The Prime Ministers E-Book

Steve Richards

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'Fascinating, revealing and entertaining.' John Humphrys 'A pure pleasure to read.' Polly Toynbee 'Extraordinary.' Kirsty Wark A landmark history of the men and women who have defined the UK's role in the modern world - and what makes them special - by a seasoned political journalist. At a time of unprecedented political upheaval, this magisterial history explains who leads us and why. From Harold Wilson to Theresa May, it brilliantly brings to life all nine inhabitants of 10 Downing Street over the past fifty years, vividly outlining their successes and failures - and what made each of them special. Based on unprecedented access and in-depth interviews, and inspired by the author's BBC Radio 4 and television series, Steve Richards expertly examines the men and women who have defined the UK's role in the modern world and sheds new light on the demands of the highest public office in the land.

Leseprobe

REFLECTIONS ON LEADERSHIP FROM WILSON TO JOHNSON

‘A thoughtful and compelling book… the chapters on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are the jewels in the crown, but the entire set glitter.’

Observer

‘Brilliant.’

Independent

‘You could not ask for a better qualified guide… than political journalist Steve Richards… the whole book brims with counter-intuitive insights.’

Prospect

‘Extraordinary.’

Kirsty Wark

‘Smart and incisive, from a fine scribe and a wise watcher. Steve Richards is a joy.’

James Naughtie

‘Entertaining, informative and timely.’

Evan Davies

‘A pure pleasure to read.’

Polly Toynbee

About the Author

Steve Richards is a political columnist, journalist, and presenter. He regularly presents The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4 and has presented BBC radio series on Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. He also presented the BBC TV programmes Leadership Reflections: The Modern Prime Ministers, Turning Points and Reflections: The Prime Ministers We Never Had. He has written for several national newspapers including the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times. He also presents a popular political one man show each year at the Edinburgh Festival and across the UK.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2020

Copyright © Steve Richards, 2019

The moral right of Steve Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The picture acknowledgements on p.476 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 588 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 589 1

Printed in Great Britain

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To Lachlan, who was born as one prime minister fell and as another hopeful figure prepared to acquire the thorny crown.

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

1. Harold Wilson

2. Edward Heath

3. James Callaghan

4. Margaret Thatcher

5. John Major

6. Tony Blair

7. Gordon Brown

8. David Cameron

9. Theresa May

10. Boris Johnson

Conclusion

Notes

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I finished writing the first edition of The Prime Ministers on 24 July 2019, the day Theresa May stepped down as prime minister. Her premiership had been short and tumultuous, a wildly oscillating ride, from an early honeymoon during which her colleagues and a fickle chorus of political commentators assumed she would be in post for many years, to a speedy descent as she struggled to survive as leader. In the final months of her leadership no one knew what would happen next, as May’s bid to deliver Brexit suffered one historic parliamentary defeat after another. Yet such were the volcanic explosions following her tearful departure from Number Ten that her leadership has been almost forgotten, obscured by subsequent upheavals that make her traumatic era seem almost tranquil.

Every prime minister of the modern era has endured phases of nerve-shredding stress, but Boris Johnson’s first year in Number Ten tops the lot for mind-boggling, energy-draining drama. In April 2020 he almost died in intensive care, after catching coronavirus, which had already transformed the way he governed and the way the rest of us lived. Before the pandemic wreaked havoc, Johnson had taken the UK out of the European Union and won a general election – two epic events that were soon dwarfed by another. His leadership or, to be more precise, what happened to him as a leader was of supreme significance well before he had served a full year as prime minister.

Yet the lessons of leadership arising from other modern prime ministers apply equally to Johnson’s frenetically fraught early months in power. His predecessors also faced unprecedented challenges, even if none of them ended up in intensive care, and were justified in feeling daunted. The devaluation of sterling, the three-day week, the ‘winter of discontent’, the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the ERM crisis, the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, the war in Iraq, the financial crash and Brexit all seemed impossibly stressful at the time, with unclear causes, solutions and consequences. And so it was with coronavirus. The difference was in scale: the pandemic caused the biggest emergency since 1945, but the same range of prime ministerial skills was required to deal with it as with the other major crises of modern times.

As this book argues, successful prime ministers are political teachers capable of guiding the country through frightening and destabilizing times, making sense of what is happening and why. They need a clear message, and that means he or she must have a command of detail and coherent policies. An early, astute reading of unexpected crises before they have fully taken shape is also an essential requirement of leadership. Throughout the sequence from the early stages of a national emergency, the prime minister must seek to take a party, Parliament, the media and the country with them. Each modern prime minister ached to reach the very top, and then discovered that power often made them miserably neurotic and insecure rather than euphoric. The additional chapter on Boris Johnson in this edition marks a leap in the speedy pace of events, yet it also signifies continuity in terms of what is required of a leader.

In the late 1990s, when he was becoming famous as a journalist, before his career in politics, Johnson once told me that he thought politics was the new rock ’n’ roll. He was a star pundit then, and the early New Labour era under Tony Blair had a glittering and glamorous dimension. Johnson was a critic of that government, but he was a beneficiary of the broadcasters’ tendency in those years to conflate politics with showbiz. Significantly, he was the first modern prime minister to have started his career as a journalist. He was fascinated by the performance of politics.

At the end of 2019 Johnson had cause to feel a sense of prime ministerial euphoria over the way he had performed. He had pulled off many political feats, from his perspective, as he led his party to election victory and took the UK out of the EU. In early 2020 he and his advisers were planning to radically reform the UK in the post-Brexit era. But soon Johnson found – just as his predecessors had – that being prime minister is a gruelling role, far removed from rock ’n’ roll. He started to look drawn and tired, as many of those who ruled before him had also done. Inevitably, the stress of responding to the pandemic took its toll and he was then hospitalized after he caught the virus. As the numbers dying in the UK began to rise, Johnson’s job became as far removed from showbiz as it was possible to be.

