Dan Snow's History Hit - 300 years of British Prime Ministers: Part 3
Episode Date: April 18, 2021In the third episode of our series chronicling the history of British Prime Ministers we travel from one of the Most famous occupants of the office, Winston Churchill, right through to the current inc...umbent Boris Johnson and everyone in-between. For that Dan is joined by Iain Dale a well known broadcaster, podcaster, author and editor of the recent book The Prime Ministers. They discuss, amongst other things, the Second World War, the creation of the NHS, the, economic reforms of the 1980's, Brexit and how the office of Prime Minister has changed through the second half of the twentieth century to today.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. For the last three Sundays we've been
running our big series on the history of Prime Ministers on the 300th anniversary of Robert
Walpole becoming pretty much acknowledged first Prime Minister of Britain. There's been
some rogues, there's been some geniuses, there's been some pretty average people, there's been
some lucky folk and there's been some unlucky ones, particularly the ones who died very soon after gaining office. This is episode three. We start with Winston Churchill. We end with Boris Johnson. Insert your own gag there really, sublime to ridiculous or that kind of thing.
And we talk about everyone in between.
For that, we have the brilliant Ian Dale on the podcast.
He's a well-known British broadcaster.
He's an award-winning radio presenter, journalist.
He's on LBC.
He's a bit of a legend.
And he has many successful podcasts of his own.
So please go and check those out.
Ian Dale, join me on the podcast to talk about the more recent prime ministers. It's been a really fun project.
Thank you to the three brilliant contributors we've had talking us through all of Britain's prime ministers. If you wish to go and watch documentaries about any of
the people mentioned in this episode, particularly probably Winston Churchill, we've got a lot of
Winston Churchill content, being honest, on History Hit TV, you can do so. You just head
over there, historyhit.tv, simple as that. Subscribe, sign up, enter a new world. It's
like Netflix, but just for history. You're going to love it. So head over there, get signed up, and welcome to the revolution.
But in the meantime, here's Ian Dale talking about the last 80 years of prime ministers. Enjoy.
Ian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Not at all. Looking forward to it.
You have just produced this magisterial history of prime ministers.
We're going to go through the last batch in detail now.
You're following two brilliant historians who've done the 18th and 19th century.
But first I want to ask you, because you've studied them all for this project,
the office has changed so much.
We talk about the presidential prime minister today.
office has changed so much. We talk about the presidential prime minister today. What have you identified over these 300 years that really is central to the office itself?
Well, I should make clear, I've edited the book rather than written it. But I think one of the
big things that's come through is that up until I would say Queen Victoria, so maybe halfway through
her reign, the prime Minister of the day really had
one audience, and that was the monarch. You had to keep the monarch happy. Now, modern day Prime
Ministers obviously have to keep Parliament happy, their cabinet happy, most of all the electorate
happy. But if you were Henry Pelham or George Grenville or any Prime Ministers in the 18th
century, your main audience was the monarch,
because if the monarch took against you, you were basically toast. So I think that's probably
one thing which I hadn't quite taken on board before. And of course, the other big difference
is that really, I suppose, since the days of Harold Macmillan, maybe Harold Wilson,
modern day prime ministers have to deal with the news media in a way that they just didn't
before. And I think that has changed the job immeasurably. And you can't imagine Mr. Ackley
now becoming prime minister because he wouldn't have been able to cope with the media. So I think
that's another thing that's really changed. Really, I suppose all the prime ministers that
we're going to talk about have fallen into that era. It's such a long amount of time,
the office is so different. Is it almost pointless even comparing Robert Walpole with
Boris Johnson, the first and the last office holder? I mean, is there anything essential in
common? I think there are things in common, but you're right, it is difficult to compare
Walpole with Johnson or Pitt with Churchill. Obviously, most prime ministers have to
involve themselves in some sort of military action in their time. There are very few prime
ministers that haven't. So I suppose most of them have got that in common. And they are first among
equals. They are the head of the cabinet and they have the same challenges of making sure that their
cabinet is as united as it can be and that their parties are united. But of course, up until the 1850s, we didn't have the same kind
of political parties as we had now. I think people, when they hear the words Tory and Whig,
they automatically think that they were formalised political parties. Well, they weren't.
They were essentially factions, and there were factions within the faction. And it was quite
common for politicians, including sometimes prime ministers,
to switch between Tory and Whig in their careers,
much more so than it is today.
It was only really after the repeal of the Corn Laws
that the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party
really became formalised political parties
in the form that we would recognise nowadays.
Speaking of someone who changed parties a few times in his career,
let's talk about that old maverick. People may have heard of him, one Winston Spencer Churchill. Let's start our little
rampage through the second half of the 20th century prime ministers with him. He has appeared
on this podcast before, I'll be honest, Ian. We have discussed Churchill. One thing that really
surprised me, and I'm reading up about the Bismarck at the moment for a big show next month on History, is his attentiveness to Parliament was fascinating, wasn't it?
Even those big speeches he made, the big ones that we remember, they were to Parliament.
He took the business of being in front of Parliament and answering to Parliament very seriously.
And that's where he announced that Bismarck had been sunk, this great flourish.
A note was brought to him as Parliamentary.
