On The Worst Five Prime Ministers in the History of Britain

[danieldwilliam]

I think we have seen the five worst Prime Ministers in the history of Britain and in descending order of worstness. Their greatest common sin was to consistently put duty to their Party or to their own venality ahead of their duty at Prime Minister but each one has a fault of their own.

David Cameron, Britain's 5th worst Prime Minister. A man whose arrogance was only exceeded by the gap between ability and his own perception of his ability.

By choosing the most simplistic form of plebiscite as a way to save the Tory Party from itself he put in to hazard 50 years of Britain's foreign and economic policy. Too arrogant and too stupid to stop for a day and think, "what if this goes wrong? what could I do today to make those risks less?"

What he learned from the AV referendum was that he would easily win referendums. What he should have learned from the AV referendum was that, if you don't carefully structure the referendum process the other side can and will just lie.

Also, he appointed George Osborne Chancellor, and he, more than anyone else caused this mess.

Teresa May, Britain's 4th worst Prime Minister. A genuine patriot and someone keenly sensible of the sacredness of the duties she was heir to somehow failed to realise that she was in charge of what happened next and could make some different decisions. Mistaking, as many Tories do, the unity of the Conservative Party for the unity of the country. After she realised that she was in charge, at each point chose to do the thing that would damage her party least. She could have asked, "well this is a mess, how can we as a country work out what to do next?" She chose not to but instead to push on as quickly as she could so that the Tories would not fall too much to fighting each other over the impossibility of dealing with the Brexit referendum result without having to say that some Tories were pig ignorant nut jobs too loudly.

Boris Johnson, Britain's 3rd worst Prime Minister. Having ridden Teresa May over the Brexit jumps with cries of "faster, faster" he demonstrated an utter inability to find any meaningful way to put in to practise the slogans and smoke rings he had blown in to the air to get himself elected. Having contributed to the destruction of Britain's foreign policy in order to advance his career by "saving" the Tory Party from itself he then purged the Tory Party of two thirds of the broad church that had made the Tory Party the natural party of government in England for 200 years leaving it a hollow shell bereft of ideas, talent, ideology or any sense of anything greater than itself. And then, like the scorpion on the frog he could not help himself but fail to follow the rules he had set for the rest of the country. He appears not to understand that people love their grandparents, as much if not more than he loves himself, and will not lightly abandon them to die a lonely, undignified death or lightly forgive someone who did abandon them.

For his own convenience he hollowed out three of the great institutions of our country and then lost his job supporting a sex pest in Parliament.

Johnson's great (espoused) hero, when sacked from Government in 1916 over the Gallipoli landings spent two years as a battalion commander on the Western Front. Johnson appears never to have asked himself "why would a man who didn't have to do that, go and do that?"

Johnson should be made to look at a picture of himself taken during his address to the nation on the eve of the Covid lockdowns when you can see flickering in his expression the realisation that people, large numbers of people, were going to die because of decisions he had already bungled and that he was just realising, to a rough order of magnitude, how out of his depth he was. It won't do him any good but then nothing could. His soul is a sodden mess of his own incontinence.

Liz Truss, Britain's second worst Prime Minister, as well as the shortest serving. Possibly actually insane. That alone is enough to put her on this list.

Took all the examples of the four Prime Minister's prior to her; that a Conservative Prime Minister simply stating something made it the truth, that there were no political consequences from poor government if you lied well enough, that the Tory Party and the country were linked in some sort of spiritual union expressed through the voice of the leader and that believing in your own ability was the same as actually being able and things would probably turn as you hoped because you were a good sort really. Then she applied them to the profoundly left-wing institution of the UK's's banking system with the sort of gusto that would make a sledge-hammer wielding David Hasselhoff attacking the Berlin Wall look on in admiration. By accident she then applied that sledge-hammer to about 10% of the households in the UK via the magic of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that people disliked this.

If Britain has stood for anything since 1745 it is stability, prudent financial management and a sort of Whiggish hope for the future. Radical nutjobs destroying banking is the sort of thing British Communists disapprove of let alone the Tory party members who voted for Liz Truss.

Then we come to Rishi Sunak, Britain's worst Prime Minister ever. Having watched the last 8 years unfold from inside government his response to the profound political, economic, social and financial mess that the country finds itself in was to do, nothing. To sit in his office, in Office in his ill-fitting suit jacket doing nothing. To take no action but to blame some poor unfortunates in ill-fitting life jackets. Not just to say this as a lie or a distraction but to appear to genuinely think this was sufficient to discharge the duties of his office.

That is why, despite the strong competition from his predecessors, I believe he is the worst Prime Minister Britain has ever had. To look at the country as it is and decide to do nothing about it.