Other prime ministers had been through similar emotional journeys: joyfully reaching the peak, flourishing in the new terrain, before finding the burdens at the top to be almost too heavy to bear. Johnson was unusual in moving from one extreme prime ministerial sensation to its opposite in the space of a few months, and after less than a year in Number Ten. His leadership style was unique, breaking informal rules that his predecessors chose to follow, but he could not transcend the most unyielding law of British politics. Leadership is arduous and demands a range of qualities that few possess.

INTRODUCTION

There are memoirs by prime ministers. There are biographies of prime ministers. This is the first book to reflect at some length on all the modern prime ministers, from Harold Wilson, who ruled first in 1964, to Boris Johnson, who entered Number Ten following the seismic general election in 2019.

Some modern prime ministers are viewed more vividly than others. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair are still recalled with a multicoloured intensity. The explosive consequences of Boris Johnson’s, Theresa May’s and David Cameron’s leaderships will still be taking shape for another decade at least. Other prime ministers are ghostly, distant figures, even though there are many lessons from their leaderships that are urgently relevant.

This book is an attempt to make sense of their leaderships, to take a step back and look at the political stage as it seemed to them. The reflections aim to bring to life the complex three-dimensional human beings who made it to the very top – a triumphant ascent that became, for some, a nightmare when the peak was reached. Shakespeare is cited as much as other, more recent political observers. The lessons learned will also hopefully appeal to those in any field who are interested in the qualities required of leaders.

My definition of ‘modern’ prime ministers is based on two factors. The leaders from Harold Wilson to Boris Johnson were part of the television era, when a more direct and potentially hazardous form of communication with the electorate took hold. The later ones were also navigating the social-media revolution, one in which politics speeded up. Wilson became neurotically angry about newspapers and the BBC, as did all his successors at various points. Even so, if he was worried about a poor performance at Prime Minister’s Question Time he would have nearly twenty-four hours to await the verdict of the next day’s newspapers. Today, advisers to prime ministers alert them to the verdict on Twitter immediately after the event, while twenty-four-hour rolling television news is a constant, never-ending commentary. Wilson’s immediate predecessors, Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan, faced no such pressures. Macmillan read Jane Austen in the afternoons quite often. Now even he, a lover of literature, would be distracted by Sky News and Twitter.

The other defining factor is that these are the prime ministers I knew directly or observed closely. What was written about them at the time, and to some extent since, did not seem to me anywhere near the full story. I never met Wilson, but I observed him at first hand. The other prime ministers I knew, with varying degrees of access. The purpose of the book is not to attack them from the left or the right. That has been done a thousand times before. I do not accept the political fashion that the divide between left and right has become irrelevant. On the role of the state, raging questions about how to deliver decent public services and how governments can mediate in a global economy, the left-versus-right divide is as relevant as ever. But to write relentlessly about recent prime ministers from one perspective would not be especially illuminating. Instead, based on a career in political journalism that has so far included many conversations and interviews with prime ministers, aspirant prime ministers and their numerous critics, this book aims to challenge prime ministerial caricatures. In doing so, I seek to reflect on the qualifications of leadership and on how perhaps no one is, or can be, fully equipped for the mighty tasks involved. Looking at each of the prime ministers again, I am constantly surprised by what I see – by their unexpected strengths and weaknesses.

I turn to them now, at a time of epic national crisis, partly because the Brexit drama in the UK was brought about, and then deepened, by failures in leadership. Conversely, the dangerous anti-politics mood – both a cause and a consequence of Brexit – is deepened by misreadings of leaders and politicians more generally. Some voters felt ‘left behind’ with good cause and ached to ‘seize back control’ as work patterns became fractured and public services were fragmented in the name of ‘empowerment’, only to disempower. But the leaders who were culpable for hopelessly misjudged policies did not act out of wilful malevolence or for reasons of corrupt venality. Their motives were more interesting than that. There is no evidence to suggest that modern prime ministers were criminal, corrupt or lacked integrity, as is widely assumed. Their flaws were epic, but had little to do with their perceived sleaziness. Yet most prime ministers left office tormented by perceptions of their rotten lack of integrity.

This book is by no means a defence of modern prime ministers. How could it be, when contemplating such a diverse group? The modern prime ministers faced many crises, and caused some of them. The deepest is the Brexit saga, one that was partly the consequence of panic-stricken and weak leadership. Indeed, the current leadership crisis in the UK is a result of the lack of impressive leaders of depth, fuelled by the vast numbers of self-proclaimed potential leaders who are deluded enough to assume that a nation’s destiny lies in their inexperienced hands. Leadership is now an urgent theme in the UK and across much of the Western world.

In the autumn of 2016 I recorded six unscripted television talks for the BBC on modern prime ministers. Each talk lasted thirty minutes and was recorded in a single take. The historian A. J. P. Taylor was a model of sorts. In the 1960s and 1970s he spoke, without an autocue or any notes, on topics ranging from how wars start to how they end, and from Bismarck to Lloyd George. Taylor was mesmerizing and mischievous on many different subjects. I focused on the easier task of looking at modern prime ministers, the backdrop to a political journalist’s life. I was keen to do so because politics on television can be cluttered and speedy. I am a big fan of letting topics breathe in order to give context to current events. Nothing makes sense without context. The series was called Reflections on Leadership and the prime ministers featured were Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The talks have been repeated several times and are often available on BBC iPlayer. There were subsequent series on other themes, including one on The Prime Ministers We Never Had.

This book is based on those television talks, but differs from them in several ways. The chapters are longer than the original transcripts, and four additional prime ministers are considered: Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. In the television talks there was no space to compare the conduct of the different prime ministers, but in these chapters all of them recur, like characters in a crowded Iris Murdoch novel. They recur for a purpose: the conduct of one shines light on the others.

