Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain's Worst Prime Minister

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Could Liz Truss be Britain's worst Prime Minister? As the political scene in the UK hurtles into further disarray, Dan gets together historians Tim Bale, Catherine Haddon and Robin Eagles to put forward who they think has been Britain's worst Prime Minister over the centuries. Anthony Eden, Edward Heath and the 3rd Earl of Bute contend for first place.This episode was produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Prime Minister Liz Truss, the first Lord of the Treasury, the UK's Prime Minister, is currently, according to an opinion poll, the most unpopular Prime Minister in history since the advent of modern polling. She seems to have caused a financial crisis in Britain with her budget announcement of gigantic unfunded tax cuts. She is, objectively, a very, very bad public speaker. She chose a cabinet narrowly from inside her own rather small political power base inside the Conservative Party. She'd not extend the hand of friendship to opponents. But is she the worst Prime Minister in the 300-year history of the office? There have been some absolute wrong-uns in this podcast, folks. We're going there. In this podcast, we're going to find out who was the worst and are they worse than Liz Truss? Will it be Lord North?

It's difficult for me to talk about this. The man who lost the American colonies, not all the American colonies, of course, held on to Canada, didn't he? The best bit, obviously. Was it Eden? Too old, full of drugs, I joke you not, who went on an amphetamine-fuelled bender that led to a collapse in Britain's global position, global prestige?

Was it Callaghan? Was it Rosebery, who didn't seem to be that fussed about being Prime Minister at all? Was it the Duke of Devonshire, who did sort of nothing, really? I'm going to run through some of the worst, and then we're going to hear from experts, friends of the podcast, with their vote. There are plenty of prime ministers to choose from. There's probably 56, although there is a little bit of controversy there, probably 56 prime ministers, many of whom served non-consecutive terms. Gladstone, for example,

was prime minister on four separate occasions, one of which was only for a couple of months. The office now is about 302 years old, and like many things do with the British Constitution, the origination of the office is a little bit obscure. There was never a point in time when a law was passed, when the new office of Prime Minister was formally established. Robert Walpole is always said to be the first Prime Minister, but the small and strange hill that I would be prepared to die on is that James Stanov, his predecessor, who died very soon after reaching the summit of power in 1717, was sort of just as much of a prime minister as Walpole, but that's a different pod. Don't at me. Let's not do this. Then, well, as now really, the prime minister's key job was to get business

done in parliament, to get stuff through Parliament, to cajole, to threaten, to bribe, and occasionally inspire, convince eccentric, independent-minded MPs to vote for what we call supply. That's cash. That's money. And that money keeps the government, the executive branch, going. It keeps the navy in oak and hemp and shot. It keeps the crown in its splendor. And that was no easy job because the revolutionary changes, the upheavals of the 17th century, meant that the monarch in Britain, unlike his or her contemporaries in Europe, couldn't simply command, couldn't simply just demand cash. And certain powers, revenue-raising powers, for example, the right to levy taxes, were reserved to Parliament. So a monarch had to work with MPs. He or she had to find someone to get the MPs to cough up. And the office of Prime Minister emerges

in this period. It's helped by the fact that George I comes in. He's a foreign king, more interested probably in foreign affairs than the nittyitty gritty of domestic raising of revenue. And so it became convenient that a kind of bridge between the king and parliament emerges and is kind of personified in the person of one individual, a prime minister. So Robert Walpole is that man. He was an incredibly talented parliamentary manager, but he was also yet to manage the king. So Robert Walpole is that man. He was an incredibly talented parliamentary manager, but he was also yet to manage the king. So a man who knew how to maintain the confidence of the king, usually by controlling the woman in the king's life. In George I's case, it was his mistress. In George II's case, it was his wife. And so for 20 years, Robert Walpole walked that high wire between parliament and sovereign.

