Office. Home showed decisiveness with the expulsion of 105 alleged Soviet spies, which did not damage UK–USSR relations as much as many had expected. He brought experience to a relatively untried cabinet, and ran his department with competence at a time of domestic and international turbulence. Sunak must be hoping that Cameron will be an equally cool head. Lord Rosebery, briefly prime minister in the 1890s, once wrote that having an ex-premier in the cabinet is “a fleeting and dangerous luxury”. However, as we have seen, many former PMs have served in cabinet roles with distinction, and for substantial periods of time. Given the current stage in the electoral cycle, Cameron’s appointment may well prove fleeting, though it is not obviously dangerous. The question remains as to whether Sunak will ever enjoy the luxury of appointing Cameron’s replacement. Richard Toye is professor of history at the University of Exeter
8 scandals that shocked Georgian Britain
Mass-produced newspapers, pamphlets and satirical drawings kept a voracious Georgian public well sated with salacious stories and gossip, but every now and again there would be a scandal that went too far. From royal marriages to ghostly murder enquiries, Emily Brand explores eight incidents that rocked Georgian Britain to its core
The king’s brother weds a widowed commoner In November 1771, Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn, handed his brother, George III, a note. In it he confessed his marriage to a young widow, Anne Horton (née Luttrell), in a secret ceremony. The horrified king demanded that the couple leave court, declaring that the alliance of prince and commoner “must inevitably ruin him and distress his relations”. Within days, gossip columns were awash with tales of the duke being “desperately in love”. Wedding prints were published in The Lady’s Magazine, and letters alleged details of Anne’s disreputable father and “eye-lashes a yard long”. “The violence of the duke’s attachment to Mrs Horton has ended in a terrible mess,” wrote one gentleman. “What an event,” gasped another – “the Luttrell Duchess of Cumberland!” On the podcast | Emily Brand shares stories that scandalised Georgian society In the second half of the 18th century, matrimony in the fashionable Georgian world was undergoing a sea change. Expectations of love within marriage blossomed, and members of the younger generation of the upper classes were increasingly defying arranged matches. And when legislation passed in 1753 laid out strict requirements for a valid marriage, including parental consent for people under 21, a trend for eloping to Scotland was launched. For the royal family, an unsuitable match risked damaging foreign alliances and the reputation of the monarchy itself. Cumberland had already proved himself to be a liability: having allegedly married another commoner in secret in 1767, two years later he had been sued for ‘criminal conversation’ with a baron’s wife. After this latest indiscretion, the king took decisive action. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 forbade descendants of George II from marrying without the monarch’s permission. (The Duke of Gloucester subsequently admitted sheepishly that he had married an illegitimate commoner in 1766.) Later on, the act caused problems for the king’s son, the future George IV, whose clandestine marriage to a Catholic widow in 1785 would be ruled illegitimate. In 2013, the legislation was amended so that only the first six people in the line of succession required the monarch’s permission. The trial of the swindling ‘thief takers’ Before the establishment of professional policing, law enforcement relied on a network of local parish constables, watchmen and ‘thief-takers’, who claimed state rewards for apprehending criminals. In 1756, the arrest of publican and thief-taker Stephen MacDaniel exposed the potential for corruption that skulked at the heart of the 18th-century criminal justice system. Working with accomplices for around six years, MacDaniel regularly brought offenders before London’s magistrates. But after he brought forward two ‘thieves’ in 1754, one accomplice exposed their scam: with food, gin and tales of expensive goods, they persuaded “poor friendless Lads” to take part in or witness the ‘robbery’ of one of their own men, before another gang member apprehended them. They were then hauled before the courts to face a death sentence. Following MacDaniel’s trial, along with three others, for perversion of justice in February 1756, it was estimated that they had racked up £1,200 in rewards. The men were sentenced to imprisonment and the pillory, where public rage was so acute that “such a multitude of people was never known to be assembled on the like occasion”, according to the Public Advertiser. Two men died after being beaten in the pillory; MacDaniel and the other died later in Newgate Prison. Murder and the Cock Lane Ghost In January 1762, word spread around London that a man had been accused of murder – with the finger being pointed at him from beyond the grave. Investigating a series of seemingly supernatural knocks only made in the presence of Richard Parsons’ young daughter, Elizabeth, an excited Methodist preacher established communication and ascertained that the ‘ghost’ was Fanny, the recently deceased mistress of Parsons’ former lodger, William Kent – who was accused by the phantom of her murder by arsenic poisoning. Newspapers picked up the story, and the public – including author Samuel Johnson and Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany – crowded into the house in Cock Lane for seances. Public opinion was divided: while terrified witnesses insisted that it was “no laughing matter”, The London Magazine wrote that anyone who “exercises his rational faculties, unfettered by the chains and shackles of superstition” must recognise this as fraud. In February the affair descended into revulsion and then dismay as an investigative committee resorted to opening Fanny’s coffin. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was discovered to have made the noises by scratching at bits of wood hidden in her bedsheets – on the orders of her father, who had sought revenge on Kent over a disputed debt. The hoax uncovered, Kent was cleared of the “wicked and scandalous imputation”, while Parsons was found guilty of conspiracy, and sentenced to imprisonment and the pillory. The affair of the Cock Lane Ghost energised religious controversy, delivering a public blow to the reputation of the more superstitious Methodism against ‘rational’ Anglican thought. Along with other impostures – including the 17th-century Bilston boy who faked demonic possession to avoid school, and the 1720s woman who appeared to give birth to rabbits – such Georgian ghost hoaxes further dented belief in the supernatural in an increasingly scientific world. The prime minister parades his mistress, then divorces his wife When Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, discreetly separated from his wife, Anne Liddell, in 1764, he was careful to avoid scandal. Unfortunately, this prudence did not extend to his relationship with courtesan Nancy Parsons, who was branded “one of the commonest creatures in London” by gossip Horace Walpole. Living openly with his mistress, Grafton allowed her to preside over his dinner table and paraded her at the opera. As a promising young politician, this was unwise; after he became prime minister in 1768, it was a gift to his enemies. As bad press and titillating exposés proliferated, Grafton came to embody all the out-of-touch vices of the elite, and his fitness for office was questioned. “When we see a man act in this manner we may admit the shameless depravity of his heart,” proclaimed one commentator, “but what are we to think of his understanding?” Grafton was accused of neglecting his country and setting Nancy’s whims over national security. Claiming that the couple had illegally smuggled goods from France, politician John Wilkes even called for their arrest. Read more | Georgian Britain: sex in high places When the duchess fell pregnant by her own lover, the Earl of Upper Ossory, a divorce by Act of Parliament was the only option for salvaging their reputations and remarrying. Despite colluding to keep the dirtiest laundry from court, servants’ testimonies of illicit trysts were printed and read voraciously. The divorce was finalised in March 1769, and both remarried within weeks. (Nancy