And he was nervous before. I mean, I just think that's it. We think of him as a sort of wartime, almost
presidential figure, but he was very much a parliamentarian, wasn't he? I think most prime
ministers are. People could argue that maybe Tony Blair wasn't so much. But if you think some of his
greatest moments were in parliament, the speech that he made to convince people to vote for the
Iraq war, for example, I think if you made a list of the top 20 speeches of the last 50 years, that would be one of them. Most prime ministers do take
their parliamentary responsibilities seriously. I think you've got a point that in those days,
there was no alternative, though. I mean, he couldn't go on Sky News and announce something.
He couldn't stand in front of number 10 and make a big pronouncement. I suppose it could have gone
on the radio, but it would just never have occurred, I think, for prime ministers to do that sort of thing.
Whereas now, of course, various speakers of the House of Commons get very annoyed when prime
ministers or governments make announcements before they're made in the House of Commons.
We've seen that over the COVID crisis several times. It happened during the Brexit referendum
and the aftermath as well. So he was a great parliamentarian. Not all of his
great speeches were in parliament, but many of them were, and they stand up to great scrutiny.
And he would spend hours preparing his speeches. And in a way, prime ministers of those times,
they had the time to do that. You had Harold Macmillan, for example, would think nothing of
spending half an afternoon sitting down and reading a bit of Trollope.
Well, Boris Johnson may have other Trollopes on his mind, but I suspect the author wasn't one of them. Oh, Ian Dale, zingers are coming out. Listeners to this podcast will know that we've
discussed Churchill's kind of wartime decision-making and style so often. So I don't
want to dwell too long on the big guy, but he's seen now almost as platonic ideal of what you want in a prime minister. His effect on the office, the impact on the office itself is quite
profound, isn't it? In some ways, yes. I mean, when you're a wartime leader and when the war lasts for
six years, inevitably it's very different from any holder of the office in peacetime. I mean,
effectively Clement Attlee was the domestic prime minister during that period.
And Churchill would be spending a lot of time out of the country,
or his visits to the United States would last weeks on end,
because obviously he was going by ship.
So he was a very, very different prime minister.
And of course, when he became prime minister again in 1951,
he had then four years where he was quite elderly, in quite ill
health, not really in the latter year or year and a half, not really in command of the office at all.
I mean, he was a very different prime minister. And in a sense, having had that loss in 1945,
if that had happened nowadays, he would have then quit as leader of the Conservative Party. But
he was such a hero figure that he was effectively allowed to do what he wanted.
And you had Anthony Eden as his long-term successor,
waiting in the wings, but not willing to wield the dagger
in a way that I suspect a modern-day politician might.
So we've got Churchill, wartime administration.
He loses the election spectacularly in July 1945,
before the end of the war in the Far East. Japan's still fighting on. Tell us why he lost the election spectacularly in July 1945 before the end of the war in the Far East
Japan still fighting on tell us why he lost that election well as I said Clement Attlee and several
of his leading supporters in the Labour Party who were in the cabinet at the time their role was to
prepare Britain for the post-war aftermath it was clear, by 1944, that eventually Britain and the Allies would triumph.
So they had the lessons from the First World War, where Lloyd George was promising a land fit for
heroes. And there were a lot of lessons to learn from that. And I think to be fair to Clement Attlee
and his colleagues, they did learn quite a lot of the lessons. And so you had the preparations for
what became known as the welfare state. You had the preparations for what became known as the welfare state.
You had the preparations for the nationalisation of all the great industries.
You had the beverage report.
You had Butler's 1944 Education Act.
And people knew that these things were going on, maybe not the nationalisations, but certainly the welfare state.
And I think by 1945, Britain was quite a tired country in many ways.
We had borne the brunt of the war on our own for some time.
And then, of course, the Americans came in.
And I think people just wanted a bit of optimism and sunny uplands.
And they remembered the Conservatives' role in the 1930s, austerity, unemployment.
And in retrospect, a lot of historians now say well of course it was perfectly
obvious that Adley was going to win well nobody thought that at the time and it's very easy to
re-rationalize it but I think you had all of the soldiers sailors and airmen sort of coming home
after the war remember that election campaign the polling was open for three weeks to allow
all the armed forces to be able to vote and And I think people just wanted a change. And there are some times in our political history when there is absolutely
nothing that any politician can do about that. And everyone assumed that the country would be
so thankful to Mr Churchill, but actually the country was thinking of the future. And it was
a bit like James Callaghan in 1979, trying to explain Margaret Thatcher's victory.
He said, you know, there is just sometimes when you can't hold back the tide of public opinion.
And I think he was very fatalistic about it.
And in essence, that's what happened in 1945.
45, 79, 97.
Yeah, and probably 2010 in a slightly less dramatic way.
But let's talk about clement
atlee brutal challenges he faced as you mentioned a nationalizing his NHS welfare state socialized
medicare for those of you listening abroad he's in there for six years the korean war which actually
i think is a kind of underestimated challenge that he faced becoming a nuclear power just savage and
i guess kind of gets bogged down
with it. I mean, achieves a huge amount, but it sort of overwhelms him eventually.
I think since 1945, there have been two transformative governments. The Attlee
government was one and the Thatcher government was the second. And I don't think any of the
others have come anywhere near that. And if you think, I mean, Attlee was only in power for what, just over six years.