He managed to survive the transition from one king to his son. And that was a skill that eluded many of his successors. So Walpole was highly effective, but we're searching here for the duds. So let's keep going. After he left, we got the Wilmington and the Pelham brothers. They kept his machine ticking along for another two decades, kind of juggernaut of political stability, financial now. So that really helped mid-18th century Britain see off serious domestic uprising, the last great Jacobite uprising in 1745 to 1746. And it saw Britain win its greatest victory in

the Seven Years' War, which you will have heard me mention on this podcast before. have heard me mention on this podcast before. It was the advent of a new king that blew that warpole Pelamite system to pieces. And here we get some duds, folks, so buckle up. George II died. His grandson, George III, ascended to the throne. He was new. He was a young king. He unfortunately had some ideas of his own. As we might say in today's internet era, he'd done his own research and he brought it all crashing down. And his chosen instrument to do that was the first Tory Prime Minister of Britain, his former tutor, and I fear to say, an Old Etonian. Yes, it's Earl Bute. Now tell us more about Earl Bute and why he was the worst Prime Minister of all time. Here's Dr Robin Eagles. He's an editor at the History of Parliament Trust here in the UK. And he really puts the boot in. Sorry.

John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, who was the first Prime Minister really that George III wanted to have in post after his accession to the throne. He oversaw the ending of the Seven Years' War, which was a success in many ways. But in spite of that, he managed to throw it all away. A very strong position in Parliament, the support of the King. By January 1763, after he'd been in post only a few months, he said the angel Gabriel himself could not at present govern this country. And within a few more months, he'd lost all confidence in what was going on and walked away from the job. Why did George III make that man Prime Minister in the first place? What was he thinking? Well they were very close friends indeed. Boot had come to prominence through the

household of George III's father Prince Frederick, the Prince of Wales, who of course died in 1751 so never became king himself. Frederick himself had liked Bute, but he'd assessed him at a rather lesser level. He'd said that he'd be very good as an ambassador in a country where not very much happened. But George III came to like him very much. Bute was his governor and his mentor and became a very close friend. And they, between 1751, when Frederick died and George III became king in 1760, came up with a notion that they wanted to enhance the power of the monarchy and to, as they saw it, do away with factional politics. They wanted to reboot, if you like, in a terrible pun, the whole system of the country.

They hated the way that Whig factionalism had taken things over. But it was the first Tory prime minister. And so they really thought that what they were going to do is they were going to come out and they were going to root out corruption. And what actually happened was Butte then turned to Henry Fox, who was, if you like, one of the most sort of corrupt party men that was out there, to do his dirty work for him. And he oversaw a thing called what's known as the slaughter of the Pelomite innocents, which was rooting out all of the old followers of the Duke of Newcastle, the former Whig prime minister, in order to achieve his scheme. So, I mean, George III himself was quite dismayed by

this, by having Henry Fox imposed on him. It was everything they didn't believe in. But Boot was just a very timorous character. He's very aloof and very sort of self-important in lots of ways. One of his great rivals, Lord Wargrave, called him Bombastus Vigoroso and sort of lampooned him as this man who sort of had great self-belief but could barely read a newspaper himself. He puts forward this very vigorous guide for Henry Fox to clear out the Aegean stables, if you like. But then at the moment of his triumph, when he's the peace through that's brought the Seven Years' War to an end, when he's about to start trying to tackle balancing the books, he has this huge meltdown and walks away from the job.

So you've touched on it there, but he just sounds like he was temperamentally unsuited to being a prime minister in an era, not a democratic era, but an era of parliamentary divided government. Yeah, that's absolutely right. What he really wanted, and indeed what he angled for with his resignation, was he wanted to remain a kind of advisor behind the curtain. He didn't want all the problems of office. He didn't want really to be first Lord of the Treasury. And this is the great thing about him. People assumed that for the next few years, he continued to be this sort of malevolent figure behind the scenes. People assumed that he was having an affair with the Dowager Prince of Wales. I mean, this was supposedly one of his entrees into George's confidence.

And that continued to be said about him for the next sort of 20 years or so. It comes up again when the Dowager Prince of Wales dies later in the century. People remember this supposed thing. That was Dr. Robin Eagles pointing out that for all his weaknesses, I think the worst was the fact that

he couldn't take the heat. He resigned, hoping to exercise power from the shadows, from a distance. Wow, shocking. So he was actually the first in a run of short-lived, pretty unhappy prime ministers. His successor, Grenville, served for two years, memorable for the Stamp Act, which drove the Americans absolutely bonkers. So he's probably towards the bottom of the league as well. Rockingham only managed a year. And then here's my surprise nomination. This is shocking, folks. This is shocking. One of the worst prime ministers is a man who is one of our greatest politicians,

