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A Century of Premiers: Salisbury to Blair

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A Century of Premiers: Salisbury to Blair A Century of Premiers Salisbury to Blair Dick Leonard A Century of Premiers Also by Dick Leonard THE BACKBENCHER AND PARLIAMENT (ed. with Val Herman) CROSLAND AND NEW LABOUR (ed.) THE ECONOMIST GUIDE TO THE EUROPEAN UNION ELECTIONS IN BRITAIN: A Voter’s Guide (with Roger Mortimore) GUIDE TO THE GENERAL ELECTION PAYING FOR PARTY POLITICS THE PRO-EUROPEAN READER (ed. with Mark Leonard) THE SOCIALIST AGENDA: Crosland’s Legacy (ed. with David Lipsey) WORLD ATLAS OF ELECTIONS (with Richard Natkiel) A Century of Premiers Salisbury to Blair Dick Leonard © Dick Leonard 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–918398 hardback ISBN 1–4039–3990X paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leonard, R. L. (Richard Lawrence) A century of premiers : Salisbury to Blair / Dick Leonard p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–91839–8 (hardback) — ISBN 1–4039–3990–X (paperback) 1. Prime ministers—Great Britain—Biography. 2. Great Britain— Politics and government—20th century—Biography. I. Title. DA28.4.L46 2004 941.082Ј092Ј2–dc22 [B] 2004056070 10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne. To Irène, Mark and Miriam for their unstinted love and support, and to John for his critical encouragement This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1 Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury – The Man who Stayed too Long 8 2 Arthur James Balfour – Bob’s your Uncle 23 3 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman – ‘A Good, Honest Scotchman’ 37 4 Herbert Henry Asquith – Not Quite in the Gladstone Mould 53 5 David Lloyd George – ‘A Dynamic Force’ 72 6 Andrew Bonar Law – Tory Puritan 94 7 Stanley Baldwin – ‘A Man of the Most Utter Insignificance’? 107 8 James Ramsay MacDonald – An ‘Aristocrat’ among Plain Men? 125 9 Neville Chamberlain – A Family Affair 144 10 Winston Churchill – His Finest Hour 161 11 Clement Attlee – Quiet Revolutionary 176 12 Sir Anthony Eden – Self-Destruction of a Prince Charming 193 13 Harold Macmillan – Idealist into Manipulator 209 14 Sir Alec Douglas-Home – Right Man, Wrong Century? 227 15 Harold Wilson – Master – or Victim – of the Short Term 241 16 Edward Heath – Cheerleader for Europe 263 17 James Callaghan – Labour’s conservative 282 18 Margaret Thatcher – Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady 300 viii Contents 19 John Major – ‘Thatcherism with a Human Face’ 322 20 Tony Blair – Governing against his Party 342 Appendix: Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century 368 Index 371 Introduction Fifty men and one woman have held the post of Prime Minister (or, more formally, First Lord of the Treasury) since Robert Walpole was appointed by George I, in 1721. Twenty of them served during the twentieth century. This book aims to provide a succinct account of their political careers, assess their achievements and, where appropriate, draw conclu- sions as to their relevance to the present day. It is conceived as part of a larger study: two further volumes, by the same author, will be devoted respectively to Prime Ministers of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, so that eventually all 51 will have come under the spotlight. Historians argue about whether it is great men and women or social and economic forces which fashion events. No one studying the lives 1 2 A Century of Premiers and careers of the 20 people who led Britain in the twentieth century would doubt that it is a combination of the two. While many of the most fundamental changes would no doubt have occurred in any event, some at least were down to the judgement, force of character, and sometimes, indeed, errors of particular Prime Ministers. Here are a few of the more obvious examples: ● Salisbury’s legacy: the dominance of the Conservative Party, through extending its appeal to new sections of the electorate. ● Asquith’s failure to broaden the base of the Liberal Party, which allowed Labour to replace it as the main progressive party. ● Churchill’s defiance of his party and much ‘common-sense’ opinion in continuing to fight a war which seemed lost. ● Attlee, overseeing the creation a uniquely universalist welfare state, and ensuring that the end of the British Empire was achieved peace- fully, at least as far as Britain was concerned. ● Heath, ensuring British entry into Europe – too late, but quite possi- bly rather earlier than any other Prime Minister would have done. ● Thatcher, like Salisbury before her, changing the rules of British poli- tics, and entrenching Conservative economic ideology, so much so that Blair is still a prisoner of her legacy. ● Blair, overseeing a constitutional revolution, and perhaps reshaping the electoral politics of the twenty-first century. The 20 Prime Ministers discussed in this book came from a variety of backgrounds. Five of them (Salisbury, Balfour, Churchill, Eden and Douglas-Home) were aristocrats, while a sixth, Macmillan, was married to a duke’s daughter. Apart from Macmillan, six others (Campbell- Bannerman, Bonar Law, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Attlee and Blair) came from comfortable middle class or professional families. The remaining eight came from the working or lower-middle classes, though four of them (Asquith, Wilson, Heath and Thatcher) effectively ‘reclassed’ them- selves through graduating at Oxford University. Of those from ‘humble homes’, only Lloyd George, MacDonald, Callaghan and Major succeeded in climbing to the top of ‘the greasy pole’ without the benefit of a univer- sity education. (It is remarkable that of the 13 Prime Ministers who were university graduates, ten attended Oxford and three Cambridge. The only other university represented was Glasgow, attended by Campbell- Bannerman, who was also to graduate at Cambridge.) It would be idle to maintain that the 20 people discussed in this volume were the most able and distinguished British politicians of the Introduction 3 century. The list includes a number of mediocrities and one or two rank failures, as well as some of the highest competence and perhaps two or three of outstanding quality. It would be easy enough to pick a dozen names of other leading politicians who might well have made it to 10 Downing Street and who would quite probably have outperformed many of those who actually did. On the Conservative side, the names of Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, R.A. Butler, Iain Macleod, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke spring to mind. A Labour list would include the names of Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland. The uneven performance of those actu- ally chosen to fill the highest political position in the land is at least partly explicable by the circumstances of their selection. In the early years of the century, party leaders, and hence Prime Ministers, were cho- sen (if not by the Monarch) by their leading parliamentary colleagues, and their performances in the House of Commons were regarded as per- haps the most important criterion. The Labour Party, however, insisted from the outset in choosing its leader by a ballot of all its MPs, a practice soon copied by the Liberals and, much later (after 1964) by the Tories. Later still, all three parties gave their rank-and-file members a direct role in electing the leader. Other qualities (sometimes conflicting) have become more important in assessing the rival claims of potential leaders, including their ideological position within the party, their support among party activists, and – perhaps most important – their appeal to the electorate as a whole. This has not precluded the choice of compromise candidates who have been preferred to more dynamic but also more divi- sive contenders, and the choice has sometimes gone – apparently fortu- itously – to somebody who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It is the candidate who is the least offensive and is judged to have the ‘safest pair of hands’ who usually emerges at the end of the day. There are, of course, exceptions, and these are liable to occur in unusual situations. Neither Churchill nor Attlee – perhaps the two most successful of twentieth-century premiers – would have been likely to be chosen in ‘normal circumstances’: one was regarded as altogether too flamboyant, and the other as not nearly flamboyant enough. Churchill became Prime Minister, in extremis, in 1940, when the nation was staring military defeat in the face. Attlee had become leader of the Labour Party five years ear- lier, but only because all the more favoured candidates of his generation had lost their parliamentary seats in the 1931 general election, which put them temporarily out of the running.
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