I find the demands of leadership, and the characters of leaders, so endlessly fascinating. Prime ministers tend to be viewed at the time they are in power, and subsequently, as cartoon stereotypes. The newspapers in the UK are on the whole biased to the right and they still influence nervy BBC editors. But the much bigger bias is one that favours political fashion at any given time. This leads too often to what the former BBC director-general, John Birt, once brilliantly described as a ‘bias against understanding’. I am biased in favour of understanding, partly because the characters of our prime ministers – as well as the demands placed upon them – thereby become more compelling, and not less.

One of the lessons of leadership is that fashionable assumptions are nearly always wrong. A prime minister can walk on water. Later the same prime minister can be mad and a criminal. A prime minister can be a ‘modernizer’, whatever that overused term means. Later the same prime minister can be hopelessly out of step with the times. A prime minister can be admirably dutiful, a committed public servant. The same prime minister can be a self-interested liar, no longer to be trusted. The extreme perceptions held in relation to the same individual do not add up. What if both are wrong? Whatever my views about her policies and their consequences, I am fascinated by Thatcher’s skills as a leader. Although widely lauded by some journalists and writers to the point of deification, her precise qualities as a leader have in some respects been underestimated. The same applies to prime ministers who have been largely forgotten. Wilson, in particular, merits considerable rehabilitation. Conversely, the flaws associated with modern prime ministers are based on misunderstandings about the pressures on leaders, and a tendency in the anti-politics age to assume the worst.

Sometimes we choose to see what we want to see, or are told to see, rather than what is happening in front of our eyes. This is a lesson of leadership that I learned at a youthful age, and one that I have applied ever since. Do not assume that what you are told to see is what you are seeing. For me, this lesson took the form of a political rally that I attended in the 1970s, only just a teenager and yet drawn towards the theatre of politics.

During the October 1974 election I went to see the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, speak at a rally in north London. This was the distant era when security was less tight and anyone could get in to big campaigning events with ease. Wilson had been prime minister since February of that year, having won a handful more seats than the Conservatives. The mid-1970s were a sensational time to become interested in politics. There were two elections in 1974 and a referendum on Europe in 1975. Big politicians seemed to be on the campaign trail in nerve-shredding contests all the time. When there were no elections or referendums, the Labour government struggled to win key votes in the Commons. Parliament also became the location for epic dramas. It was no coincidence that James Graham’s glorious play This House was set in late-1970s Westminster and became a hit in the twenty-first century. In the 1970s there were charismatic politicians lighting up the political stage at Westminster and out on the campaign trail. Politics was as exciting and unpredictable as football and almost as glamorous as rock music, two more familiar teenage passions.

Wilson intrigued me. I had read in the newspapers that he was exhausted, paranoid and useless. Some television interviewers appeared to be disdainful, as if they shared the assumptions of the influential newspapers they read. Yet Wilson was prime minister having performed better in the February election than most pundits had assumed. He was leading a country in turmoil and was planning a referendum on Europe. Coming to politics fresh and for the first time, I felt a bit like Hercule Poirot, who would often turn to his sidekick, Hastings, and make an observation along these lines: ‘Mon ami, something is not quite right. We jump to conclusions, but they are not necessarily the right conclusions.’ From my uninformed perspective, something did not add up. How could a prime minister facing a range of nightmarish challenges be exhausted, paranoid and useless?

I wanted to make sense of Wilson by seeing him live during that dark autumnal campaign in 1974. As a teenager I went to live gigs as well as buying records. For me, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols only started to make much sense when seeing them perform. I assumed that a prime minister might acquire greater definition at a live event as well.

At the rally I attended during the October 1974 election, Wilson was the star turn at a large and packed town hall. The prime minister walked onto the stage to the sound of comically incongruous pop music. At first he looked old, grey and stooped by the burdens of leadership. He was dull, looked well beyond his fifty-eight years and repeated tediously familiar phrases like a machine: ‘…the social contract… price freezes… help with rents…’ I was both excited to be seeing a prime minister live and wondering whether the media caricature was right. Perhaps Wilson had peaked long ago and this was a ghostly shadow, a prematurely aged and lifeless leader.

Then there was a dramatic twist. After around ten boring minutes of the speech, a protester threw an egg at Wilson. The contents trickled inelegantly down the prime minister’s face and onto his crumpled suit. I looked on in horror, wondering what the tired, old and useless prime minister would do. Wilson looked up after the egg had landed and declared: ‘You know, I’ll tell you something very interesting. During the June 1970 election, after six years of a Labour government, somebody threw an egg at me like the man has just done, the one who’s being escorted from this hall. In February 1974, during the election campaign a few months ago, nobody threw an egg at me at all. I think that the contest was an egg-free campaign. And now somebody has thrown an egg at me again.’ Wilson paused. He brushed the yolk away from his ruined shirt and looked up again and said with great mischievous passion: ‘Which goes to show you can only afford to throw eggs under a Labour government.’

There were spontaneous cheers in the hall, people were laughing and suddenly Wilson looked ten years younger. He had changed the political mood beyond recognition. For the rest of his speech he sprang into life, as if liberated by the egg challenge. The audience left raving about what a class act he still was. In the space of a couple of hours I had seen the Wilson of caricature and the Wilson who could think speedily and transform the political mood. So it was during his final phase in power between 1974 and 1976. He was exhausted, drank too much whisky, lacked much visionary purpose, viewed colleagues and others with suspicion and loathed most of the media. But he won two elections and a referendum on Europe and, uniquely, left Number Ten on his own terms. He continued to master complex policy detail while plotting several steps ahead of his internal and external opponents. His old friend Barbara Castle was convinced that if Wilson had stayed on, he would have beaten Margaret Thatcher at the next general election. I am not sure about that, but I am certain that the fuller picture of Wilson is more interesting than the caricature. Instead, we chose to see what we wanted to see. In Wilson’s case, we still do.