was dropped unceremoniously.) As the public became increasingly disillusioned with the “Folly and Excess” of those in power, the scandal sparked a series of (unsuccessful) calls for legislation prohibiting adultery. Grafton’s record as the only prime minister to divorce and remarry while in office was broken only with the recent tenure of Boris Johnson. The South Sea Bubble pushes Britain to bankruptcy In the autumn of 1720, London was in shock and desolation. Following a summer of unparalleled investment mania, the implosion of stocks in the South Sea Company had bankrupted thousands and brought the economy to its knees. “The vast inundation of the S. Sea has drowned all,” regretted poet Alexander Pope, “except a few unrighteous men” who had grown “richer for the calamities of others”. In 1713, the company had been licensed to conduct the slave trade with Spanish America, and huge profits were promised. When those failed to materialise, the company directors dabbled in illicit trading, and evaded providing accounts. In 1720, the government became further entangled when the company secured an agreement to refinance the national debt. Hopes were raised of expanding trade and increasing the value of shares; a propaganda campaign plugged the actual short fall and boosted public confidence, while new money was paid out to older investors – a ponzi scheme. Many people bought shares on credit in hopes of huge profits from selling them in future. Share prices surged to over £1,000 in August, then – as people sought to realise their profits, and no income from the company materialised – plummeted, falling to £124 in December. Amid this “general calamity”, fortunes disappeared and suicide rates soared. The company’s chief cashier fled with a ledger of incriminating evidence. Along with concurrent financial bubbles in France and the Dutch Republic, the fraud contributed to the first international stock market crash. Amid intense popular backlash, the scheme was lambasted in newspapers and prints. Outrage was directed, of course, at greedy speculators; there was little sympathy for African lives stolen and lost. The estates of company directors were confiscated to alleviate the national debt, and John Aislabie – the unrepentant chancellor of the Exchequer, who had made a fortune – was imprisoned. The newly appointed chancellor, Robert Walpole, introduced emergency measures to shore up Britain’s economy, ultimately emerging as the nation’s first ‘prime minister’. A love triangle and shambolic duels The unconventional courtship between renowned singer Elizabeth Linley and aspiring young writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan began with a clandestine flight to France in March 1772. That alone would spark sensation enough, but Sheridan’s note explaining that he was acting to protect Elizabeth from the unwanted advances of married military officer Thomas Mathews embroiled all three in a very public affair of honour. Retaliating with an advert in the Bath Chronicle, Mathews branded Sheridan a “Liar and treacherous Scoundrel”; feeling bound by “the laws of honour”, the defamed Sheridan challenged him to a duel. Duelling was a murky business. Despite being a popularly accepted means for an upper-class gentleman to defend his reputation – or that of a lady – he might yet be charged with manslaughter or murder. Over the Georgian era, hundreds of such combats with sword or pistol were recorded in England (the true number can never be known), provoked by slights ranging from accusations of military cowardice to writing unchivalrous poetry about a lady. Read more | A survivor’s guide to Georgian marriage When Sheridan and Mathews clashed swords in a London tavern in May 1772, the latter was quickly disarmed and forced to apologise. Unable to bear the humiliation – Sheridan jubilantly set about spreading the story – Mathews issued another challenge. The even messier second duel, fought near Bath in July, was derided in the press as “an unmanly combat”. According to one letter, after both men’s swords shattered, “they threw each other down, and with the broken Pieces hacked at each other rolling upon the Ground”. Mathews fled, leaving his opponent with apparently fatal wounds. Recovering, Sheridan and Elizabeth were legally married, albeit in the face of reluctance from both families. Enacted and reported in mortifying detail by the newspapers, the affair was later immortalised in poetry, ballads and even in Sheridan’s own plays. From ambitious MP to “a disgrace to the age” While sex scandals were very much grist to the 18th-century gossip mill, the disgrace of wealthy 24-year-old writer and MP William Beckford in autumn 1784 stood apart. He had been discovered in flagrante with 16-year-old William Courtenay, heir to Powderham Castle in Devon, after the boy’s tutor peered through a bedroom keyhole. Even worse came when information from their letters, intercepted by Courtenay’s uncle, was leaked to the press. To modern eyes, the most troubling aspect would be the age difference: though it’s uncertain when the relationship began, Courtenay was just 11 when the two met. For Georgian society, the charge of homosexuality caused more consternation. Sodomy was illegal – a capital offence, in fact. Though same-sex relationships are well attested in records of the time, exposure could mean imprisonment or execution. Long-standing rumours about Beckford’s sexuality had been quelled by his marriage in 1783. But the new revelations, spread by newspapers, letters and tea-table chatter, derailed both of the men’s lives. Beckford’s expected peerage evaporated, and he lamented that Courtenay, “poor wretch… is mangled, bruised and smashed every day”. The Morning Herald wrote scornfully of “a Grammatical mistake of Mr. B and the Hon. Mr. C, in regard to the genders”, sinking them “below the lowest class of brutes”. Lady Milbanke – later embroiled in similar scandal as the mother-in-law of Lord Byron – scoffed: “What an infamous wretch is Beckford! & what a disgrace to the Age that he should be suffered to walk about!” Ignoring his mother’s recommendation to dispel suspicion by gathering “half a dozen women about him” in Covent Garden, Beckford escaped social censure and potential arrest with a self-imposed exile in Europe until 1796, living reclusively thereafter. Courtenay continued to be “reviled and insulted” by neighbours decades later, eventually emigrating to America in 1811. The death penalty for homosexual sex was abolished in 1861, 17 years after Beckford’s death. It was not decriminalised until 1967. George IV brands his queen a cheat – hypocritically In August 1820, the sensational trial of Queen Caroline, estranged wife of newly minted George IV, dominated the news. After 25 years of unhappy marriage – 15 of which had been blighted by very public mud-slinging about promiscuity and infidelities on both sides – she stood formally accused of adultery. A bill was proposed to dissolve their marriage and deprive her of the rank of queen; a guilty verdict on this charge from the Houses of Parliament would allow the king to discard her once and for all. Unfortunately for the unpopular George, the story snowballed into much more than just another salacious royal dispute, as the ‘persecution’ of his wife was condemned in the press and lampooned in satirical prints. Fervent support for Caroline sprang up among all classes. According to radical journalist William Cobbett, the affair “let loose for a time every tongue and pen in England”. For some, the case was entwined with women’s rights. “Poor woman,” Jane Austen had observed as early as 1813, “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a woman, and because I hate her husband.” The parliamentary debate – amounting to a trial of the queen – highlighted the double standards in divorce law: whereas men could sue on the basis of adultery, women could not escape marriage without evidence of physical cruelty. So while witnesses spilled damning details of Caroline bathing with her Italian lover, George’s succession of brazen infidelities was deemed irrelevant. The case also provided a rallying point for a public eager to show their displeasure with their extravagant new monarch and his increasingly oppressive Tory government. Provoking a “daily mobbing” of parliament and hundreds of petitions that poured in from across the country, the trial not only sparked popular political protest but also proved that it could be effective. The force of public opinion made it clear that the proposed bill would never pass in the Commons. It was ultimately dropped, providing a victory of sorts for the people and an important moment in 19th-century radical activism. Of the Tory government, one newspaper gloated that: “They are beaten, disgraced, and humbled, and put in that place which they deserve.” This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