And he transformed Britain in many ways, both in terms of the economy and in terms of the welfare state. The NHS, which, I mean, you cannot criticise the NHS even 70 odd years on,
for anything at the moment, it has become a national religion in many ways. And it has
many achievements to it. And they do go back to the
formation within that Atlee government in 1948 under an Aaron Bevan as health secretary. I think
one of the things that we should bear in mind is it's not just that, it's the beginnings of the
end of empire as well. India became independent, a huge thing to happen. Other countries gained
their independence. NATO was
formed. And one of Attlee's major achievements, I think, was to really have a cohesive government.
Because if you think back to his cabinet, there were some really big beasts in that cabinet.
You look at the likes of Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevan, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps,
the list goes on. And in a way, that's what we don't have now we have a cabinet
of pygmies compared to and I always think I sound a bit like an old git when I say that so say oh
of course it was much better 20 years ago we had all these massive figures but I think in those
days it was true and it was a tremendous feat for Attlee to really keep a reasonably united cabinet
yes he did have the odd resignation here and there, but all prime ministers experienced that. And given his own temperament, given that he wasn't Mr. Charisma,
it was actually, I think, a great feat for that government to remain as united as it did.
It won an election in 1950, but with a razor thin majority, hardly any working majority in
Parliament. The year or so that it staggered on until the next election in 1951 must have been a bit grim. I think it was. And the electorate is
very good at spotting when a government has become tired. And it's not surprising that government
became tired because of all the things that we've just talked about. It was a hyperactive government.
But I think a lot of people felt that they weren't seeing the fruits of the reform in a way.
All-time rationing, for example, was still around until I think 1953 on most things.
There hadn't been a massive house building programme.
That really came a little bit later in the 1950s.
And I think people felt, you know what, we're going to give the others a chance.
In any election, it's either the governing party will fight under the banner of stick with us for fear of worse, or sort of
we've done a lot, but there's still a lot to do. And of course, the opposition fight on a platform
of change, and virtually all elections are on that basis. And I think the electorate just thought,
no, you know what, we won't be impressed by what they've done in some ways, but we think we need a
bit of a change now. And that's what happened in the 1951 election.
And that led to 13 years of Conservative rule under four different Conservative prime ministers.
Exciting change.
They got Winston Churchill back, the old Victorian slash Edwardian warhorse.
Not in his best form.
That second administration, he's three strokes, I think.
I mean, he was in a bad way.
The interesting thing about that is that they managed to keep that quiet.
And at one stage, his son-in-law, Christopher Soames,
was effectively a replacement prime minister, but no one knew.
Now, think of that in today's terms.
You would have leaks galore.
We would find out about that.
But in those days, you could hush things up like
that. And I think it was for quite a few months that Churchill was literally out of action.
Bizarre. And he was replaced eventually, as you said, by the guy that had been waiting to take
his job for decades, Sir Anthony Eden. And it's one of those sad cases, not unlike Gordon Brown,
incredibly qualified for the job, used to bestriding the
world stage, and then quite quickly turfed out of office. Well, he seemed to have it all. And on
paper, he ought to have made a really, really good prime minister. But sometimes, you know,
you need to be in the right place at the right time. You need to be a lucky prime minister.
Gordon Brown was not in the right place at the right time, and he certainly wasn't a lucky Prime Minister. James Callaghan, thinking back to his government, 1976 to 79, he'd been
Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Again, on paper, should have
been a brilliant Prime Minister, and could have been, I think, but it was just that the country
was beset by strikes, by the after-effects of the oil crisis, having to go to the IMF to bail out
the finances, and it was almost inevitable that he wasn, having to go to the IMF to bail out the finances.
And it was almost inevitable that he wasn't going to last. And Eden was a little bit the same.
He got Britain involved in the Suez crisis, Britain and France together. But once the
Americans decided that they weren't going to play ball, the game was effectively up. And
he didn't immediately resign, but he became quite ill. and he was in office for less than two years
and if you draw up a league table of successful prime ministers since 1945 i mean he's either at
the bottom or very very near the bottom yeah poor thing suez crisis we've been talking a lot about
suez recently but uh that sunk him it's's funny, isn't it? David Lloyd George eventually
kicked out technically over war in Turkey, Eden foreign policy. It's interesting the ones that
lose their job because of entanglement overseas. Yes, you could say in a way Margaret Thatcher,
at least partially, lost her job because of her attitude to the European economic community, as it then was.
Tony Blair, had Iraq not happened, would he have lasted more than 10 years? I doubt it,
actually, because Gordon Brown would have made sure that that wasn't the case. David Cameron
lost his job because of the Brexit referendum. So, I mean, there are quite a few, you're right.
Look, virtually all prime ministers don't know when it's time to go Churchill didn't
Blair I think I mean you could argue that he went at the right time but he didn't want to go he
would have loved to have carried on but he just looked at the political reality and all of the
problems with what were called the TBGBs Tony Blair Gordon Brown as detailed in Alistair Campbell's
diaries I think he just felt he had no alternative but to go.