Much later, in the mid-1980s, the then Labour MP and former adviser to Wilson, Gerald Kaufman, told me that ‘Wilson had learned to have a sense of humour’. The observation added to Wilson’s ghostly enigma. He had been very funny that evening in 1974 and could use wit like a weapon. Apparently this was not a natural attribute, but one that he had deliberately acquired. He had the timing of a stand-up comic, without having a natural sense of humour. Unlike some of his successors, Wilson recognized that humour was a powerful force in politics.

Each modern prime minister has the equivalent of the Wilsonian rally – a sequence that does not make full sense of how they are perceived. In subsequent decades, Margaret Thatcher was sometimes portrayed as mad in her evangelical convictions. Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan and John Major were portrayed as useless. Tony Blair became a deranged war criminal. Gordon Brown was seen by some as bonkers. David Cameron was apparently a lazy dilettante. Theresa May was a dangerously self-absorbed leader who stubbornly led her party to the right after the ‘modernizers’ had taken it triumphantly to the ‘centre ground’.

Again, we were choosing to see what we wanted to see. I feel like Hercule Poirot once more: none of this makes much sense. What if Thatcher’s projection of shrill certainty was partly an act, at least until her final phase when her lofty and elevated status had blunted some or her sharper political instincts? Sometimes she was brutally unyielding in her simplistic convictions, but not by any means all of the time that she led. She could be smartly pragmatic, too.

If Heath, Callaghan and Major were useless, how did they survive at, or close to, the top for so long in often dark circumstances? If Blair was a thoughtlessly crusading warmonger, how to explain his sleepless mission to bring peace to Northern Ireland? Perhaps Blair possessed other flaws that propelled him towards Iraq. If Brown was so unreliably temperamental, how to make sense of his record-breaking tenure at the Treasury (the longest-serving Labour chancellor) and his focused response to the financial crash in 2008? If Cameron was lazy – the so-called ‘essay crisis’ prime minister, as he became known to some – how to explain his leadership of a coalition that introduced more radical reforms from the right at a speedier pace than any government in recent times, including Thatcher’s? The ‘essay crisis’ epithet implied that he acted only at the last minute when a deadline loomed, opting to ‘chill’ the rest of the time. But no modern prime minister has time to chill for very long, not even the self-assured and occasionally over-confident Cameron. His reforms might have been misjudged, but that is a different matter. How was May’s leadership, deeply flawed in so many ways, a leap to the right when she was the first Conservative leader since Heath to argue that the state could play a benevolent role in some circumstances and that markets did not always work? In some respects, under the influence of her close adviser Nick Timothy, May was to the left of her predecessor, but was seen as being to the right partly because, as the most tribal of Tories, she felt the need to appease the Brexit hard-liners in Parliament and in the party membership.

Step back a little and nothing quite adds up. Thatcher’s claims to be giving power to the people were widely hailed, when all but the affluent were being disempowered. Blair and Cameron were portrayed as ‘modernizers’ without much scrutiny as to what the term meant. In some respects, both were fearful of moving on from the era in which Thatcher had cast her spell. Both paid homage to the recent past as much as they leapt away from it. May was praised for being dutiful and honest, when she was sometimes being self-interested and making assertions at odds with reality. How was Brown perceived as a stealthy chancellor when he became so well known for being stealthy? How was Wilson devious when he was so famous for being devious?

The characters of leaders are more interesting than they seem to be, but their conduct is also explained by the many actual or imagined external constraints. The modern prime ministers possess Shakespearean qualities and suffer dark fates brought about partly by character and partly by other factors beyond their control.

My favourite essay title when studying Shakespeare’s plays was ‘Character is Destiny. Discuss’. The instruction to discuss was a wonderful way of understanding politics as much as the great Shakespearean tragedies. Although Shakespeare’s characters were creations of genius, three-dimensional and complex, their tragic destinies were determined by much more than who they were. Their fates were rooted in the wider context of the plays, the other characters, the situations they were in, the need to sustain a plot for a night out at the theatre. As my English teacher used to joke, Hamlet delayed murdering Claudius partly because the play would have ended very quickly if he had acted immediately. There were also many external factors that explained the delay.

In Hamlet and His Problems (1921), T. S. Eliot argued that the external factors in Hamlet did not fully justify the character’s behaviour: ‘Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.’ I would argue that being told by your father’s ghost that he was murdered by his brother, who is now king and married to your mother, was enough to justify all that Hamlet expressed. Either way, there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, and the rotten element needs analysing to make sense of Hamlet’s actions. Hamlet’s character alone did not make his destiny inevitable. Similarly, Othello was furious in his jealousy partly because he had good cause to be jealous. He assumed his wife had been unfaithful. Othello had the misfortune to face Iago. He might have acted differently if he had a less villainously deceptive ally, but then the play would have been different. Again, character alone did not determine destiny. I could write a whole book on Macbeth and the degree to which his character determined his destiny. I would argue it did so only to a limited extent.

The essay theme taught me how to view politics. A leader acts partly because of the appalling constraints he or she might face at any given time. The characters of the prime ministers matter hugely, but Wilson, Callaghan and Heath would have led differently if they had not faced economic turmoil, and Blair and Brown would have been unrecognizable as leaders if Labour had won elections in the 1980s rather than being slaughtered. Major might have been a genuine ‘modernizer’ if he had not faced the nightmare of a party divided over Europe. Heath might have been a more imposing leader if he had not been beaten by Wilson in the 1966 election, his first as leader and a calamitous debut.