John Major: a brief guide to Britain’s prime minister in the 1990s
A new fictionalised portrayal of John Major, prime minister of Britain between 1990–97 and the last Conservative in Downing Street in the 20th century, is upon us as Jonny Lee Miller takes on the role in season 5 of The Crown. Richard Toye explores how Major became the successor to Margaret Thatcher, his leadership style – and the real story of his approach to the royals…
Margaret Thatcher – who served as Britain’s first female prime minister from 1979 to 1990, having won three general elections – was always going to be a hard act to follow, regardless of what people thought of her political decisions. Her successor, John Major, at first achieved surprising success by leading the Conservatives to a record-breaking fourth election victory in 1992. But soon after that unexpected triumph, things fell apart. For the majority of his time in Downing Street he had to battle a succession of crises and internal party enemies. The fact that he was personally liked and respected by many voters was not enough to save him from a landslide loss at the hands of New Labour in the 1997 general election. Read more about the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The road to politics Though he was often dismissively described as “grey” as a politician, Major was born in 1943 to a rather colourful family: his father was an aged, one-time music hall performer and owner of a garden ornament business; his mother was a former dancer. The young Major attended Rutlish School, a grammar school in southwest London, but, amidst his family’s financial troubles, he left with few qualifications. After a few years, he settled into a career in banking. In 1970, he married Norma Johnson and went on to have two children. He always harboured political ambitions, however: joining the Young Conservatives as a teenager and being elected as a councillor in London in 1968. In 1979, in the election that brought Thatcher to power, Major was elected to a safe Tory seat, and he quietly grew in influence during the 1980s, entering the cabinet as chief secretary to the Treasury. Up to this point, his rise had largely been without trace. While Thatcher had no plans to retire, she came to regard Major as a potential party leader in the future. During her turbulent final phase in office, she appointed him foreign secretary in July 1989, and then, just three months later, chancellor of the exchequer. Not long before her downfall, Major (who by then had become chancellor) helped persuade Thatcher, against her own better judgement, that Britain should join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which required the value of the pound to be maintained within a fixed band. He saw this as an anti-inflationary tool, but the decision turned out to have catastrophic consequences for his own premiership a few years later. Through the doors of Number 10 Following Thatcher’s forced resignation in November 1990, Major beat two other candidates, Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine, in the battle to replace her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was symbolic of his collegial approach that he gave both of his defeated rivals important posts in his cabinet, and yet also revealing of his political cunning that he handed Heseltine the tricky task of replacing the Community Charge (or ‘poll tax’), the highly controversial local government taxation system that had helped bring Thatcher down. From the first, Major had problems with Thatcher, who now sat on the backbenches. “I shan’t be pulling the levers there, but I shall be a very good back-seat driver,” she told journalists. While Major wanted to preserve much of her legacy, he looked to be more emollient and consensual than the ‘Iron Lady’ had been. He would speak of creating “a nation at ease with itself” and of building a “classless society”. Later in his memoirs, Major explained that when he talked of classlessness, he “wanted to say that the subtle calibrations of scorn in which the country rejoices, the endless puttings down and belittlings, so instinctive that we do not notice ourselves doing them, are awful.” As prime minister, he continued to push forward the privatisation agenda of the 1980s – in the case of the railways, this created short-term chaos and long-term structural problems. But Major cared genuinely about public services: the 1991 Citizen’s Charter was an initiative designed to make bureaucracy more accountable, more transparent and more focused on ordinary people. A few months before Major had become prime minister, Saddam Hussein had launched his invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990. Major quickly established a warm relationship with US President George HW Bush and Britain was part of the coalition that drove the Iraqi forces out again in the Gulf War, which led to Major being generally considered to have had a “good war”. There was, however, no khaki election: he waited until April 1992 to go to the country. By then, Labour was widely expected to sweep to power. Fighting as the underdog, despite being the incumbent, Major took to the streets, addressing the public from a soap box. He was rewarded with an upset win, though with a much-reduced majority, which over the next few years was progressively depleted through by-election losses. His luck was about to run out. Scandal, schism and sleaze Membership of the ERM had exacerbated Britain’s ongoing recession, as only painfully high interest rates could sustain sterling at the required parity. The pound came under growing pressure, and in the chaos of 16 September 1992 – ‘Black Wednesday’ – Major’s government was compelled to announce that it was withdrawing from the system. The economy recovered; the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence did not. Equally damaging for the Tories was their division over the issue of Europe. At the time, the Maastricht Treaty, the foundational document of the European Union, signed in February 1992, looked like a negotiating triumph, as Britain secured important opt-outs on monetary and social policy. Still, a group of Conservative backbenchers, known as the Maastricht Rebels, could not be reconciled to any form of further European integration. They fought a bitter battle in the House of Commons against Major’s government, in which can be seen many of the origins of Brexit. On the podcast | Who was Britain's greatest prime minister? On one occasion, unaware that he was being recorded, Major explained to a journalist why he did not sack the Eurosceptics in his own cabinet: “You and I can think of ex-ministers who are causing all sorts of trouble,” he said. "We don't want another three more of the bastards out there.” The mutineers took that label as a badge of pride. His government would be further hurt by a succession of sexual and financial scandals that were dubbed by the press as “sleaze”. While he was not implicated personally in any of them, Major appeared unable to act effectively when each crisis arose. In fact, before he became prime minister, he had himself engaged in an affair with a fellow MP, Edwina Currie, although this revelation only came out after he left Downing Street. John Major and the Royal Family A convinced monarchist, Major had to deal with the challenges facing the Royal Family in 1992, dubbed an “annus horribilis” by Queen Elizabeth II. Chief among them was the very public breakdown of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. He met separately with the Queen, Charles, and Diana, to discuss the issue before the couple’s divorce in 1996. Major’s biographer, Anthony Sheldon, later revealed that Diana sent the prime minister several appreciative letters. In his autobiography, Major discreetly refused to comment on the matter at all. Recently, in the weeks before the release of season 5 of The Crown, he has spoken out against a scene in which the then Prince Charles (played by Dominic West) meets with Major (Jonny Lee Miller) to discuss ousting the