I mean, who knows in what circumstances Boris Johnson will leave office. It's very rare that
a Prime Minister knows when to stand down. So Harold Macmillan, we get him next. It feels,
given the people either side of him, he feels like the most successful Prime Minister in this
batch of Tories. Yes, I think you'd be right in saying that, but successful up to a point, because it was in some ways odd that he got the job in the first
place, because he had backed Eden over Suez 100%. And so you might have thought somebody else might
have got the job, because in those days, leaders of the Conservative Party emerged, there was no
election. It was a very strange process, almost mystical process. And he managed to persuade people that Rab Butler,
who had been thought of as Eden's natural successor, he would get the job. But to Macmillan
that wasn't the case. I mean, he was successful in that he won two general elections in 1955 and
1959, increased the majority, I think I'm right in saying 1959. And he coined the phrase,
you've never had it so good. And in material terms, he was right. There was quite an economic
boom in the second half of the 1950s. Ordinary people on ordinary wages began to buy things that
they would have never been able to afford before, just sort of washing machines and fridges and
things like that. He had presided over building over 300,000
council houses each year. So the country was feeling quite good about itself. And that
was essentially why he largely increased his majority in 1959. But in some ways,
it wasn't a happy government. You had a whole batch of Treasury ministers, including
the Chancellor Peter Thornycroft and Enoch Powell, who was a Treasury Minister, resigning
over public spending plans because they thought the government was spending too much. Inflation
was starting to happen. And eventually, it really all came crashing down. And his government was
beset by a series of scandals, the Profumo scandal, the sort of call girl scandal. Profumo was
Minister for War back in the days when we had a minister for war. I think we should bring that round tonight.
And Macmillan started to lose his grip.
And whenever that happens, you can almost sort of see power draining away from a politician.
We saw that with Theresa May, especially, I think.
But it happened with Harold Macmillan.
And it was scandal after scandal.
And then, of course, he was ill himself with a prostate problem.
And he decided that he would have to resign over that. Now, in retrospect, I'm not sure that he
needed to. I mean, if we had modern day medicine, he certainly wouldn't have needed to.
And then that triggered another leadership election, which happened to, well, it wasn't
an election. It took place at the 1963 Tory party conference in Blackpool, where all the different
contenders sort of
were able to show their wares. But it was actually everybody's second favourite, Alec Douglas Hume,
that emerged from that. I mean, the most unlikely Prime Minister of modern day Britain you could
ever hope to see. Yeah, so tell us why. What was wrong with Lord Hume? Well, there's nothing wrong
with him. It's just that he was the 14th Earl of Hume so a real aristocrat he looked like an aristocrat he looked like a human skeleton actually
and he had been around politics for a very very long time he was Neville Chamberlain's PPS I think
and he's very much in favour of appeasement but of course that was quite a long time ago by 1963
and he was somebody that was just quite popular with everybody. And he didn't really tout
himself for the position. But everybody said, for example, I might like Reggie Maudling,
but I don't like Rad Butler. But he was somebody that everybody could happily cope with. He didn't
have that many enemies. And that's actually a reason why many prime ministers get the job,
because they have fewer enemies than their opponents. But he was only in power for just over a year. And he came a lot closer than a lot of
people thought to winning the 1964 election, because he was up against Harold Wilson,
who he referred to as the 14th Mr. Wilson. And Harold Wilson was quite a dynamic figure for the
Labour Party in those days. He hadn't coined the phrase the white heat of technological revolution, but he was quite populist. He would consort with people like the Beatles.
And the contrast between him and Alec Douglas Hume was great for the electorate, but he only won
by a majority of four seats in 1964. And then he followed that up two years later by holding
another election, and of course got a majority of over 100 so that set
him up for the next four years and alec douglas whom gave up his elder gave up his seat in the
house of lords yeah the last prime minister in the household i think was lord salisbury wasn't it the
turn of the centuries but the 1890s the hume thought he couldn't do that so he got a seat
in house commons but that didn't save him he was defeated by harold wilson wildly unpopular with
the establishment was he i think the establishment, was he?
I think the establishment was quite suspicious of him because they were quite suspicious of anybody
who wasn't on the right, essentially. And he had quite a left-wing history. I mean, we think of him
now as quite a moderate Labour figure. But when he became leader of the Labour Party after Hugh
Gatesgood died, he was not seen as on the right of the Labour Party
at all. I think he drifted in that way over the course of his leadership. But he was quite a sort
of cheeky chappy. He would always appear with a pipe. He never smoked a pipe in private. He smoked
a cigar, but the Labour politicians smoking a cigar in public, I mean, you can imagine the
reaction that would have caused. He was very good at ingratiating himself with the so-called working classes. I mean, he was an Oxford don.
He was an academic. He didn't really have any working class credentials in many ways. He was
the first prime minister, I think, that really used what we would now term as spin to any great
degree. I mean, you can say Harold Macmillan
possibly was. He was the first one to do quite effective party political broadcasts.
But Harold Wilson really translated well on television in a way that Alex Douglas-Hulme
certainly did not, and in a way that his successor, Ted Heath, never really did either.
He would go on chat shows and appear perfectly natural. He was comfortable
in himself in a way that some politicians never are. Certainly, perfectly natural he was comfortable in himself in a way
that some politicians never are certainly ted heath was never comfortable in himself
you're listening to dan snow's history we're talking about prime ministers
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episodes every week harold wilson sort of ted heath and him have this kind of disraeli gladstone like in a minor key
but there's the quite exciting politics in the 1960s and 70s between labor and the conservatives
lots of close elections,
lots of minority governments and things. By the way, why was that in that period? Why did it seem difficult to win a decisive victory? Well, Harold Wilson did win a decisive victory. And you could
argue that Ted Heath won quite a decisive victory in June 1970, when he wasn't expected to win.