one of our greatest strategists, the man who had effectively run the Seven Years' War, but not, as you'll sometimes read, as Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder. He'd actually been a kind of foreign secretary during the Seven Years' War. Duke of Newcastle was the Prime Minister. Pitt was by this stage old. He was declining terribly. He was very ill. He lost control of his administration. They levied more taxes on the American colonies that Pitt didn't seem to have known about or okayed. The minister is completely rudderless and therefore poor old William Pitt, great man, terrible prime minister. He was succeeded by the Duke of Grafton when his health completely

collapsed. Duke Grafton again did two years. Hard to say exactly what he did other than not sort out America. So Grafton not brilliant. Now we get to Lord North. Now he did do 12 years. He steadied the ship. If by steadying the ship, you mean drive it hard onto a goddamn reef and let various waves smash into it for years, threaten to break up the hull completely. He was the boss. He was the prime minister in the lead up to the American Revolutionary War and during it. And that was, I think, Britain's worst strategic defeat in history. We can discuss that, but I think it probably was. The end of the war meant the end of him. In fact, when he was brought the news of the defeat at Yorktown, he simply shouted, oh God, it is all over. I think from memory,

he was like at a drinking session. He was like a big dinner party. He was quite drunk at the time, which in itself is probably instructive. How bad is Lord Northwell? I mean, do we blame him for the greatest geopolitical setback in the last 300 years of British history? He was in the hot seat, but at the same time, it was an impossible task. I think, to be honest, funding that war, a huge transatlantic force projection, was a triumph of logistics and financing. And Britain was fighting nearly every power in Europe and the so-called patriots in America. To be honest, I'd be tempted to blame those headwinds and the on-the-spot commanders. Anyway, that's North. That brings us to Shelburne, this guy, this guy. At the peace treaty at the end

of the Revolutionary War, Shelburne just coughed up a gigantic slice of North America, trans-Appalachian America, which the Americans had no business having. It was garrisoned by the Brits. He gave them far more bizarrely than America's closest ally, France, thought they should have. That's an extraordinary negotiating position. Would I like, and people might say this is absurd, but do I think that large parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and bits of other states, do I think they should be in Canada? Well, yes. Yes, I do. So, Shelburne, not great. After that, we arrive at a slightly torturous path to Pitt the Younger. Good PM, fair to say, good PM. Drank himself to

death, but no one is perfect. Stress the job. Addington, not a huge fan of his. He followed Pitt, but hard to say he's the worst. Grenville, interestingly, really pretty useless, but abolition of the slave trade happened on his watch, which kind of lifts him clear of the bottom of the table. Spencer Percival, fascinatingly, now we're coming to the darkest years in the Palaeonic Wars, probably dealt one of the worst hands ever dealt to a UK Prime Minister. I mean, I think it's tougher outlook in those early years of the Poland Wars, really, than 1940. So he does all right, frankly, but his bad luck continued when he was shot and killed. The only UK prime minister to be assassinated.

Not his fault, though, to be fair. Then we get some fairly able, if rather reactionary, prime ministers. And the next dud, though, was probably Goderich, who took over when Canning tragically died after days in office. Poor old Canning. He's at the moment the shortest serving prime minister. who took over when Canning tragically died after days in office. Poor old Canning. He's at the moment the shortest serving prime minister. He served less than four months thanks to his premature death. I say at the moment because a situation not looking great for Liz Truss. But yes, Goderich, one of his colleagues, a leading Whig, said they think

Goderich has behaved so ill in this affair that they can have no confidence in him. His conduct has been marked by such deplorable weakness as shows how unfit he is for the situation he occupies. George IV, the king at the time, went a little bit further. He called him a damned, snivelling, blubbering blockhead. But I think George IV is one to talk there. So Goderich, a bad prime minister. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're trying to find out who the worst prime minister in British history was. More coming up. Probably will be more coming up.

Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast, American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with English colonists, tour Central Park before it was Central Park, and a city in Tennessee which helped build the atomic bomb.