To make sense of a leader’s rule, an understanding of the context matters as much as the personalities of those who acquire the crown. Heath, Wilson in 1974, Callaghan, Major, Brown, Cameron and May faced daunting contexts. Thatcher, Blair and Wilson, in his first term in the 1960s, made their preliminary moves against political backgrounds that were benevolent. In spite of the benevolence, Blair and to some extent Wilson saw daunting constraints wherever they looked, some real and some imaginary. Labour prime ministers tend to regard themselves as imposters, disturbing the natural order, where England – not the rest of the UK – ensures that Conservative governments are elected. The sense that they have much to prove partly explains why Wilson was wary of tackling the vulnerable pound before devaluation was forced on him in 1967, why Blair went to war in Iraq in 2003 and why Brown wooed senior bankers. The Shakespearean irony is that in seeking desperately to prove they were part of the natural order, Labour prime ministers moved towards their doom.

Leaders become more interesting when situations are viewed from their nervy perspectives. They are obliged to appear in command, when most of the time they are not. If a prime minister confessed to an interviewer that he or she had no idea about the state of the UK economy at some future date, they would seem ‘weak’. Yet the state of the global economy, over which they have little or no control, will play a major role in determining the fate of the UK’s fortunes. Quite a lot of the time prime ministers have to act with their fingers crossed, needing to keep voters on board, a party together, an economy on track, public services at a high standard (although some prime ministers have not seen this as a priority) and to respond around the clock to a noisy media. From the outside, they can seem lofty and arrogant. From their point of view, the challenges of leadership can seem almost impossible to meet. Commentators and interviewers may attack leaders for acting weakly, evasively or bizarrely if they convey any hint of their sense of political incarceration. Yet even prime ministers with big majorities can feel trapped.

In spite of the presidential culture in UK politics and the obsessive focus on leaders and potential leaders, the qualities required for the titanic demands of leadership are under-explored. Partly for good reasons, a leadership contest tends to divide along ideological lines and did so even when UK politics appeared, deceptively, to be moving in a less ideological direction in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. After the 1997 election, Conservative contests were based largely around candidates’ positions on Europe. Polls suggested that Ken Clarke, a towering figure in the Conservative Party who had held numerous ministerial roles, was the most popular candidate with the wider electorate in the many contests in which he stood, and yet he never had a chance of winning because of his pro-European views. In Labour’s 2010 contest, Ed Miliband won as the candidate to the left of New Labour, but not as far to the left as Diane Abbott, another candidate in that muted battle, which now seems like ancient history. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn won because he was the change-making radical. He brought the leadership contest to life because he had convictions and was not too timid to express them. A candidate’s views and convictions, where they stand on Europe and on the wider political spectrum, are pivotal in leadership contests, and so they should be.

Their qualifications for leadership are also pivotal, but are much less scrutinized. If it had not been for the Conservative Party’s obsession with Europe, Clarke would have been a more popular and better-qualified leader than William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron. Clarke described his hobby as standing in leadership contests and losing. He stood against all those victorious candidates in various eccentric leadership contests. In some respects Yvette Cooper was more suited to leadership than Jeremy Corbyn, who won Labour’s 2015 contest. She did not stand a chance in spite of her greater experience, her capacity to master policy detail and her authoritative voice in the Commons. The rise of Corbyn highlighted an ache for a leap away from orthodoxies that had taken hold in the UK since 1979. Inevitably Corbyn lacked the leadership skills to make a success of his ascendancy. He became close to invisible for large periods of time after he won the contest, as the storms raged. Corbyn had been a backbencher since 1983, with no need to agonize over the demands of leadership. His sudden rise was the equivalent of a tennis player in a local park being asked to play on the Centre Court at Wimbledon. The demands are different.

The 2015 Labour leadership contest was important for marking a rare break with the past. The BBC and The Times newspaper were both demanding that candidates should apologize for the Labour government’s ‘profligate spending’ – seen widely, and wrongly, as the cause of the financial crash. Candidates agonized over how to deal with this narrow, outdated interrogation. Up popped Corbyn and declared the Labour government should have spent more. He was ahead of the media zeitgeist. Soon the Conservative government abandoned its plans to wipe out the deficit largely by spending cuts. But Corbyn’s exuberant ideological confidence, an important qualification of leadership, should not have obscured the obvious fact that he lacked other pivotal qualifications.

This makes politics an unusual vocation. When vacancies are advertised for senior posts in other fields, previous experience of running an organization is often specified as an essential qualification. Similarly, if a passer-by popped into the National Theatre and declared a wish to play Hamlet, he or she would be told that some previous experience of acting in demanding roles would be necessary. Playing the equivalent of Hamlet at the top of politics requires no previous experience, however. The opposite is the case. Perversely, not having any previous experience can be an overwhelming advantage. Donald Trump became the most powerful elected leader in the world by proclaiming his lack of experience in politics. In the UK, Tony Blair and David Cameron became prime ministers with no previous ministerial experience. In 2010 Nick Clegg became deputy prime minister in a coalition facing daunting economic turmoil. He had been an MP for only five years.

Yet it should be a statement of the obvious that having served as a Cabinet minister, observing and working closely with a prime minister, must be a significant advantage for a candidate seeking to be a leader and to rule from Number Ten. Other demands of leadership also transcend a candidate’s convictions. Leaders must have the capacity to communicate and persuade, internally and with the wider electorate; they must manage unruly parties, giving the impression of unity when intense division is unavoidable; they must translate their convictions to policy detail and then ensure successful implementation of the policies. In the UK, responding to the media is another essential requirement. Even in its fragmented state, the media still mediates politics. Few people watch leaders perform unmediated; they watch or read from a media outlet of some form or another. In reflecting on modern prime ministers, here are a few of the lessons of leadership that I have learned.