Queen; decrying the fictional meeting as a “barrel-load of nonsense”. In truth, Major appears to be a sincere admirer of Britain’s new king. When presenting Charles with the 2013 Sir Winston Churchill Award, he commented: “Out recipient tonight has – over the years – faced his own criticism, his own setbacks, yet held firm to his own beliefs. That is the first of many reasons he is truly worthy of the award made to him.” Major’s fall from office Long before May 1997, it was clear that the Conservatives faced a drubbing at the hands of a resurgent New Labour. Leader Tony Blair later recalled that Major “had real appeal as a person… but his weakness was he took personally the fact that I tried so hard to dislodge him.” On the morning after the election, Major was gracious in defeat, observing: “When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage.” He stayed an MP until 2001, was knighted, and received the Order of the Garter (the oldest and most senior order of chivalry in Britain). He has continued to speak out on issues, particularly in recent years on Brexit. Yet Major has shown no inclination to go to the House of Lords. Sometimes dull in public, often warm and witty in private, it is to his credit that he could suffer a calamitous political downfall and still see a life beyond politics. Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of Britain in its global and imperial context in the period from the late-19th century to the present day. He is the author of Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Age of Promises: Electoral Pledges in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Any politician will sometimes change course, but a full-blown U-turn can be a risky undertaking, as these five key historical examples demonstrate
Wellington and Catholic Emancipation, 1829 By the 1820s, most of the old restrictions on Irish Catholics (and, indeed, Catholics elsewhere in Britain) had been removed, but they were still debarred by their faith from sitting in parliament. Irish nationalist demands for Catholic emancipation were loud, but for Tory backbenchers the exclusion of Catholics from parliament had become a talisman guaranteeing the apparent superiority both of the Protestant religion and of parliament itself. So it was with incredulity that, in 1829, parliamentarians greeted an emancipation bill presented by the impeccably Tory and protestant Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert “Orange” Peel. Their hand had been forced by an Irish Catholic lawyer, Daniel O’Connell, who – because there was nothing stopping Catholics standing for election – had stood successfully in the 1828 County Clare byelection. Given his enthusiastic mass Catholic support, Peel and Wellington feared serious disturbances in Ireland if he were to be denied his seat, hence the emancipation bill. Although the bill passed, Wellington and Peel’s U-turn disgusted the Tories, making them even more determined to resist upcoming proposals for parliamentary reform. It was a futile stand, which brought down Wellington’s government and effectively kept them out of power for ten years. Robert Peel and the Corn Laws, 1846 Received wisdom was that the Tory party stood for landowners and for protecting against the cheap import of grain. That was until, in 1846, the Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel repealed the protectionist Corn Laws and allowed foreign corn to flow freely into the country. The Corn Laws were of enormous symbolic importance, because their repeal signalled Britain’s decisive move away from protection towards free trade. Peel had been slowly won over by the arguments of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League, a radical middle-class movement that held little appeal for his conservative landowning backbenchers. The impetus for Peel’s U-turn came with the 1845 outbreak of the Great Famine in Ireland. The humanitarian case for the free flow of food, and for economic prosperity to combat the poverty that had caused the famine, was compelling. In the teeth of bitter opposition from his backbenchers, Peel passed his measure with the support of his Whig opponents; as soon as it was safely passed into law, they promptly brought him down. Internal arguments over the Corn Laws and rancour over Peel’s fall kept the Tories out of real power for a generation. Read more | Five of the greatest Prime Ministerial downfalls of the past 100 years Disraeli and the Franchise, 1867 Thirty years on from the 1832 ‘Great’ Reform Act, by the 1860s the question of who should be allowed to vote once more dominated political debate. The trade union movement showed many in the working classes to be responsible and trustworthy, but how far among them should the franchise extend? In 1866, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, who had already committed himself to a working-class franchise, proposed a Reform Bill that would extend the vote to the more prosperous working men, paying £7 rental a year in the boroughs, and £14 in the counties. Even this relatively modest extension of the vote was too much for the Conservatives, particularly Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli denounced the proposal as dangerously radical and, with the help of disgruntled Liberals, was able to defeat the bill and bring the Liberal government down. Yet Disraeli then brought in his own Reform Bill , accepting all amendments to it except Gladstone’s, with the result that his bill extended the vote to far more working people than Gladstone’s bill had ever envisaged. Gladstone was left speechless by Disraeli’s unprincipled U-turn, which gave Disraeli the undeserved credit for the working-class vote. However, it did him little good: the new working-class voters promptly used their vote to put the Conservatives out and Gladstone back into office. Wilson and prescription charges, 1968 Founding the NHS in 1948 was one of the proudest achievements of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, but its spiralling costs soon plunged it into crisis. Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, was adamant that NHS treatment should remain free – but the Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, having to fund Britain’s involvement in the Korean War, thought prescription charges essential. As a result, in 1951 he introduced charges for dental treatment and spectacles on the NHS. Bevan, by then in a different post, resigned in fury. Wider prescription charges were subsequently introduced by the Conservatives in 1952, but Labour leader Harold Wilson, who had stood by Bevan on the issue, fought the 1964 election on a promise to abolish them. He did, but the economic crisis of 1967 forced him into both his famous devaluation of the sterling and, in 1968, a U-turn on prescription charges. By then people had got used to paying them and any controversy was overshadowed by the sterling crisis, but, alongside Wilson’s growing confrontation with the trade unions over wages policy, the prescription charge U-turn added to a growing feeling that he was departing from the socialist principles of the Attlee years. Edward Heath’s multiple U-turns, 1972 Conservative leader Edward Heath unexpectedly won the 1970 general election on a manifesto promising to cut public expenditure, limit immigration, resist big wage demands from trade unions, stop propping up “lame duck” companies and abandon the Wilson government’s attempts to bring in a wage control policy. By the end of 1972, Heath had been forced into U-turns on all of them. He nationalised Rolls-Royce rather than let such a prestige company go bankrupt and, with unemployment at over a million, went back on his pledge to cut spending by pouring money into public services. Faced with a nationwide strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, he determined to resist their wage demands, declaring a state of emergency and a three-day week to conserve fuel, but then caved in and conceded a 27 per cent wage rise as well as overtime, holidays and pensions. Read more | What was the Winter of Discontent? To cap it all, having said in his manifesto that he utterly rejected wage control, in 1972 he introduced just such a policy. Even his decision to admit the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin was denounced by some as a U-turn on his commitment to limit immigration. No wonder the Guardian journalist Tim Bale called Heath “the undisputed King of the U-turn”.