From famous battlefields to secret cities, from familiar names to lesser-known events, I'll speak with leading experts from across the United States and beyond to bring American history to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, another candidate. This is my other strange candidate for worst prime minister. Like Pitt, a man who was one of the greatest in his own field, literally on the battlefield, because that man was Britain's greatest general. The man who liberated Spain, brought Napoleon to his knees. The man who occupied Paris, bedded Napoleon's mistress on the banks of the Seine, the Duke of Wellington. He served less than two years as Prime Minister, and he was a terrible Prime Minister. He absolutely

refused to tweak the British voting system, the Constitution, despite its manifest lunacy, despite huge popular unrest in favour of things like expanding the franchise, reallocating seats, getting rid of some rotten boroughs. He didn't like trains as they encouraged poor people to travel about. He didn't live in Downing Street because it was too small and pokey for a man of his stature. And he once fought a duel against someone who criticised his policies as Prime Minister, fought an actual duel, threatened to shoot someone. He claimed he didn't hit him deliberately. However, the thing I think curiously that lifts him from the bottom spot, apart from being a card-carrying legend, so I can never give him the crown of worst Prime

Minister, the thing that lifts him from the bottom spot is that in the face, albeit forced by a potential insurrection, he does pass emancipation for Catholics, allowing them to hold office and vote. So there is that. He does extend civil rights in the UK. After him, you actually get a pretty decent run of prime ministers. You've got Grey, Melbourne, Peel, Russell, Derby. Getting us to the next possible failure? Tough call. But I think the Earl of Aberdeen, he wasn't a great prime minister. He's got a cabinet of rock stars. Badgett, a famous constitutional observer and writer, called the cabinet the ablest we have had perhaps since the Reform Act. It's full of former and future prime ministers, Russell, Palmerston, Gladstone, but he's got a razor-thin majority. It was a kind of uneasy coalition between Whigs and Tories. They're always falling out. He had a good old-fashioned

foreign policy crisis, the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, Russia on the march in the East. Aberdeen was kind of old. He lacked charisma. He couldn't really hold his cabinet together. He was certainly no war leader. And he got binned when the Crimean War sort of reached its worst point. He was got rid of. Instead, the fire-breathing Palmerston was put in. Badger said, we turned out the Quaker and put in the pugilist. Next up, this is where the big beast come out to play. Second half of the 19th century. The zenith of Britain's imperial might. Is there a clue there? I mean, that's interesting.

Does the power and wealth of the state kind of flatter whoever's holding the reins? Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury. Many of these men sort of rotated through the office. They all had decades-long political careers, rather different to the short and bright careers of many of our politicians today. There is one bizarre failure in there. I think he is one of the worst. Now, he's the hugely talented Marquess of Rosebery. He was good at everything, apparently, apart from holding high office. It reminded me of the Tacitus, wonderful Tacitus, the Roman historian,

the quote, he talks about the Emperor Galba. He said, he seemed too great to be a subject, as long as he was a subject, and all would have agreed that he was equal to the imperial office if he had never held it. That's classic, classic Rosebery right there. He was the standout guy of his generation, smart, good looking, charismatic, but a terrible prime minister. And his heart wasn't there either. He resigned over a very minor defeat in parliament. Everyone went, what did he do that for? He didn't need to resign. And it didn't help that he was being hounded by the homophobic Lord Queensbury, who blamed Rosebery, who was probably homosexual, and Oscar Wilde for Lord Queensbury's son's homosexuality. And that allows me, a little digression, it allows me to share my favourite

ever story. When Rosebery was Foreign Secretary, just before he becomes Prime Minister, Lord Queensberry followed Rosebery to the spa town of Bad Homburg in Germany, telling everyone who would listen that he was going to give May horse whipping. And then at Bad Homburg, the Prince of Wales, who was also staying there, literally had to intercept him and shout, it's not worth it. I mean, what a world. Rosebery, as Prime Minister, a little bit like Aberdeen really, couldn't get his cabinet to agree on anything. He got insomnia, his health collapsed. He's way down there, way down there.