Right up to the polling day, everyone thought Harold Wilson would be re-elected. But just before
polling day, the balance of payments figures came out. And people younger than me will scratch their heads and think,
well, so we know that Britain always has a trade deficit. But in the 1970s, you had unemployment
figures, inflation figures and balance of payments figures, and they could really affect people's
votes. People literally thought that that was the reason why Ted Heath won. I think it was a bit more
complicated than that. And the Wilson government between 64 and 70 was quite a transformational government in many
ways. You look at a lot of the social reforms that they carried out, legalising homosexuality,
legalising abortion, things like that. I mean, very brave things to have done in many ways.
There was an ideological divide between the Labour and Conservative parties on social issues,
but not so much on economic issues. There was a so-called Butts-Gillite consensus, that was a
sort of combination of R.A. Butler and Hugh Gateskill, where even if the Conservatives took
over from Labour, you wouldn't necessarily see too much change in economic policy, because the
Conservatives had seemingly accepted a lot of Labour's economic plans, including not
really reforming the trade unions. And that was really a consensus, I would say, between 1945 and
1975 between the two parties. But of course, that broke when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1975.
Ted Heath had a reasonable parliamentary majority. And he started off with what seemed to
be a right wing economic programme, a sort of pseudo Thatcherite economic programme. But he soon,
you turned on that when the oil crisis started, one or two big companies like Rolls Royce got
into trouble, and he nationalised them. I mean, can you imagine? Well, you can imagine a Conservative
government doing that nowadays, because of course, we live in very strange times. But in those days, it would have been considered anathema.
And then of course, the miners' strikes and all sorts of other strikes came to
bedevil the nation. I remember at the age of 12, on a Sunday afternoon, power cuts sitting around
the fire with candles, and there was a three-day working week. And the country just seemed to be in
a real downward spiral. And on top of that,
you then have the oil crisis. And Ted Heath in the end called an election in February 1974 with the slogan, who governs Britain? Is it the Conservatives or is it the trade unions?
And the electorate didn't do what he expected them to do. Had he called the election a few
weeks earlier, he may well have won it, but he delayed it too long. And Labour came into power again for the next five years.
Such are the vagaries of the British electoral system. Ted Heath won more votes, but lost the
election, and then refused to cut a deal with the Liberal Democrats who demanded big, sweeping
electoral reform. He'd rather go into opposition than change the way we elect our MPs. I think
that's fascinating. It was slightly more complicated than that because the Liberals had polled six million votes, which was an astonishing number, but they
only got 14 seats, something like that. So it was a very unfair system. But Jeremy Thorpe was the
leader of the Liberals and he was demanding to be Home Secretary. Well, Ted Heath clearly knew
quite a bit about Jeremy Thorpe's recent past and decided that really could not happen. Also, the Liberal Party were not up for a full coalition either, even though Thorpe was. So it was sort of six of one, half a dozen of the other as to the reason why that didn't happen.
Howard Wilson was back in power, but only for a couple of years, because in 1976,
he then voluntarily resigned. People now say that, well, he realised that his mental faculties were going. He wasn't very old. I think he was only just over 60. People say there was the first
signs of the dementia that later afflicted him. And there wasn't an awful lot achieved in those
two years. And there was a second election in October 74, and Labour only had a very small majority. That majority was whittled away by by-elections, so there had to be a pact
with the Liberals. It wasn't a formal coalition. And in 1976, the Chancellor, Dennis Healey,
had to go to the IMF to borrow a billion pounds to bail out the public finances. So that was
probably the economic nadir of Britain in the post-war period. I remember going on a school
trip to Germany in 1977, I think I was, what, 14 or 15, and people would laugh at us. We were
known as the sick man of Europe. They kept saying, well, how come you have all these strikes?
And it was actually quite embarrassing. And that gave Margaret Thatcher, who'd been elected leader
of the Tories in February 1975, a real opportunity. And boy, did she grab it.
We should leave Harold Wilson and say, allegedly, very unlikely, he's the Queen's favourite Prime
Minister. Is there any truth to that rumour? Well, we'll never know, will we? I've lost
count of the Prime Ministers that she's had. Is it 14 now that have served under her? Something
like that. There's only been 55 in the whole of history. That's quite some feat. I think she did
get on incredibly well with Harold Wilson in a way that she certainly did not with Ted Heath.