Following the First World War, Prime Minister David Lloyd George was ‘the man who won the war’, with wide approval to continue his leadership of a post-war coalition. Yet rifts and crises were to follow, as Great Britain entered a new decade. Stuart Ball explores the factors that led to the resignation of the Prime Minister in 1922…
One of the most dramatic and significant Prime Ministerial downfalls took place a century ago, on 19 October 1922. At a meeting held at the Carlton Club on 19 October 1922, Conservative MPs decisively rejected the advice of their party leaders to continue the coalition led by the Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He resigned immediately after hearing the news, and never held office again. Lloyd George had become Prime Minister in December 1916 after ousting Herbert Asquith, who had been the premier of a Liberal government from 1908 to 1915, and then led a wartime coalition. Lloyd George’s new coalition was supported by all Conservative MPs, about half of Liberal MPs, and – until the end of the war – the small group of Labour MPs. After dark days in 1917 and 1918, when victory finally came in November 1918 Lloyd George was at the height of his power and popularity. He was 'the man who won the war', and the Conservative Party leader, Andrew Bonar Law, told Lord Beaverbrook that "he can be Prime Minister for life if he likes". There was no opposition within the Conservative Party to continuing the coalition into peacetime, as there were many difficult problems to be faced. The general election of December 1918 was a landslide: 529 coalition MPs were returned (382 Conservatives, 133 Coalition Liberal supporters of Lloyd George and 14 from minor parties), whilst the opposition was only 57 Labour MPs and 28 Liberal followers of Asquith. Read more | Five of the greatest downfalls of the past 100 years The problems began in 1920. Lloyd George’s attempt to secure his power base by encouraging the ‘fusion’ of the coalition parties was blocked, ironically by his Liberal followers who feared losing their identity. More importantly, the post-war economic boom collapsed, and the following recession produced two crucial effects. Rising levels of unemployment boosted the rise of the Labour Party, whilst the middle classes, under pressure from the great increase in taxation due to the war (the standard rate of income tax was 500% higher in 1919 than in 1913), became increasingly alienated from the coalition. There were frequent demands from the Conservative grass-roots for cuts in government spending to enable reductions in taxation, and a press agitation and by-election challenges under the banner of ‘Anti-Waste’ (founded in January 1921) put pressure on Conservative MPs in the safer seats. Rifts and scandals From the autumn of 1921 onwards, almost nothing seemed to go right for the coalition government. There were too many failures, U-turns and policies which strained Conservative support. These included a rift with France, overtures to Bolshevik Russia, and the failure to fulfill a pledge to reform the House of Lords so that its delaying powers would be strengthened – something that the Conservative grass-roots considered essential in case the Labour Party should win a majority in the House of Commons. The reversal of Irish policy to negotiate with the Sinn Fein rebels was unpopular, although the Conservative Party conference in November 1921 approved the Anglo-Irish treaty because its solution of partition safeguarded the position of protestant Ulster. Lloyd George’s tactical adroitness looked like lack of principle, and the atmosphere at the top of the coalition was seen as high-living, cynical and opportunistic. In the summer of 1922, a scandal over Lloyd George’s fund-raising by the sale of honours added a damaging whiff of corruption. The last straw was the ‘Chanak crisis’ of September-October 1922, in which the belligerence of Lloyd George and leading cabinet ministers, including Winston Churchill (then still a Liberal), seemed likely to result in war with Turkey. By this time, party members in the safer Conservative seats, many backbench MPs, and some junior ministers had come to see Lloyd George as a liability, and the coalition as failing in its basic purpose – instead of preventing the rise of the Labour Party, its unpopularity was actually assisting it. This deteriorating situation was made worse by the deficiencies of Austen Chamberlain, who became Conservative leader when Bonar Law resigned due to ill-health in March 1921. Chamberlain was inflexible, aloof and autocratic; he failed to signal his intentions clearly to his followers or respond to their concerns. Together with the other prominent Conservative cabinet ministers, he was seen as too captivated by Lloyd George and failing in his foremost duty of preserving party unity. Chamberlain and the most prominent Conservative leaders sought to suppress dissent from below, and to maneouvre the party against its will into another coalition election under Lloyd George. They were seen as arrogant and contemptuous, and regarded themselves as indispensible, when in fact they were discredited and out of touch. Chamberlain was convinced that separating from Lloyd George and his Coalition Liberal supporters would fatally divide the ‘constitutional’ forces resisting the dangerous advance of Socialism, and crucially he did not believe that the Conservatives could win an election on their own. The government’s problems and unpopularity actually strengthened Chamberlain’s view that the coalition was essential, as he considered “the shoulders of the Coalition are broader than the shoulders of the Party.” However, most of his followers took the opposite view: that the coalition’s discredit was dragging the Conservative Party down with it, and that Lloyd George would divide their party as damagingly as he had the Liberals. By the autumn of 1922, many Conservative MPs in the south and the midlands had promised their constituency associations to stand as ‘independent’ Conservatives at the next election, and the approaching party conference in November was almost certain to repudiate the coalition. Read more about the 1922 Committee The pro-coalition leaders sought to pre-empt this by calling a general election beforehand. Confident that he would secure approval of his strategy, Chamberlain summoned a meeting of all Conservative MPs for 11am on 19 October 1922. This was held at the Carlton Club because it was conveniently located and had a room of sufficient size, and most Conservative MPs were members. After speeches had been made on both sides, the result of the secret ballot was a massive defeat for Chamberlain, by 185 votes to 88. Immediately afterwards, he resigned the party leadership and Lloyd George resigned as Prime Minister. Bonar Law’s last-minute emergence from retirement to attend the meeting and support ending the coalition was crucial in providing a credible alternative leader. He became Prime Minister and immediately called a general election, in which to the surprise of many the Conservative Party won an overall majority of 73. In Bonar Law’s government a new generation of Conservative leaders, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, rose to power and dominated British politics until the Second World War. Stuart Ball CBE is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester and author of Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2013)
From Walpole to Truss: lessons from the 300-year history of the British prime minister
Three centuries after its inception, Sir Anthony Seldon charts how the office of prime minister has defied hostile monarchs, a scandal-hungry media and two world wars to become the beating heart of Britain’s body politic