We've had someone who didn't stop to think, followed by someone who didn't stop, followed by someone who didn't think of anyone but themselves, followed by someone who appeared not to be able to manage a single coherent thought and finally followed by someone who thinks this is okay. That it's all okay.

Come tomorrow, come the reckoning.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I also hold against David Cameron that having lost the bloody stupid referendum he mismanaged, that he then abandoned his responsibilities, and didn't stay around to say "We now need to look at what shape the people of this country want our future relationship with the EU to look like", and actually manage our exit in a rather more sensible way than any of his successors did.

[danieldwilliam]

His cowardice is his most endearing feature.

[bens_dad]

I agree. He should have said "the country is divided but many people want something different" and organised a committee to figure out what Brexit meant.

I'd have forced Boris and Farage to sit on that committee, but not let them control it.

[mountainkiss]

Replying to Andy on Dan’s post so that you both get the notification.

If I write a political post, is there anything in recent DW correspondence that you are not happy for me to quote? It’s fine for you not to be happy for me to quote anything at all, or to have specific exclusions. But I don’t want to quote you without consent.

Thanks so much! Hope you are enjoying politics today.

[andrewducker]

Go for it. I'll look forward to it.

[andrewducker]

Oh, and I'm enjoying bits of it.

Glad to see the back of the Tories. Not happy about the most undemocratic result ever (comparing votes to seats), Labour winning one seat with 26% of the vote, etc., etc.

But things could definitely be worse. And, indeed, were yesterday :-)

[mountainkiss]

Replying to Andy on Dan’s post so that you both get the notification.

If I write a political post, is there anything in recent DW correspondence that you are not happy for me to quote? It’s fine for you not to be happy for me to quote anything at all, or to have specific exclusions. But I don’t want to quote you without consent.

Thanks so much! Hope you are enjoying politics today.

[cmcmck]

I'd put it as between Truss and Sunak meself and probably have Truss as the very worst.

Sunak is simply out of his depth at this level of politics but Truss thought she knew what she was doing.

One thing is for sure though- no one will ever forget the lettuce! :o)

[danieldwilliam]

In one hundred years some topical panel show will be perplexed by a spate of cartoons showing the Prime Minister as a lettuce.

[mountainkiss]

There are some different definitions of "worst" here.

Worst impact on the country? Cameron. (I agree with your point about Osborne.)

Worst character? Johnson, by a country mile.

Least competent to carry out role? Toss-up between Sunak and Truss, with Johnson a close third. (ETA: you can form some sub-definitions here; Sunak is incompetent because his capability is so extraordinarily far from what's needed for the role, whereas Truss was incompetent because she's unhinged. So you can split by personal qualities / skill set if you like.)

I don't think you are right that Sunak decided to do nothing about the problems that met him on accession to office. I think that it's his idea of what to do was ludicrously inadequate to the situation because of his failure to understand the problems.

I think this post is hard on May. She also wasn't up to the job but it was a far, far harder job than any of the rest of these prime ministers have had to contend with (excepting only the initial months of covid) and I think she was in better faith than any of the rest of them by a long way.

[danieldwilliam]

May would not be on this list if she had succeeded Thatcher or had Johnson become Prime Minister immediately after Cameron and May after Johhnson.

And I accept that she is a woman driven by a concept of duty and virtue. I don't agree with her on the fine details of that concept but I do respect that she was trying to work towards what she conceived as the greater good. Which is more than I think can be said for the other four.

Her decisions in the context she found herself in were poor. Her very narrow focus on what people like her would think morally acceptable blinded her to a range of possibilities. She made a bad situation worse. I think one of the reasons she did that was because she was not prepared to risk the destruction of the Tory Party (or perhaps her own career) in order to negotiate a workable Brexit referendum outcome.

Very much agree there are definitions of worst here.

Johnson's character has in several ways degraded the *office* of Prime Minister. The others are probably just very poor Prime Ministers. Perhaps not Truss. An office which can now be held by someone who may or may not be actually insane is less of an office than it used to be.

Truss and Sunak have demonstrated that if you let a very small group of people select from a very small group of people shortlisted by a very small group of people where none of the those groups of people is incentivised to think critically about the outcome you are going to get unhinged inadequates because it is easy to sound hard core and gung-ho when you have no idea nor care about how you are going to deliver on your wilder promises.

Cameron mostly made a series of catastrophic errors of judgement and May was inflexible in a dynamic situation.

I *think* it is a semantic point whether Sunak's actions, or inaction, as Prime Minister is due to a failure to fully grasp the problem or deciding to inaction. Not certain about this.

Item one as Prime Minister is to have a really good think about 1) what is going well that we need to do more or 2) what are the root causes of the big problems 3) what are people agitated about that I can't solve. I don't think Sunak started with that sort of analysis and so did nothing (my view) or did only inadequate things.