There's a lot written about her relationship with Margaret Thatcher. A lot of it is complete and
utter rubbish. The Crown, I think, totally misrepresented that relationship. I think she
always found Tony Blair a bit of a trial. And I don't know what her relationship, I mean,
nobody has a relationship with Theresa May. I'd love to know what the relationship between the
Queen and Boris Johnson is, I have to say. My mind boggles. So Harold Wilson resigns,
we get Jim Callaghan for three years, staggering to the end of that Labour administration. And then
1979, Margaret Thatcher comes in. Well, actually actually not really with a big landslide she
gets a monumental landslide in 83 after the Falklands War but she comes in with a big mandate
in 79. She did and if you read the Tory manifesto from 1979 it's a fairly insipid document there
were very few categoric promises in that and she'd had a very difficult first four years as
leader of the Conservative Party because everyone assumed that she wouldn't last but she did have an appeal to different groups of people that the
Conservative Party had never really been able to get to and she developed what nowadays I think
would be called a bit of a populist platform particularly on the sale of council houses
and I think that was one of the main reasons that she got elected in 1979. It was
certainly one of the main reasons why she got such a huge majority in 1983. But her victory in 1979
was not completely assured. She knew that there was still a lot of people in the electorate, even
women in the electorate, who doubted whether a female could do the job. She did an address to
the nation on a party election
broadcast, I think it was two nights before the election day itself. And it was just her
staring into the camera, telling the electorate why they needn't fear electing a woman. And it's
worth watching back because it really did have a big effect on people. And she got a majority of
44. And she wasn't as radical as everyone now thinks she was
in her first few years. On trade union reform, for example, she appointed Jim Pryor, who had
always been on the left of the Conservative Party. And he adopted a very softly, softly approach
to trade union reform. And even when Norman Tebbit, who everyone thinks of now as on the hard right,
even when he took over from Jim Pryor,
he didn't go in all guns blazing either. But the economy was transformed in the 1980s in so many
ways with privatisation, which wasn't really on the agenda in 1979. It only really started after
BT was privatised, I think in 1983. And then, of course, in the second term, a lot of the major public utilities followed.
And that cemented her reputation amongst working class voters, so-called lower middle class voters,
a lot of whom became share owners for the first time, something 10 or 20 years previously no one
would have even thought was possible. So she had a huge effect on that. And then, of course,
possible so she had a huge effect on that and then of course the Falklands war came along in April 1982 now that could have seen the end of Margaret Thatcher and she knew that right from the
start but it cemented her reputation as the Iron Lady the the Russians had dubbed her that in 1977
probably the biggest favor they could ever have done her the subliminal message that she wanted
to convey after that is Britain is back,
not just through economic reforms, but the Falklands War shows that we are not a pushover.
We're not going to give in to the Russians because, of course, we now forget the Cold War
was not over at that point. That was really only over in 1990. And she and her alliance with Ronald
Reagan and her relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev really
enabled that to happen. And she was a major world figure in a way that no British Prime Minister,
I would say even including Tony Blair, has been since. I think he's come closest.
But everyone knew Margaret Thatcher throughout the world. She was almost as famous as the Queen.
Why did she end up proving so divisive? We've had long discussions
about Margaret Thatcher on this podcast before, but where do you come down on whether the economic
changes would have taken place anyway, even without Margaret Thatcher, whether she accelerated
and nurtured them? Why did she prove to be both loved and hated by her fans and enemies?
I think most of the most successful prime ministers that we've ever had, or even foreign
leaders that you think of who are successful, they are in some ways divisive. They're not people who necessarily
unite the country in normal times. I don't agree that the economic changes would have happened
anyway. I think that the so-called Butzker-like consensus would have probably continued for some
time. I think Britain's economic decline would have continued had she not been there. The longer
a prime minister is in office,
and there are lots of examples of this, the longer they're in office, the more enemies they create,
whether they're within their own party or within the electorate. And depending on the power of
those enemies, it depends on how quickly the prime minister then falls from power. But if you've got
a majority of 144, or as it was in 1987, I think 101 101 you are inevitably going to create a lot of enemies by
default because you can't include everyone in government so there'll be a lot of recalcitrant
backbenchers who are a bit bitter because they see their mates being promoted but they don't and then
of course there are people that leave government for whatever reason they then start to formulate
on the back benches so in a sense her fall from power in 1990 was probably inevitable at some point.
If it hadn't happened then, it would have happened fairly quickly afterwards, I suspect.
And then you add into that the fact that the Conservative Party at that time was
mostly very pro-European and she became increasingly Eurosceptic,
though in today's terms, very moderately Eurosceptic.
You look at the introduction of the poll tax,
which her cabinet or members of her cabinet couldn't stop her doing.
And yet many of them saw that it would be a political disaster.
John Biffin, who had been in her cabinet until 1987,
when she fell, he said it was like when you want to go
from one tube station to another in Paris,
and you press a couple of buttons and the lights light up to get to your destination.
It was like that had happened, that everything coalesced to provide the perfect circumstance
for her to fall. And if you think back to those days, I mean, I remember the day that she fell,
and the whole world thought that Britain had gone stark staring mad.
And all my adult life she had been prime minister.
I remember my seven-year-old niece in 1988 asking me, Uncle Ian, can a man become prime minister?
She'd had such an effect on the whole country.
She was a bit like the Queen is now.
We can't imagine a time, because we've all grown up with the Queen, we can't imagine anyone else being the monarch, but one day we'll have to.
She was succeeded by John Major, who appears better in hindsight than we felt he was at the
time. I think that's true. Margaret Thatcher's big failing was that she didn't groom a successor
in her own image. She allowed the whips to appoint a lot of junior ministers who then rose up to become in
her cabinet. She never had a majority in her own cabinet in many ways. Now, she quite enjoyed a
good argument, contrary to what people seem to think, but there were too many people in her
cabinet who weren't of her own ilk. And when the leadership election came in November 1990,
she thought that John Major was about the nearest to her that there was. Douglas
Heard and Michael Hazeltine were the other two candidates, and she was probably right in that.