Listen to this article: The history of the British prime minister, 300 years old in April 2021, is riddled with mysteries, in large part because no one has joined together all the dots. It is nearly 50 years since someone tried, when historian Robert Blake wrote a book that discusses the office and its holders going back to the beginning. We have biographers who dive down deep shafts into the ground to mine everything about an individual prime minister, but sometimes know little about who came before and after. History has become segmented by period and specialism. Some know a great deal about the early 18th century, or the mid-19th century, about economic or cultural history, but few take the long view. Rare are historians like Jeremy Black, or journalists like Daniel Finkelstein, who have a rich understanding of the entire 300 years of British prime ministers. In place of a wide horizon, we have gone in for polls, plenty of them, ranking prime ministers from “first” to “last”, as if they were artists whose work we can see now, or footballers who have scored a given number of goals. We attempt to determine a prime minister’s “greatness”. But great at what? Everyone knows about Winston Churchill’s achievements. But what about William Pitt the Elder (PM from 1766–68) or Earl Grey (1830–34), both of whom were considerable figures. Polls are fun but we should not treat them as a substitute for serious analysis. In The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister, the book I wrote to coincide with the April anniversary, I have sought to answer seven questions – and I’ll attempt to do so here... When was Britain's first prime minister? So why did the office emerge in 1721? When King George I asked Robert Walpole to be First Lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1721, no one at the time saw it as a major constitutional innovation. No one used the term “prime minister”, except as a term of abuse (because it seemed to usurp royal prerogative). It was to take two centuries before the office became a formalised part of the British constitution. Some historians have denied that 1721 was a significant milestone at all. This is understandable, but they are wrong to do so. Something of significant historical importance happened then, even if not apparent to contemporaries for many years. Some see the office of prime minister dating back long before 1721. Chief ministers to the monarch had been strutting the corridors of power since the days of Dunstan, a powerful bishop who advised several English kings in the 10th century. In the 16th century, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII, and William and Robert Cecil under Elizabeth I, had some of the attributes of the prime minister as the job emerged. They were clearly pre-eminent over all other figures in privy council and court. But they differed from the prime minister because their power rested wholly upon the monarch. By the mid-17th century, Oliver Cromwell was drawing his power from his command of the army. But the office that emerged after 1721 derived its authority from the monarch and parliament. The latter was critical to his powerbase, as Walpole understood. It took the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Interregnum, then Restoration in 1660, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 to pave the way to the prime minister, as opposed to the chief minister. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the office. As the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us, were it not for the imposition of a Scottish king (James VI and I), a Dutch king (William III and II) and then the Hanoverians, the future of the constitution could have been very different. A series of Acts of Parliament after 1689 were all important in ensuring that Britain was to develop a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, with parliament to meet every year, elections initially every three then every seven years, and the king dependent upon parliament for revenue. This required the king to have a figure in parliament who he could trust to ensure his legislation and financial bills passed. If it hadn’t been for the infamous South Sea Bubble in 1720–21 (when the collapse of the South Sea Company stock ruined thousands of investors), the office might still not have emerged. George I, who became king in 1714, was heavily implicated in the affair, and he turned to the wily Walpole to steer and stabilise the country. How has the role of prime minister survived for 300 years? The survival of the office, our second question, was far from certain. A moment of high peril came in 1727, when King George was succeeded by his son George II, who turned to one of Walpole’s rivals, Spencer Compton. Only when he proved incapable of commanding parliament did the second George turn back to Walpole, who cleverly exploited his position, not least ingratiating himself with the king’s wife. Robert Walpole was nothing if not a seductive manipulator of people and money. When Walpole was ousted from office in 1742, the position was more firmly embedded in the constitution, not least because he survived for 21 years, still the longest spell in the hot seat for a British PM. But it was to be another 40 years, and the arrival of William Pitt the Younger as prime minister, before the office truly stabilised. It is, to a large extent, thanks to Pitt’s many qualities as a leader that the position of prime minster has survived its first 300 years. Between Walpole and Pitt, the power of the nascent office of prime minister was threatened by the accession to the throne in 1760 of George III. Britain now had a monarch who wanted to claw back authority from parliament and politicians, to appoint the First Lord and subordinate ministers at will, to be the dominant voice in cabinet and to control policy. We see this most clearly in the American War of Independence, when it was the king, and not Prime Minister Lord North, who drove the belligerent policy forward. The loss of the 13 colonies was a profound blow not just to Britain but to George himself, who seriously considered abdicating. For the next serious military conflict, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it was William Pitt in the driving seat, not George. The king’s bouts of mental illness, and increasing fatigue, and his withdrawal from office in 1811, was another key moment in the emergence of the prime minister. The growing influence of political parties from the 1830s further consolidated the position of the prime minister, as the political head of their party. There was to be no going back. The genius of the landmark holders of the office was constantly to update the position of the prime minister within the body politic, and strengthen the powers of No 10 and the Cabinet Office, formed by Lloyd George in December 1916. The fact that no one has launched a successful invasion of mainland Britain since 1688, that there was no revolution, nor civil war (all of which would have swept the office aside), all counted. Loss of a major war might have done for the office of PM: had Britain been defeated in the First World War, the monarchy might have fallen, and quite probably the prime minister. The survival of the office is all the more remarkable considering the profound changes that the role of prime minister has experienced. Walpole never visited Bristol, Manchester or Leeds, still less Wales or Scotland. Norfolk was his limit. He communicated and travelled at the speed of human legs and horses’ hooves. Today's prime ministers travel almost at the speed of sound, and communicate at the speed of light. The coming of the telegraph, telephone, electricity, the railway, cars, jets and internet all profoundly changed the life of the prime minister. Is the job that Walpole was performing in 1721 the same as the modern prime minister? So, given all the changes, is it still the same office, our third question? Walpole and recent prime minister Boris Johnson have much in common. Like Walpole, Johnson is a chancer, who came to office on the back of high-stakes risks. Like his predecessor, on assuming the role, Johnson’s primary task was to remain in office, and see off challengers, who were plentiful. Control of the media, in its very different forms, was a principal challenge and frustration for both Walpole and Johnson. The role of the prime minister is ultimately responsible for the national finances and solvency. He or she is the nation’s leader, tasked with keeping the country safe from threats abroad and within its own frontiers. The population looks to him or her, as well as to the monarch, for leadership and national unity. Again, these were all challenges faced by Britain’s first prime minister in the 1720s