danieldwilliam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
danieldwilliam) wrote2024-07-03 05:25 pm
danieldwilliam) wrote2024-07-03 05:25 pm
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On The Worst Five Prime Ministers in the History of Britain
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.
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.
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Since it's clearly nuts to hypothesise that Sunak did not think about the problems of the country and yet he failed to do very much* about the problems of the country, it is then interesting to explore what shaped his responses, because I do agree with Dan that they are baffling. So then for me the enquiry becomes "what warped his thinking?"
So Rwanda is an interesting way into this. He had a window to turn the volume right down on this - not necessarily bringing it to an end but at least focusing the discourse away from it. There were two very good reasons why he might be expected to have done that. First, he's not actually a nutter and it's the most unworkable policy in the history of policies. Second, he's a fucking Treasury bod and it's very, very expensive. There is nothing in Sunak's revealed history to suggest that this policy would be in line with his convictions. Instead, he doubled down, thus creating the single biggest unnecessary problem of his premiership and probably the most significant contribution to rendering him unelectable. HS2 is another example of policymaking that appears to have no coherent thought behind it.
So... why? What is going on here? Why has someone who presented in summer 2022 as "the sane, mature safe pair of hands candidate" suddenly pivoted to swivel-eyed loon territory?
I have absolutely no evidence in support of this theory and may be 100% completely wrong about it - I don't hold to it strongly - but I think that he has not got over losing the 2022 Party leadership election. He's never lost anything. He's had everything he wanted, and appeared successful in all his roles to date. He was promoted very very quickly in all his career pathways. CST doesn't require much of you, and he won popularity as CX through furlough and EOTHO. Correlation is in fact not causation, but if only good things ever happen to you then it is rational to conclude that you earned them and deserve them. That's how most people work. The idea that he would lose a popularity contest - and to Truss, with whom he had served in Cabinet and whom he therefore knew to be deranged - was a source of outrage to him.
So one hypothesis - which I certainly don't think is the whole picture, but I do think is part of it - is that he's trying to retroactively win that election, which is what I mean by "relitigate". I think he's still trying to convince the members that they should have voted for him, which is why his policymaking has been so incoherent, extreme and detached from reality - because those were the criteria that made Truss the winning candidate.
If we look at the q "what really comes from Sunak's own convictions", it appears to be maths teaching and banning smoking. That's the primary evidence, in my view, that he's unqualified to do the job - his utter lack of vision and strategy in terms of forming a policy platform. I don't believe for a second that he actually gives a fuck about f'rex national service.
I really need to stop now and get some work done - I've been trying to write this for about an hour! Am I making sense yet?
*I do feel quite strongly that any discussion of Sunak's premiership should not overlook the Windsor Framework, which is a genuinely significant and impressive piece of negotiation, as discussions of Johnson's and Cameron's premierships should also not overlook their achievements (Ukraine and vaccines** in the former case and gay marriage in the latter case (+?)). I can't think of any for May, but I'd like to be wrong because as my earlier comment probably reveals I have a sneaking liking for May.
**Yes I know that there was no need to leave the European Union in order to negotiate the vaccines etc. etc. I still think it was highly effective and since he damn well gets the blame for all the failures when he was at the helm, he also should get the credit for the successes.
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If he's trying to please the Conservative membership then that will make a big difference from if he was trying to please himself or trying to please the electorate at large.
I have been wondering why the Conservatives were totally ignoring the polls that were saying "This is not what the public wants" and "They were trying to appeal solely to their membership" is definitely a good explanation for that.
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That's my best inference from the data I have. Other interpretations also available.
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I don't see how you'll ever find out.
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