He decided not to think about the problems the country has. For me, and I know I didn't say it like, that was his first and most fatal bit of inaction. He dondered in to office and appears to me to have given no thought to what the problem was and so he continued Osborne's habit of announcing policy that sounded on the front pages like it would improve things but either couldn't or would make them worst. For example he appears to have mis-understood where concerns about unregulated migration spring. He knew people were excited about it. I don't think he knows why. So he ended up with a policy of blaming the French and trying to scare irregular migrants by threatening them with Rwanda.

[mountainkiss]

Dan you can't possibly say that someone you've never met decided not to think about something. You have absolutely no idea what he didn't or didn't think about. You can comment on the outcome of the thoughts but you cannot legitimately claim that you know what they were.

[mountainkiss]

I think the three threads here - quality of decision-making, overvaluing of party loyalty and character - are very hard to untangle.

May made one catastrophic decision - to call an election. She made a series of bad ones about EU Exit but I'd find it very difficult to make the case that anyone else leading the Tory party after the referendum would have done better. The only other person to have a crack at it - Johnson - did worse. I disagree that Cameron should have stayed; he would have had no credibility with anyone inside or outside the party and I don't believe he could have been effective.

Cameron could have averted the EU referendum result in a number of ways. He could have said that the decision is so momentous that it required a 55% majority. He could have required each of the four nations to have a majority vote - which would have been a phenomenal gesture to the Union - or he could have said that British citizens living in the EU can vote. He did none of these things, because he was so utterly convinced that he would win. I think that is a failure of character, and if the competition weren't Boris Johnson then I'd say it made him the worst character on your list.

[andrewducker]

Nitpick - The Rwanda plan was announced by Johnson in April 2022. It then continued on through Truss (in September) and on to Sunak (in October), who just carried on doing it without thinking about it. Presumably because it was popular with people in the migrant-hating party, and he didn't care very much.

(I don't know what Sunak actually cared about, to be honest. Cutting taxes. Anything else?)

[mountainkiss]

An office which can now be held by someone who may or may not be actually insane is less of an office than it used to be.

You could argue that an office that ejected such an inadequate holder after 49 days is stronger than people think.

[mountainkiss]

Okay this is my last comment on May (probably).

I think the way to reconcile my conviction that she was at heart in good faith and your thesis that she put the good of her party ahead of the good of the country is to understand that for her, the good of her party and the good of the country were basically the same thing. Her belief in the righteousness of the Conservative Party was such that it automatically followed that its success would be a national good.

This thesis is debatable - both whether it’s right and whether her assumptions are accurate - but I think it allows us both to be right. (I think it’s true and I am pretty sure it’s supported in textev - I did a lot of back reading of May’s speeches, interviews and articles when she became PM - but I am not going to go out searching so I’ll cave if challenged. I think her care for society is real, though, and I wouldn’t make that claim for anyone else on this list.

[mountainkiss]

It's also important to remember that May had an initial majority of 12 and Johnson / Truss / Sunak much bigger ones, making the latter's jobs in principle infinitely easier.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. Sunak was able to solve the Northern Ireland deal by basically saying "I am doing this thing, and any members of my party who don't like it will have to live with that." - May couldn't do that with her tiny majority.

Well!

[lsanderson]

At least you don't hafta decide between the Old Codger and Baby Hitler.

[calimac]

Since UK viewers have not been able to watch John Oliver's corrosive take on the same five, allow me to quote just one line from the conclusion of the survey: "Which finally brings us back to Sunak the Wet, a man who literally doesn't have the sense to come in from the rain."

[andrewducker]

I've had a few people ask about Thatcher. Including questions about high inflation and interest rates.

[alithea]

Interesting. I also disagree on May for the same reason as Frankie.

I think in terms of damage to the country, I'm not sure I can pick between Cameron, Johnson and Truss.

Cameron trashed the country economically and broke the Good Friday Agreement, Johnson brought our entire political system into disrepute, and Truss trashed a significant chunk of the population's family finances and brought our system into a different sort of disrepute. How do you rank those against each other?

In contrast to those, I find Sunak a non-entity. If he hadn't taken over a broken country, would we be talking about someone who did naff all as the worst prime minister ever?

[mountainkiss]

I think it’s arguable (for the sake of argument rather than because I care) that Sunak is less qualified to be prime minister than almost any other candidate has been. So that’s one definition of worst. I don’t know that it’s the one I’d pick, but I can see that it’s a legit definition.

[alithea]

Ah yes. I agree. Not the definition I'd pick either but an arguable one.

[mountainkiss]

I can’t back up the case beyond relatively recent history, though, because I’m not a historian. William Pitt the Younger famously became PM at 24. Can he truly have been more qualified?