Prime Ministers of My Adult Life – from Best to Worst
With a new prime minister recently installed in No. 10 after yet another one resigning, there has been quite a lot of media chatter about the P.M. comings and goings of the last few years. Some commentators have asked which was the worst P.M. out of a pretty bad bunch, and some have offered lists grading them. League tables of P.M.s is not a brand new phenomenon; I discovered that my old university at Leeds has been involved in compiling them. An internet search will reveal examples.
I thought I would weigh in here and entertain you with my own list! I was born under the second premiership of Winston Churchill, but I wasn’t really aware of politics until secondary school, which I started in 1964. In that year, there was a general election. The claimed ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’ came to an ignominious end in scandal. There were serious concerns over the economy; housing; immigration; the threat of Moscow. Sounds a little bit like 2024, doesn’t it?
In my adult life, I have seen thirteen P.M.s come and go. The victor in 1964 was Harold Wilson of Labour, but he didn’t win by much and had to go back to the country in 1966. He repeated this double election trick in March and October 1974, as the March election had resulted in a minority government. Consequently, Harold Wilson became the P.M. when I was eleven but he regained the post when I reached twenty-one, so he counts as one of my thirteen. In chronological order, they are: Harold Wilson (Lab), Ted Heath (Con), James Callaghan (Lab), Margaret Thatcher and John Major (Con), Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (Lab), David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak (all Con), Keir Starmer (Lab).
Only two of the thirteen left the job voluntarily for personal reasons: Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. Here is a table showing the beginnings and endings:
| Conservative | Labour |
Beginnings
|
|
|
Through a general election | 3 (Heath, Thatcher, Cameron) | 3 (Wilson, Blair, Starmer) |
Through succeeding the previous P.M.
| 5 (Major, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak) | 2 (Callaghan, Brown) |
Endings
|
|
|
Through a general election
| 3 (Heath, Major, Sunak) | 2 (Callaghan, Brown) |
Position unsustainable for political reasons, including own party challenges | 5 (Thatcher, Cameron, Johnson, May, Truss) | 1 (Starmer) |
Voluntarily for personal reasons | 0 | 2 (Wilson, Blair) |
I am going to keep the suspense going by starting with the person I regard as the best P.M. of my adult life, and follow down to the worst. Who will that be? I am sure that I will infuriate some people with my choices, while others (probably the minority) will agree with them. But that’s the fun of it; perhaps it will make you wonder what your graded list would be! And, yes, of course as a Labour voter (soft left, not an ideologue), I am likely to favour the Labour P.M.s, although my list doesn’t completely divide with all red at the top and all blue at the bottom. I haven’t done any research on the P.M.s by reading scholarly autobiographies; these are just a set of memories and reflections. I have also taken into account things that some of these people did before and after they became P.M. And, finally, I have to admit that they are a pretty motley crew, so being in the top half does not indicate my unqualified approval, not by a long shot. (NB Apart from the header photo, I haven’t included any other pictures in this blog; P.M.s make pretty boring illustrations!)
Without further ado, here we go!
1. Harold Wilson (1964-70; 1974-76, 4 general election wins, of which 1 was a minority, and 1 defeat)
Harold is the first on my list, both chronologically and in order of merit. Like Keir Starmer in 2024, he inherited a pretty messy national situation, but unlike Keir he survived his first term and only had to retire because of his deteriorating health part-way through the second. He is the only P.M. in my adult life who survived a general election defeat and went on to fight another. He was an astute politician, and walked a tight-rope between the capitalist economy with the dominant U.S. on the one hand, and the left wing of his party, led by Tony Benn, on the other. It was something of a tragedy that the British electorate, who had given the Tories the aforementioned thirteen years - which included four P.M.s and three general elections - didn’t allow him a longer period of time to make more of a success of it. Six years is not enough to bring a country round! So, in 1970, the British people (not me, I was only seventeen) surprisingly voted in Ted Heath for four more years of Tory misrule. Harold had to pick the baton back up in 1974 when he was already close to the natural end of his political life due to ill health and the onset of the early stages of dementia.
Perhaps I have a soft spot for Harold because I adopted Yorkshire (or it adopted me). He was a Yorkshireman born and bred, albeit based at Oxford University before becoming a politician. A statue of him stands in his home town of Huddersfield, the nearest large town to where I now live. But I think it is mainly because he was a survivor, a man who juggled the impossible odds of premiership, led Labour through five general elections, and generally came out with his reputation intact. If only they had given him four or five more years in 1970!
2. Gordon Brown (2007-10, no victories as P.M. and 1 defeat)
Amongst Labour supporters, there is a common view that Gordon Brown was the more socialist-minded of the two dominant figures in the Blair years. He has certainly continued right up until the present day to give current politicians advice on ways in which we might support the vulnerable in our society. He was, like Tony Blair, a Christian Socialist, and I respect him because he did try and put his faith into practice. And I think he was a good Chancellor, probably the best we have had in my lifetime, with his liking for ‘prudence’.
He finally got his chance to be P.M. when Tony Blair retired in 2007. Perhaps Blair knew what was coming! Unfortunately, it was the economy that put paid to the prudent Gordon Brown, through a global recession which he could not prevent, and history suggests that his work with the banks, for example, made the best out of a very bad situation. The 2008 recession blights us still. Could Blair and Brown have foreseen it and done more in advance? I am not sure, but I do remember reading gloomy predictions a year or two before it all happened.