and 30s. Who are the best and worst prime ministers? But which prime ministers have met these challenges most successfully? Of all our seven questions, that is surely the one that is asked most often. As opposed to the parlour game of picking the best and worst prime ministers, it is surely better to place prime ministers into different categories. “Agenda-changer” prime ministers made an enduring mark on the office and on policy, such that the successors either tried to be like them, or deliberately unlike them, but none were able to escape that shadow. They held the union together and enhanced its standing abroad. Only eight match this high standard: Walpole himself, Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. That means that in the last 70 years, there’s only been one such figure. “Major influencers” come next, all of whom made a powerful impact on the country, like Winston Churchill, William Pitt the Elder, Benjamin Disraeli, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, but who left little enduring mark on the office. “Stabiliser prime ministers” (such as the Earl of Derby and John Major) all served well, but, in part because of the lack of opportunity, such as a war or major disruption, or lack of talent, didn’t significantly shift the dial. “Noble” failures are leaders of integrity and ability, who signally failed to achieve their mission, like Neville Chamberlain and Theresa May. “Ignoble” failures include Lord Melbourne (who spent far too much time fawning over Queen Victoria, and not enough trying to improve the lot of his fellow countrymen), and Anthony Eden, who shamed himself and the country over Suez in 1956. Finally, there’s a group of 12 who served for a year or less. This group includes some (like Lord Canning, who lasted just 119 days before dying) who could well have become significant prime ministers. So, too, could Spencer Perceval, assassinated after just three years, the only prime minister to suffer that fate. When did the prime minister take over from the monarch as the most powerful figure in Britain? As to why the prime minister took over from the monarch (our fifth question), this was a process that unfolded progressively over the centuries. Their position was immeasurably stronger relative to the monarchy in 1901 when Victoria died than it had been in 1837 when she assumed the throne. The growth of representative democracy was critical to legitimising the prime minister. Yet to dismiss the power and influence of the monarchy today – especially Elizabeth II, the best-known figure and the most photographed in the world – would be a mistake. The monarch is a much stronger symbol of national unity across the four nations, and throughout the Commonwealth than the political and transitory prime minister – a fact that’s been evidenced on numerous occasions during the Covid-19 crisis. Over the past three centuries, the British foreign secretary has gradually lost power to the head of government. Technology has made such a development all but inevitable. By the time of the First World War, the prime minister could follow in real time and direct operations on the battlefield in a way that Pitt the Younger and Lord Liverpool could never have done 100 years earlier. For decades now, the prime minister has merely had to pick up the phone to speak to the president of the United States and other key global figures. While the foreign secretary has fallen in power, the chancellor of the Exchequer (our sixth question) has seen his (it always has been a man) power wax. Since the 1980s, when Nigel Lawson was chancellor, they have increasingly challenged, threatened and ignored the prime minister. Tony Blair’s premiership would have been utterly different if he had not been constantly blocked by Gordon Brown as chancellor, as Theresa May’s would have been had it not been for her chancellor, Philip Hammond. How might the office of prime minister, and No 10, be strengthened as it enters its fourth century? Every prime minister since 1945 has left the building at a time not of their own choosing, through election defeat, cabinet revolt or (as was the case with Harold Wilson in 1976) ill-health. None left with their agendas completed. What might then be done to strengthen the office of prime minister, and No 10 (our final question), as we enter the fourth century? The prime minister and senior posts in No 10 have been overwhelmingly white, middle-class, male and from the south-east of England. Many of them studied in the same classrooms, slept in the same bedrooms, and played in the same fields at Eton. No 10 has been full of cronies, with open selection criteria rejected in favour of mates being brought in looking and sounding like the prime minister. More women, people from BAME backgrounds, and people with regional accents are urgently needed. Prime ministers have – for much of the office’s 300-year history – been vastly overworked, with little time for parliament, visiting the four nations, meeting people, going to the theatre, or even seeing the country at play. We expect so much of them, expectations that they themselves encourage, not least with their hyperbolic statements on the doorstep when they enter the building. Disappointment is inevitable. But change is needed. The frequently impressive record of the German chancellor since 1945 shows how different it could be. We need to create the opportunity for the often highly talented figures who rise to the top of the British political system to leave No 10 on their final day, not in tears, but with their heads held as high as they were on their first entry. Anthony Seldon’s is the author of The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister ( CUP, 2021). His BBC Radio 4 series The Prime Minister at 300 is airing now and available via BBC Sounds This article was first published in the May 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
The 1922 Committee: the 'men in grey suits' behind 100 years of Conservative leaders
The 1922 Committee is the parliamentary group that sets the rules for how Conservative Party leaders are be chosen. David Thackeray, Associate Professor of History at the University of Exeter, explains how this influential group has shaped British politics over the last century…
What is the 1922 Committee? At its core, the 1922 Committee is a group open to all backbench Conservative MPs that provides a means for backbenchers to discuss policy and communicate their views to the Cabinet – but in recent decades it has become well known for the role it has played in transitions in Tory leadership. It does this through taking informal soundings of MPs or, since 1965, through organising formal leadership contests. While backbench committees had been a common feature of Conservative politics before the First World War, they had often been associated with factional disputes, which led to the party losing three consecutive elections from 1906. By contrast, the 1922 Committee provides an inclusive means for backbenchers to air their views and help shape party policy. From Walpole to Johnson: lessons from the 300-year history of the British prime minister Three centuries after its inception, Sir Anthony Seldon charts how the office of prime minister has defied hostile monarchs, a scandal-hungry media and two world wars to become the beating heart of Britain’s body politic While the 1922 Committee is best known for its role in Conservative leadership contests, it has also hosted a number of important speeches by party leaders, and it has become common practice for the party leader to give an annual speech to backbenchers at the end of the parliamentary term. The most controversial of these was delivered by Margaret Thatcher during the early months of the miners’ strike in July 1984. She was reported as saying that “we had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within”. It was a barbed reference to the miners’ unions. While the speech proved highly divisive when it was subsequently reported, private papers released in 2014 indicate she intended to make similar comments at that year’s party conference in Brighton. However, following the IRA bombing of Thatcher’s hotel, her speech was hastily rewritten. When was the 1922 Committee formed? It wasn’t 1922… Conservative backbench MPs played a prominent role in the fall of Liberal Party prime minister David Lloyd George’s coalition government in 1922. While Lloyd George was widely admired for his leadership record during the First World War, he had long attracted criticism for his controversial leadership style, which included bestowing honours for his own personal advancement. A meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club – a private members’ club in central London, and the original home of the Conservative Party – was key to the party’s abandonment of the coalition and Lloyd George’s downfall. Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain, who had supported the continuation of the coalition, also subsequently resigned. The resulting general election saw the Conservatives, under Andrew Bonar Law, take government with a majority. But this was not the event that precipitated the formation of the 1922 Committee: this came after the general election of 1923, which was called by Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin after Bonar Law resigned due to ill health (after only 209 days in office). The 1922 Committee initially began as a dining club, and it was only from 1926 that all backbench Conservative MPs were invited to become members. From 1922 to today: the five greatest prime ministerial downfalls of the past 100 years Boris Johnson is far from the first British prime minister compelled to end their tenure in No 10 Downing Street ahead of time. Richard Toye, professor of modern history at the University of Exeter, considers five of the most spectacular downfalls of British prime ministers during the past 100 years… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/PMs-37d25e2.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Montage of five British prime ministers: David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher" title="Montage of five British prime ministers: David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher (Photos by Getty)" /> When did the 1922 Committee become so powerful? Conservative backbenchers have long played an important role in shaping who gets to be party leader. In 1940 Lord Salisbury led a ‘Watching Committee’, which channelled Conservative discontent to Neville Chamberlain in the months leading up to his replacement as prime minister by Winston Churchill. However, it wasn’t until 1965 that the 1922 Committee’s role as Conservative ‘kingmakers’ became formalised, when a process for electing a party leader was introduced. At first only MPs could vote, but from 2001 leadership contest onwards party members have had the final say over who becomes the next Conservative leader in the event of a leadership contest. Under the current rules, introduced in 1998, a leadership contest can be triggered by 15 per cent of Conservative MPs writing a letter to the chairman of the 1922 Committee calling for a vote. Read more | Who was the best 20th-century prime minister? Who sits on the 1922 Committee and how are they chosen? The 1922 Committee is entirely comprised of backbench MPs, although in 2010 there was an attempt to change that. When David Cameron formed a coalition government (alongside the Liberal Democrats) in 2010, he sought to change the 1922 Committee’s constitution to enable frontbenchers to play a greater role in its activities. The move didn’t go down well with several backbenchers, fearing it was an attempt to control potential dissent and undermine their autonomy. It prompted Sir Graham Brady, who became chairman that year, to rule that while frontbenchers would be able to attend meetings of the 1922 Committee, only backbenchers would be able to vote for its officers and the 12-member executive committee. Does the Labour Party have an equivalent to the 1922 Committee? The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) performs a similar function to the 1922 Committee, although there are important differences. Membership is open to all Labour MPs, and until 1970 the party leader also led the PLP. Since 1983, Labour leadership contests have been decided by a weighted electoral college made up of affiliated trade unions, party members and MPs. Read more | When was Britain’s Labour Party established? Four key moments in the history of the 1922 Committee The introduction of Leadership contests, 1965 When Harold Macmillan announced his decision to resign as prime minister in 1963 – in a letter delivered to the Conservative party conference – there was no obvious successor. With no formal mechanism to elect a Conservative leader, informal ‘soundings’ were taken within the parliamentary party. After both frontrunners – R A Butler and Reginald Maudling – performed poorly at the conference, the Conservatives settled on Sir Alec Douglas-Home as leader. Douglas-Home subsequently renounced his peerage to fight a by-election so he could sit in the House of Commons. The process frustrated many younger MPs such as Iain Macleod, who would claim that Douglas-Home’s victory relied on a ‘magic circle’ of party grandees. Labour leader Harold Wilson ended 13 years of Tory rule in 1964 running on a programme of modernisation against his aristocratic rival. The divisions caused by the earlier succession crisis led the Conservatives to introduce a formal process for leadership contests – via the 1922 Committee – when Douglas-Home resigned as party leader the following year. Becoming the ‘men in grey suits’, 1990 Margaret Thatcher’s 15-year leadership of the Conservative Party was bookended by the 1922 Committee’s activities. The first came following Edward Heath’s third general election defeat in October 1974, prompting the 1922 Committee to urge the Conservative leader to either resign or hold a leadership contest (at the time there was no way to challenge an incumbent). Read more | How to win an election: 25 general elections and where they were won – and lost Heath resigned after finishing behind Thatcher in the first round of votes. However, the rules agreed for this 1975 contest – namely that the victorious candidate needed to lead their nearest rival by a margin of 15 per cent – were central to Thatcher’s eventual downfall in 1990. She missed the threshold by four votes in the first round, and subsequently resigned before the second could take place. The party insiders who suggested she should resign were described at the time as the ‘men in grey suits’, a term which has since been regularly employed to refer to the leaders of the 1922 Committee. Toppling a sitting Conservative leader, 2003 Both Theresa May and Boris Johnson were badly damaged as Conservative party leaders by backbench revolts, but there was only one to lose a vote of no confidence initiated through the 1922 Committee: Iain Duncan Smith, whose leadership was rejected by 90 votes to 75 in 2003. Duncan Smith had faced opposition for his lack of charismatic leadership. He was further undermined by ‘Betsygate’ – allegations of inappropriate salary payments to his wife who acted as his diary secretary. It was to get worse: Duncan Smith’s novel, The Devil’s Tune, was published the day he left office, reportedly selling only 18 copies on its first week of release. Forcing Theresa May to step down, 2019 The 1922 Committee grew in public prominence as a result of Theresa May’s troubled Brexit negotiations. May won a vote of no confidence by 200 votes to 117 in December 2018. However, it was reported that she had announced she would stand down as Conservative party leader before the next general election as a means of ensuring that she would win the vote. In March 2019, May announced that she would resign before the next round of Brexit negotiations, but did not set a date to leave. It was only following requests for clarification by the 1922 Committee chairman, Sir Graham Brady, that she eventually stood down – and in June 2019, Boris Johnson won the subsequent leadership contest Read next | Ten prime ministers Britain never quite had David Thackeray is Associate Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of the political history of modern Britain and the British World. His most recent book, co-authored with Richard Toye, is Age of Promises: Electoral Pledges in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2021)