But there was no way that he was a down-the-line Thatcherite. All of the other possible contenders
had fallen by the wayside. I think the one that she would have liked was Cecil Parkinson.
But of course, he resigned in 1983. And then when he came back into the Cabinet,
he was never quite the same again.
He's a sort of Anthony Eden figure, looked very much like Anthony Eden.
So John Major came in and immediately, of course, he had to break with the Thatcher legacy.
And the way he did that was to basically abandon the poll tax and change it to a council tax based on rentable values.
So that signalled a break with Margaret Thatcher.
His approach to the European
community was quite different. But of course, he had to deal with these noises offstage from
Margaret Thatcher, first from the back benches in the House of Commons, and then after 1992 in the
Lords. And she proved to be a considerable thorn in his side. But he won the election in 1992
against all the odds. Everyone thought that he was going to lose. He was up against Neil Kinnock,
the leader of the Labour Party, who people just couldn't imagine as Prime Minister. They couldn't
imagine him on the doorstep of number 10 doing his equivalent of whether his discord may we bring
harmony. He didn't sort of pass that sniff test. So Major got in with a way for the majority of 21,
which was gradually eroded by by-elections in that parliament. And then, of course, just after
the 1992 election came Black Wednesday, when we had to leave the European exchange rate mechanism,
which Major had been instrumental in going into when he was Chancellor. And the Conservatives'
reputation for economic competence really never came back after that, even though by 1997 the
economy was actually doing really, really well.
And people imagine that that period was terrible for the economy. It actually wasn't. But the
country never gave Major any credit for the fact that we had bounced back. And there was a
succession of scandals affecting various members of his government, which just gave Tony Blair,
the new leader of the Labour Party, a complete open goal. And boy, did he kick the ball in.
the Labour Party a complete open goal. And boy, did he kick the ball in.
Three gigantic election victories for Tony Blair, 1997, 2001, 2005. Again, a politician we've talked a lot about on this podcast. 10 years in office. Is he historically significant?
Well, I think given that he was there for 10 years, that inevitably means he was historically
significant. I think he also changed the country quite a lot. I mean, a lot
of it for the better. I'm not someone who shares Tony Blair's politics, but I can remember on the
night that he won the election, I was driving along the embankment past the House of Commons
at about four o'clock in the morning. And I could hear this music coming over from Royal Festival
Hall. And he had just arrived to greet his party workers and they were playing things can only get
better and as a sort of at that point a die-hard conservative myself I wound down the window and
stopped the car and just listened to this and I can remember thinking to myself Tony Blair as
Prime Minister I can actually imagine that and I think it might be quite exciting he didn't frighten
the electoral horses in the way that some labour leaders have done over the years
I think he wasted his first term he was far too conservative there were not that many major
reforms minimum wage was one in his memoirs he admitted as such he should have been much more
radical in his first time he had a majority of 179 for goodness sake he could have done
literally anything but he didn't. Now, he could have taken
us into the euro, and that would have been something that he would have always been remembered
for, and that would have had huge consequences over the course of the next 20 years. We would
not have had a Brexit referendum, for example. How the country would have been different, I don't
know, but that would have been a truly transformational moment. But of course, Gordon
Brown, the Chancellor, in my view, rightly made
sure that did not happen. So I think he missed quite a few opportunities to really stamp himself
on history, because most prime ministers, if you think all the prime ministers we've discussed,
will be remembered for one thing. And Tony Blair will be remembered for the Iraq war.
Now, I would argue that he should be remembered for a lot more than that. There were a lot of
domestic reforms, social reforms that he brought in, which have stood the test of time and will continue to do so. But I'm afraid that in the league table of prime ministers, he will be marked down for that.
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His successor, not unlike Churchill and Eden, Gordon Brown, his sort of anointed successor,
years and years and years of waiting, their relationship apparently terrible by the end,
gets in and has the toxic aftermath of the Iraq war fallout, the general sense of malaise that you get after a party's
been in power for 10 years, and then you get the greatest economic or certainly financial collapse
since the Great Depression, all smashing into him in his nearly three years in office.
Pretty unlucky, Gordon Brown and his timing. In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. Prime
ministers who take over from a prime minister who's been in power for a long time rarely will
go down in history as great prime ministers. I mean, Major being a good example of that and Gordon Brown being the most recent.