The longest-serving modern prime ministers are Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. These election winners were different from each other in many ways, but shared a common quality. At their peak, they were all political teachers. They sought to make sense of what they were doing or of what was happening around them. This was especially the case with Thatcher and Blair. Thatcher was an instinctive teacher, making complex ideas and contentious policies become reassuringly accessible. Her ability to teach was helped by the fact that she did not delve deeply into the complexities herself. She seized on terms like ‘freedom’, ‘the people’ and ‘choice’ in ways that voters and activists in her party could relate to. Blair could frame an argument more effectively than any modern leader and would advance the arguments across all media outlets most days of the year. He introduced monthly press conferences in Downing Street, a highly effective innovation – at least for him. During the late phase of Blair’s leadership, the media would be full of stories about his bleak vulnerability. Up he would pop for two hours at a press conference, putting the case that his expediency was a form of ‘boldness’ (one of his favourite terms) and answering all questions from fickle journalists who had become fleeting admirers once again. In his early phase Wilson, too, was a teacher, witty and evidently able, making his form of social democracy seem safe and yet exciting in its overdue modernity.

Wilson won four elections. Thatcher and Blair both won three. There were many factors that explain their durability, but the common one was their skill as teachers. This is a form of artistry that is different from ‘spin’, an overused term that became derogatory. There is nothing sinister in prime ministers seeking to present what is happening in the best possible light. But the teacher prime ministers do more than that. They sense instinctively that voters will not listen to lists of aspirations or policies without having a sense of the values that underpin them. So few leaders, and aspirant leaders, recognize the need to explain, opting instead only to assert. They never explain why they are acting in the way they are. They only proclaim that their actions are the right ones. Thatcher was fascinated by the ‘why’ question and liked to answer it. One of May’s failings, as she navigated the impossible waters of Brexit, was an indifference to explanation and persuasion. She possessed no language to make sense of what she was doing, or the skill to frame an argument. Even if she needed to be opaque to keep her party together, there were ways of making evasiveness seem purposeful. She opted for near-silence punctuated by speeches every six months or so, which sought to paper over the cracks, but never did so.

There is, though, an important twist that highlights the degree to which leadership is multi-dimensional. This trio of teachers does not represent the deepest thinkers in the list of modern prime ministers, although Wilson had a grasp of policy detail and a strategic wiliness that were a form of depth. When it came to policy detail, Blair and Thatcher often skated on thin ice. Curiously, the two prime ministers who thought most deeply and had the widest range of insights were not long-serving. Both also suffered traumatic leaderships. They were Edward Heath and Gordon Brown, both of whom became unfashionable even before they had left office, and even more so subsequently.

Heath arrived in Number Ten in 1970 with a highly developed sense of how he saw the UK’s place in the world, unique for a modern British prime minister. Most prime ministers begin their time in Number Ten with no clear international outlook. Thatcher had campaigned in the 1975 referendum for the UK to stay in the Common Market and had even argued in the late 1970s that the UK should join the European Monetary System, the embryonic move towards a single currency. Only in government did she adopt a foreign policy that was tonally hostile to the European Union, while never advocating withdrawal, and that was intensely Atlanticist. Blair was a supporter of the euro and yet he ‘loved the pound’ as he made his way to power in 1997, hoping conveniently to be a ‘bridgehead’ between the US and the EU – convenient in that the metaphor conveys diplomatic muscularity rather than incoherence. Wilson and Callaghan were opponents of the UK’s membership of the European Community and yet were the two figures who secured the voters’ consent for membership, when they were back in government. Cameron was an opponent of the UK leaving the EU and yet held a referendum that brought about its departure. In opposition he hinted at doubts about the war in Iraq, but as prime minister he authorized air strikes in Libya that led to a similar chaos that arose in post-war Iraq. May arrived pledging to unite the UK over Brexit and led the most spectacularly divided government, party and country in modern times. Heath was different. He was convinced that the UK’s destiny lay in Europe and he negotiated its membership with an unqualified focus and enthusiasm. He also arrived in Number Ten with a deep knowledge of how government and the parliamentary party worked, as a former Cabinet minister and chief whip. Yet his three and a half years as prime minister were stormy as well as brief.

The other prime minister who could range widely, and who thought deeply about policy and politics, was Gordon Brown. He arrived in Number Ten as Labour’s longest-serving chancellor, buttressed by a profound sense of political history in general and of the Labour Party more specifically. He could delve below the surface in analysing policies and the ideas behind them, the only senior figure from the New Labour era who dared to reflect on the relationship between markets and the state, the limits of ‘choice’ as a driving force in the delivery of public services, and who sought to claim Adam Smith as an economist of the centre left. He had regular conversations with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as well as with authors, poets and historians. But Brown was equally at ease with the populist soundbite. He devised the phrase ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, as well as ‘prudence for a purpose’. He was obsessed with the media and with securing the support of Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers. Brown had range, a capacity for mastering detail and a hunger to project.

Yet his period as prime minister was around the same length as Heath’s and in some ways more turbulent. Heath was never challenged while prime minister. There were several attempted internal coups against Brown, who also faced the nerve-shredding nightmare of the 2008 financial crash. He left office in 2010, having finally achieved his aching ambition to be prime minister in the summer of 2007. He dreaded being a ‘tail-end Charlie’ prime minister, and yet that is what he became.

Heath and Brown were very different in many ways, but had similar failings that overwhelmed their capacity for range, depth, curiosity and intelligence. Neither was good at handling colleagues, even if they commanded intense loyalty from those who worked closely with them. Both assumed that voters followed politics as closely as they did and would understand the nuance of what they were trying to do. Heath introduced a pay policy – a way of controlling inflation by restricting increases in wages, and prices – that had a certain logic to it, one that came in three different phases. Most voters found each phase an act of provocation, rather than a reasoned way of managing soaring incomes. Brown sought endlessly to make sense of the global economy, of the opportunities and the need for governments to do more to counter the downsides. Most voters paid no attention. Both men lacked empathy and were wooden as performers. Brown became wooden when he acquired responsibility for the economic brief after Labour’s defeat in 1992. Prior to that, he was a lively and witty speaker. He faced the mighty Nigel Lawson when he was acting shadow chancellor in the late 1980s, and often got the better of him. Heath was never a great performer, but was at his worst by far as prime minister. Before he became leader, he conveyed a certain dynamic authority rooted in a partly unjustified self-confidence.