Let's quick stop off at Arthur Balfour, Lord Salisbury's nephew. He was pretty bad. He owed his job probably to his connections. Hence the wonderful expression, Bob's your uncle, for everyone listening abroad. That's an expression in the UK we have for like Bob's your uncle, meaning there you go, sorted, it'll all be fine. And that's because his uncle was Robert Salisbury, the former prime minister. So he succeeded his uncle and became prime minister. Bob's your uncle. Then we get a run of liberals, the First World War. I think the 1920s post-war dominated by Baldwin and Macdonald. And they had the unenviable task of

handling a gigantic economic meltdown, the aftermath of the First World War, the huge upheaval of the First World War, the rise of extremism in Europe, and apart from anything else, just the erosion of Britain's hegemony. Britain is just losing its ability to determine the course of events in the world, losing its agency. But I think they do okay. And that brings us to Chamberlain. Tough really to avoid being the kind of armchair expert here, knowing what was to come. But it's tough to give him good marks. He did misjudge Hitler. Yes, he bought Britain time to rearm, but appeasement, his signature policy, was obviously a failure. Post-war, post-Churchill and Attlee, it all becomes a bit ropey. I wonder if that point I thought about earlier about Britain's

global position starts to just reflect back. This becomes hard to be a Prime Minister of Britain. You've got fewer levers to pull. And we get a few ropey Prime Ministers post-war. Eden, he's often at the bottom of the list. And here is friend of the pod, Professor Tim Bale, expert in Conservative Party history. Not a fan of Eden. Tim, who gets your vote for the worst prime minister? Well, it would be Anthony Eden from way back in the mid-1950s.

Well, he was taking all sorts of drugs. His health was poor. But maybe that does make him a bad prime minister. Yeah, it doesn't help that he was taking all sorts of drugs. His health was poor. But maybe that does make him a bad prime minister. Yeah, it doesn't help that he was taking enormous quantities of drugs. The exact drugs are contested. Many people thought that one of them was Benzedrine, which is essentially an amphetamine. But he was taking opioids as well because he had all sorts of health problems from a botched operation early on. And that certainly didn't help his judgment. But he was also, I think, very thin-skinned and actually quite paranoid. And I think when we talk about modern prime ministers, for example, being obsessed with the media, well, Anthony Eden actually was very worried about what the newspapers were saying, often actually took what the newspapers were

saying as a cue for trying to encourage his ministers towards particular policies. So he was, in some sense, he's a very modern figure. We should quickly talk about his tenure defining catastrophe in Suez. Was he a bad prime minister even before his mistake in trying to invade Egypt? Well, yes. I mean, anyone can make that mistake, obviously. We've all been there. Invading a Middle East country with no good reason and failing is something other people have done. But no, he wasn't a great prime minister,

actually, to begin with. To be honest, he probably took on the premiership later than he should have. He was really ready to take it on in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but Churchill insisted on sticking around, albeit anointing Eden as his successor. So by the time he took over in 1955, he was still very popular, but I think past his peak. And actually, Churchill himself recognised that. He didn't have very much experience either of domestic policy. He was very much a foreign policy expert. He'd been foreign secretary several times. He was Churchill's foreign secretary. And so really didn't know what he was doing in domestic policy. And nor did he really have any kind of experience of running a kind of coordinating ministry. So I don't think he was actually very good at the mechanics of

prime ministership. Tim Bale, the demolition job, or Anthony Eden. And while I've got you, do you like league tables? And is it useful to think about the prime ministerial league table? I always think these things are affected by recency bias, to be honest. So we do occasionally see these things done by political scientists or by journalists, but I don't think they have very much value. But in as much as they do have value, Anthony Eden is normally fairly near the bottom. And Liz Truss, where's she at the moment? I think she may well displace Anthony Eden at the bottom, actually, the range she's going. She certainly looks like she might be possibly the shortest-lived Prime Minister. That was Tim Bale. Wow. Even without Suez, Eden's a terrible Prime Minister. That's brutal.

Anyway, we get Douglas Hume shortly after, the very short-lived Tory peer who emerged to give up his peerage and he found a seat from NASA Commons so he could be Prime Minister. The men in suits thrust him into office. An able politician, actually, and served in Cabinet after being Prime Minister, but he's mid-table. He was not an election winner. Now, another Tory, Ted Heath, comes in for an absolute pasting from my next guest. And she knows what she's talking about. She is Catherine Haddon, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government. She's a brilliant historian. She's a must-follow for all constitutional issues. And she thinks Edward Heath, leader of the Conservative Party 1965 to 75 and Prime Minister for four of those years from 1774, was a failed premiership. But more importantly, a failed