He was in some ways in the right place at the right time, though, because he effectively led
the world effort to come back after the great financial crash. You had the astonishing scenario
of a meeting of Euro country finance ministers and prime ministers
being chaired by Gordon Brown, even though Britain wasn't in the Euro, because even Nicolas Sarkozy,
the president of France at the time, recognised that Gordon Brown was one of the few people that
understood what had happened and what needs to be done to get out of it. So I think British
political historians are going to be much kinder on Gordon Brown
in the future if you read a lot of the memoirs of people who were involved in that not just in
this country but overseas you can see that his contribution to that and his leadership
in essentially educating a lot of his fellow colleagues about what needed to be done I think
that will stand the test of time but you look at the first three months of his
premiership, I remember thinking at the time, my God, I've really misjudged Gordon Brown. He's a
really good prime minister and he did incredibly well, but it was all undermined by the fact that
he briefed there was going to be an election and then he wimped out of it and it was really all
downhill from there. That was a disaster. The Conserv conservatives had spent years complaining that labor was run by spin
doctors and then found a spin doctor to run the conservative party david cameron defeated gordon
brown and he was slick wasn't he there was a big contrast in him and gordon brown there was a huge
contrast he was a much more likable figure as well and i think in modern day politics that does count
for something okay you can have a sort of bastard figure as a prime minister. And there are some circumstances when that's a good thing. But I think when you go up
against somebody who was as dour as Gordon Brown, seemingly devoid of a sense of humour, which is
totally untrue. If you meet Gordon Brown privately, he's a very nice, funny guy, but he just couldn't
quite translate that in the media. Always looked as if he was in a bit of a mood, possibly because he often was. He always did interviews with leading broadcasters as if he
was slightly irritated by them, that they weren't really up to having a conversation with him.
And of course, what exemplified this was in the 2010 election campaign, his encounter with Mrs.
Gillian Duffy of Rochdale, where he'd left his microphone on and described her as a bigoted
woman. And then later in the day, he had to go around to her house and apologise for it.
Now, bizarrely, he actually rebounded from that quite well. And it almost gave him a new lease
of life. And he thought, well, sod it, I'm going to lose anyway. I might as well enjoy the last
week of the campaign. And he did a lot better than many people thought. But he was only Prime
Minister for three years. And I think he was the sort of figure that
probably needed five to 10 years to really make a huge impact. We're now in very modern history
here. Everyone knows this stuff. David Cameron resigned after the disastrous backfiring of his
Brexit referendum decision. Theresa May and Boris Johnson, these last three. I mean, it's too soon
to say. It's like the old historians. It's too soon to say it's like the old historians it's too soon to say isn't it what they're well it really is and i was faced with
a dilemma here because i've written the boris johnson chapter in the book and i wondered whether
to include boris johnson in the book and i could only really write up till august last year and of
course he thought he would go down in history as the brexit prime minister but he will probably go
down in history as the covid prime minister, but he will probably go down in history as the Covid Prime Minister, because of events. And each Prime Minister, you can literally
go back to 1721, and each Prime Minister has to cope with events that they could not have foreseen.
And then they are judged by how they react to those events. And it's very interesting,
as we record this in April 2021, the Conservatives are streets ahead in the opinion
polls. And yet, if we'd had this conversation six months ago, we would have been saying,
well, there's no way the Conservatives can win the next election under Boris Johnson,
given his failures of handling COVID. But just as the Falklands factor gave Margaret Thatcher
a boost in the polls, the vaccine factor has given Boris Johnson a real boost in the polls.
So I always thought that Boris Johnson
would either be a fantastically brilliant Prime Minister, or an absolutely dire one,
and there wouldn't be many shades of grey in between. I still think there's a few chapters
to write on Boris Johnson before we come to a conclusion on him. But the other two that you
mentioned, David Cameron and Theresa May, I think, again, David Cameron will probably be seen as a better prime minister than people think now. It depends a lot on how Brexit turns out. If in 10 years' time, we are motoring ahead economically, that it's all actually gone rather well, then I think people will forgive him for the Brexit referendum in many ways. But if the opposite is true, then probably not. But I think in other
areas, he was actually quite a good Prime Minister. Theresa May, I'm afraid, her premiership has no
redeeming factors whatsoever. She came in with promises to do lots of different social reforms.
She didn't achieve hardly any of them. And of course, it was all defined by Brexit and her
failure to get her deal through Parliament. And she was actually,
I think, very ill-suited for the job, which possibly a lot of people ought to have worked
out before that, because she was somebody who had no natural allies on the Tory benches. She'd been
in Parliament since 1997, but no one really knew her. She was very much a loner. And even some of
her so-called closest political friends, when you talk to them now,
they will still say, well, yeah, she would count me as a friend, but I don't count her as a friend
in the conventional sense of the word friend. And she was too in hock to her advisors. And when they
left, there was nobody there really to pick up the pieces. And it's quite a sad tale in many ways.
Imagine clambering the greasy pole reaching
the pinnacle life's ambition then you end up having to wrestle with this one intractable
thing when what you want to do is pass all sorts of interesting reforms and change britain anyway
thank you so much we got there in del you absolute hero well done you your book is called it's called
the prime minister's 55 leadersors, 300 Years of History.
Do you know the thing that I'm really most proud of about this is that when I had the idea for the book,
I thought it was actually going to be quite a struggle to get a publisher to take it on because it's quite a big project.
And I thought they're never going to think this is going to sell.
But I had the sales figures through last week week and I cannot believe how many copies it has
sold it's had four reprints so far and it shows that there is a lot of I mean you know this Dan
there is so much interest in what I would call general history this is not an academic book I
asked all of the authors for this book to write without footnotes to write in a way that somebody
with an interest in politics would like but also just to interest a general reader. And it's absolutely gratifying that so many
people have bought it. Well, lots more people buy it now, I'm sure. I'm sure they will.
History podcast. Thank you very much for coming on and well done for this big project.
Thank you very much. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,
this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.
Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast.
Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms,
but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour,
head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars,
and then leave a nice glowing
review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but
them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything
will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. you