Both men faced complex political backgrounds when they became prime minister. Heath had been slaughtered in his first election as leader in 1966 and never fully recovered his authority. Many in his party thought he would lose again in 1970. Heath was conscious of having much to prove. He never looked a ‘winner’ – a perception that is hugely authority-enhancing – except for the briefest of honeymoons after the 1970 election victory. Brown waited a long time for Blair to leave Number Ten and, when he got in, faced the delicate task of indicating distance from Blair, but not too much, as he wanted the support of newspapers that had only been sympathetic to Labour because of Blair. Both Heath and Brown were partly destroyed by mistimed elections. Heath went early and lost. Brown very publicly contemplated an early election and then did not call one, fatally undermining his strategic and policy ideas as well as his public voice. In some respects, they were the two biggest figures in modern times and yet they struggled to stay afloat at the top.

In both cases, the Cabinets over which they ruled were relatively passive and united. Another essential requirement of leadership is the skill to manage the frontbench, the parliamentary party and the wider party. In the UK there is a presidential culture and yet the system is inescapably party-based. If a party is divided, a leader has a duty to bind it together. This is relentlessly tough. The much-derided Wilson had no choice but to be a party manager, given the scale of the divisions in the Labour Party during his leadership. He led a Cabinet that included Tony Benn and David Owen, Michael Foot and Roy Jenkins, all political giants who disagreed on the big issues. The largely forgotten James Callaghan was the most effective manager of all the modern prime ministers. He led the divided Cabinet that he inherited in 1976 from Wilson through stormy economic times. There was not a single resignation over policy throughout his three or so years at the helm. The contrast with May is revealing. She lost more ministers through resignations over policy than any modern prime minister. She had the excuse that she was dealing with Brexit, an even thornier challenge than the ones facing Callaghan. Nonetheless, his Cabinet had many bigger and more charismatic figures in it than May’s and he kept them all on board, a deft act of leadership. Yet it did him no good in electoral terms. Callaghan lost the only election he fought as leader, in 1979.

Keeping a Cabinet and a party together is not enough to win an election. Winning elections is an essential quality of leadership, and Callaghan lost. Those who become prime minister without winning an election lead with far less confidence. Brown ached for his own mandate, but blew the election timing and had to carry on awkwardly until the 2008 financial crash gave him fresh purpose. He had a strategy to move on stealthily from Blairite New Labour for around a year and then call an election. Such was his early popularity, which he had not anticipated, that he got caught up in a frenzy over a much earlier election that he did not in the end call. May felt obliged to woo the hard-line Brexiteers in her party, having become prime minister without winning an election. When she sought her own mandate, she lost her party’s majority and became weaker still, or at least she acted in a politically fragile context, even if she was largely unyielding in her approach to leadership.

Winning and governing successfully requires a UK leader to espouse and implement policies that bind members while appealing to a wider electorate. This is not easy. One of Thatcher’s great strengths was to act with radical conviction while convincing enough of the wider electorate that she was on their side. In doing so, she changed her party rather than appeased it – epic leadership. Blair challenged his party’s convictions and rarely appeased them, but while Thatcher moved to the radical right, Blair was more cautious and technocratic, arguing for ‘what works’. No one supports what does not work. Wilson managed to excite his members and the wider electorate in the run-up to the 1964 election with his plan to harness the ‘white hot heat of this technological revolution’. Only leaders at their peak can be change-makers in policy terms, keeping their party with them and winning the backing of most voters. Yet remove one of those three components from the sequence and leadership becomes impossible, or pointless.

Leaders must also know how much space they have in which to act, on what is always a crowded political stage. This is an overlooked qualification for leadership, but an essential one. Commentators will be urging prime ministers to do X or Y, without acknowledging that if they did X or Y, their party would fall apart. To be successful, he or she must be an astute reader of the rhythms of politics. What are the underlying trends? How long will a damaging story run? How far do they dare to go in terms of policy? For various reasons, Wilson, Major, Brown, Cameron and May led with virtually no room to move at all. After 1997, Blair had more room than he dared to realize. Until the end, Thatcher was astute in recognizing just how much room she had – cautious at first, bold after the schism in the Labour Party that led to the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Wilson was a brilliant operator, given the ridiculously cluttered political stage that he faced for much of his leadership. Cameron created space by forming a coalition, which he managed with considerable skill. May had more space than she realized when she first became prime minister, and then none at all after she called an early election in May 2017 and lost her party’s majority. To his surprise, Brown had space during his early honeymoon as prime minister – space he made the most of until he became distracted by the temptation to hold an election. After that he was doomed, but his long tenure at the Treasury meant he was supremely well qualified to respond to the 2008 financial crash. An economic emergency cleared the stage for him and he could act.

Of the ten prime ministers in the following chapters, I got to know most of them one way or another and observed them all in the flesh. As well as seeing Wilson speak live, I went to the spectators’ gallery in the Commons to see him perform at the despatch box in the mid-1970s. He was wily and in command, yet he looked knackered, as he did at the rally in the October election. I interviewed Heath several times, including on the night Thatcher fell from power, when he was on an unqualified and transparent high. I also interviewed him at his home in Salisbury a few times for GMTV’s Sunday Programme and Heath usually invited us to stay for tea afterwards. He made the biggest impression on me when I was at university in the early 1980s. He came to give a talk on foreign policy and spoke brilliantly, without notes, for an hour and then answered questions. His command and range were scintillating, although he was no orator.