premiership that can teach us a lot about today. Here's Catherine. Okay, not actually the worst Prime Minister, I think, but one that is really important to talk about in terms of premierships going tragically wrong. And that is Ted Heath, Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974. Tell me why. Was it his constant states of emergencies that he called? You've got the Prime Minister, who perhaps was one of the best prepared. He'd held several big jobs in government. He'd been the chief whip during the Suez crisis, so he had seen how governments can go wrong. He had been Minister for Labour. He had been Lord Privy Seal. He'd seen lots of different aspects of policy. And he also spent a lot of the late 1960s preparing for his governments, more so than many other oppositions

that I've looked at in terms of the work they put in. And yet he is known in the history books as really being the origin of how we talk about U-turns today. It's only in the 1970s that the newspapers start calling things a U-turn. Obviously, these days we see it all over the place, all over the time. But his was the most fundamental, probably up until the trust government now, because it was a complete reversal of the sort of core principles behind his government, particularly around management of the economy, controlling the markets, labour policy, wages policy, all sort of central issues that 10 years later the Thatcher government would take on and approach without U-turns

because the lady was not for turning. and approach without U-turns, because the lady was not for turning. And so it was a totemic sort of period for the Conservative Party, because there was a lot of experiences during the Heath government that really set the store for later governments and things they never wanted to repeat again. So Catherine, that's a depressing story. He was very well prepared. He was a man of great personal probity. He had great experience. and yet it was a disaster. Why? Is that events, dear boy? Is that the onset of the so-called Yom Kippur War, the miners' strike earlier than that, gigantic energy crisis? Why do premierships fail? Yeah, I think it was a combination of sort of external forces which led to it. Definitely, again, you can look at the sort of wider economic picture worldwide. You can look at sort of

long running issues in terms of UK policy, growth policy. This was the tail end of what some historians have called the sort of post-war consensus, where you had a mixture of welfare states, some planned economy where the government was intervening over industry and how the economy would work. And then the origins of sort of free market thinking. So the government staying out of stuff. So he came in saying that he wanted to stay out of incomes policy, wanted to leave the unions alone. He wanted reforms to what the unions could do. But in the end, rising inflation, rising unemployment, particularly in the first instance, leading to a budget in 1972,

which was called the Dash for Growth, which Ted Heath was very much behind it, that then had to be reversed a year, 18 months later, because of hugely rising inflation. And then yes, loads of external factors. But I think some of it also comes down to him as Prime Minister, because always the way in which you, as an individual, govern, the way you treat people, you know, how encouraged colleagues are to sort of come to your rescue, these all had a factor. And although Heath was a technocratic politician who was really keen on reforming the way we use cabinet government, slimming it down, making it more collegiate and so forth, he was also seen as somebody that was very difficult to talk to

quite prickly in his personality. And those factors didn't help him either. He had a very small core people around him and inner cabinets. And so in those sort of crucial moments, it was very much on his shoulders, the decision that they made. And therefore, the U-turns were sort of very firmly put at his door, even if the factors behind them were much wider than just the decisions he was making. Catherine, that's a brilliant precie of Teddy's premiership. Thank you so much. But while I've got you, can you tell me who you think is the worst of the worst, the worst, the worst? I think Anthony Eden is obviously somebody that's going to be up there. But right now, a lot of people are going to be looking at Liz Truss, and it is really in the balance as to whether or not she's going to have the shortest premiership, and whether or not she's going to be seen as one of our worst prime ministers, or whether she's just going to have a disastrous start to it, but turn it around later. So thank you to Catherine Haddon for going in hard on Ted Heath.

Well, thanks for coming on the show, not for going in hard on Ted Heath, but thank you. We get Wilson back into office after Heath, despite getting fewer votes than him. LOLs, British electoral system. Then we get to Callaghan. I always feel that Callaghan got a bit of a hospital pass in the late 1970s. I think history, though, has been a little kinder to him

than contemporaries were. As rubbish went uncollected, the dead went unburied in late 1970s, and Thatcher trounced them in the 79 election. Then we get Thatcher, Major Blair Brown, but then the rogues gallery, the rogues gallery, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, four in six years. The high turnover is never a great sign. Reminds me a little bit of those years leading up to the American Revolution. Let's hope the future won't be quite as rocky Thank you very much for all the guests coming on this podcast

Please let us know on Facebook or Twitter Whether you think Truss is actually the worst Prime Minister In the last 302 years If so, that's brutal What a mantle, poor thing See you next time I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders All this tradition of ours Our school history poor thing. See you next time. you