I met Thatcher for the first time when she was guest at our primary-school summer fete. The school was in her constituency. She was Education Secretary at the time and I had been assigned the task of showing her around the stalls at the fete. Thatcher had a go on the coconut shy and, at her first attempt, succeeded in throwing a ball with such determined ruthlessness that the coconut fell to the floor within a nanosecond. Here was a sign of things to come. She was competitive and knew her targets. Her visit was on an unusually hot day and, in her speech, she made a joke about how the headmaster’s bald head was exposed to the sun and perhaps he should borrow her hat. The headmaster, Mr Sharpe, struggled to hide that he was a little taken aback by the reference to his baldness. Thatcher did not notice his fleeting discomfort – again a sign of things to come. I traded on this early meeting. She never forgot encounters, however trivial.

‘Do you remember that time you were triumphant at the coconut shy at Queenswell School?’ I asked her once.

‘Of course I do,’ Thatcher replied. She reminisced with a smile that suggested to me that, contrary to her reputation, she did possess a slight sense of humour, an awareness of how things could be a little ridiculous. I should add that of those people I have met who knew her far better, no one agrees with me on this.

I interviewed Callaghan several times, including for what I assume was one of his last long interviews, which I quote in the chapter on his leadership. He had a capacity for reflectiveness after his leadership that he did not always possess when he was in power. I observed Major at close quarters as a BBC political correspondent, although did not know him. As political editor of the New Statesman in the early New Labour era, I saw a lot of Blair and Brown and managed to remain engaged with both throughout their increasingly tense relationship. This was unusual. Most commentators were either ‘Blairite’ or ‘Brownite’ and were barred from contact with one circle or the other. I was seen as more of a Brownite because I recognized qualities in Brown, and his close allies, that most ‘Blairite’ commentators refused to see or disapproved of. But any journalist would have been able to recognize qualities in Blair, too. Both had failings. Quite a lot of their differences were ideological and strategic, although these were largely hidden at the time, and since. Roy Jenkins, a senior Cabinet minister, former SDP leader and author of weighty biographies, once said to me at the height of the New Labour era that it must be difficult being a commentator when there were only two interesting figures in politics, Blair and Brown. He compared it to the time of his political peak, when there were charismatic, enigmatic titans in both the main parties. In retrospect, there were other big figures around in the New Labour era, but they wielded little power, such was the control of the duo at the top.

As David Cameron sought to adopt some of New Labour’s techniques from the other side of the political spectrum, he wooed non-Conservative commentators including me, at least when he was leader of the Opposition. I seemed to be the chosen columnist when he took trips to East Anglia. I travelled with him three times on day-trips to Norwich. One of them coincided with the height of the expenses scandal, and Cameron had to break off from the itinerary to sack someone or other from the frontbench. He acted with an elegant ruthlessness and then got on with the demands of his visit with a cool energy. He passed a test of leadership: to act with speedy brutality when necessary and then to compartmentalize. He returned to the task in hand as if nothing had happened. Blair was the best for compartmentalizing – almost eerily so, by the end. He could have a cup of tea and discuss market economics while a vain police inspector waited to interview him about ‘cash for honours’, an outrageous police inquiry that carried the possibility of jail for Blair and his senior advisers.

After trips or meetings with Blair and Brown, I returned with lots of notes and ideas. Cameron was something of a blank canvas. He asked me a lot about Blair and Brown. Perhaps that was the sole purpose of my trips with him to Norwich: to provide him with information. His small entourage was efficient, friendly and relaxed, perhaps too relaxed. I was surprised how high the stakes were for Blair and his advisers when he went on excursions, even towards the end of his leadership. I recall one visit with him to Manchester during which we visited the set of Coronation Street. I was in the car of his press secretary, David Hill, on the way back. Blair was in a different car and he phoned Hill several times to seek assurances that the trip had gone well – and this was after he had won three elections. Prime ministers are human. Blair had been battered by onslaughts after Iraq, but had been received enthusiastically by the cast of Coronation Street and by onlookers. He could not quite believe it, and needed Hill to make sense of what had happened. No wonder he was so dependent on Alastair Campbell to guide him through the torrents of media and public scrutiny. Brown was just as dependent on individuals, especially Ed Balls. Brown might have terrified some Cabinet colleagues and external opponents, but he listened to the relatively youthful Balls on policy and strategic decisions, often phoning him several times a day even when he was prime minister and Balls was running his own department as a relatively new Cabinet minister. In terms of policy-making, Balls was the third most influential figure of the New Labour era, after Blair and Brown.

I got to know May a little while presenting GMTV’s Sunday Programme. The show was broadcast live at the ridiculously early hour of 7 a.m. In opposition, May was one of the few frontbenchers willing to come on live, getting a taxi from Maidenhead. I assumed she was merely being conscientious, but came to realize that wilful ambition played a part, too. She was impeccably polite and solicitous. The other regular live guest was Jeremy Corbyn. He lived relatively near the studio and was also willing to come on whenever we asked him, sometimes at short notice. The two occasionally appeared on the same programme and would stay for a quick cup of tea at the end. This was at the height of the New Labour era. If anyone had told me that one would be prime minister and the other leader of the Opposition, I would have assumed it to be a drug-induced fantasy, at least in the case of Corbyn, who showed no signs of being burdened by personal ambition. May gave no indication then of being the ‘bloody difficult woman’ that Ken Clarke identified during the short, eccentric Conservative leadership contest in 2016. Her obstinacy and insularity developed when she was a long-serving Home Secretary. She learned then the wrong lessons about how to lead, assuming that an unyielding insularity would work in Number Ten, as it had done at the Home Office.

My first column was published in The Spectator when I was still a political correspondent for the BBC. I shared the cover of that magazine in September 1995 with Boris Johnson; we had both written on New Labour as it emerged under Tony Blair. Johnson was the magazine’s main political columnist and would later become its editor. I got to know him a little when I became political editor of the New Statesman and we were used as pundits on a range of programmes during the early New Labour era. We also occasionally formed a panel of two on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster. Every now and then I also appeared with him on Head 2 Head, a much missed programme on the BBC News channel in which two commentators debated a topical issue for half an hour.