Gordon paid the price for holding back on a general election when the conditions were favourable (perhaps this is something that Andy Burnham should heed, although Theresa May is a counter-example). I think he was too apologetic when he called a lady, to whom he had spoken to during the 2010 election campaign, a ‘bigot’, and this was overheard on a switched-on microphone. If she was a bigot, then why not stand by your original conclusion? All in all, I wish the Liberals had stood by him in 2010 rather than David Cameron and the Tories; having said that, the post-2010 economy would have been far more difficult to manage than during his years as Chancellor.
3. John Major (1990-97, 1 victory and 1 defeat)
This will probably surprise you! How could a Labour voter put John Major so high? He was Thatcher’s Chancellor, which is like noting that Long John Silver was Captain Flint’s quartermaster. Again, there is a personal connection which might help to explain things; John grew up in the same area of London as I did, and he did not go to public school, unlike most other Tory P.M.s.
But my high estimate of John is more easily explained by my wholly negative view of Brexit, which has been a disaster for this country. It was something equivalent to fiddling while Rome was burning; so much needed doing, and there we were, the House of Commons in particular, stuck on the minute details of this catastrophic mistake. Euroscepticism was at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s disagreement with several of her ministers, despite the fact that she had campaigned for our place in the E.U. in 1975. John Major was not originally one of those but, after he took power, he became something of a champion for Europe, despite considerable opposition in his own party. If you’re over forty, you might remember him saying, ‘Put up or shut up!’ And he has continued to speak up against Brexit into his old age; I saw him on Facebook only the other day. Brexit caused Labour’s old enemies in Thatcher’s government to become friends: Heseltine, Clark, and Major.
What’s more, John laid the ground for the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, which happened during Blair’s time as P.M. but only in the first year. This is probably the most significant event within these islands in my lifetime, and will be part of John Major’s legacy. He was prepared to talk, and to listen, and to envisage change. He was more than the plastic yes man we all thought he was when he rose to power in Thatcher’s government in the 1980s.
4. Tony Blair (1997-2010, 3 victories)
There is something about Tony Blair I don’t like, but it cannot be denied that he won Labour three elections and kept a fairly stable ship over ten years. He finished the work that John Major had started in Ireland, and the early Blair years felt good. Many Labour voters were suspicious of ‘New Labour’; I remember remarking that it was Tory Mark II. There were no radical revisions of 1980s Tory policy. But it was better than Tory Mark I, one has to admit.
Apart from not foreseeing the recession, Tony has one other rather big blot on his legacy. That, of course, is the Iraq War, 2003 version. We got rid of Saddam Hussein but killed many thousands of people in the process, and the vacuum was filled with the horrors of Isis/Islamic State. Is the Middle East in the 2020s any better for it all? It seems to be the case that we only get rid of dictators when it is in our economic interests to do so, in this case, because of oil. The allies had decided not to remove Hussein in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait, because of the power vacuum and instability that would result, so why do it in 2003 with so much cost of human life? And it became clear that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ did not exist. The view of Tony Blair as something of an egotistical global big game player is deserved, I think. He’s also a bit too rich for my liking.
It is disappointing that Labour needed a leader that Margaret Thatcher said she liked to get the three election victories that no other Labour leader has achieved. In other words, Labour seems to need to become a ‘Tory Mark II’ to get the British electorate fully behind them. Yet there were still policies that characterised traditional Labour, in education and literacy along with a significant drop in child poverty, for instance. So, for those reasons, and despite Iraq, Tony still wins a respectable place in my table (but he won’t be happy being put after John Major)!
5. Rishi Sunak (2022-24, no victories and 1 defeat)
I have a personal link to Rishi Sunak as well! Despite not being invited to the Covid shindigs at No. 10, I seem to have connections in high places. Rishi was born in Southampton and supports the local football club, just like me. That helps to overcome to a rather limited extent the difference in political persuasion, and the fact that Rishi, mainly through his wife, is extremely, extremely rich.
I did not find Rishi as repellent as some of the Brexiteers in the Tory government. He was quite right in pointing out the deficiencies in Liz Truss’ plans, he stood up and initiated the downfall of Boris Johnson, and he generally came across as a thoughtful and moderate politician. He was gracious in defeat in 2024. His furlough scheme during Covid was successful. I am not sure how complicit he was in the PPE botch up that we have just heard reported on, a rather expensive 10-billion-pound botch up, and other Covid blunders. So, there are some large question marks over his contribution, I admit.
6. Keir Starmer (2024-26, 1 victory)
I liked Keir Starmer’s speech when he entered No. 10, and I wrote a blog about our need for a sensible, dull politician after all the mess of the previous years. But he never really got on top of the job, and the dullness rather overweighed the sensibleness! However, it is absurd to claim that Keir Starmer was the worst P.M. in our lifetime, which one reads in the right-wing press. They went for his jugular from day one; I can vouch for that, living next door to a shop where all the papers are out each day with their front pages able to be read as you pass by with the dog. ‘Starmageddon’ was imminent, apparently; according to that section of the press, he betrayed just about every group in British society. Somewhere between Genghis Khan and the Yorkshire Ripper in the league tables of the Mail, Express, or Telegraph. My critique of him takes no account of all that nonsense.
I accept the point made by his supporters that so many of his policies went under the radar, particularly those concerning workers’ or renter’s rights, both of which are very important to me and have been since they were eroded in the 1980s. NHS waiting lists came down; in fact, even immigration came down. A lot of what he promised he did in fact deliver, although the manifesto is a long-term project and will still be ongoing under the new incumbent.
Yet for me, his period as P.M. was a colossal missed opportunity. Having brought Labour from the low point of defeat in 2019 to election success in 2024 (albeit with not much difference in numbers and percentage of votes to those of Jeremy Corbyn), he really needed to be ready for the challenge, and he wasn’t. He could afford to ignore the right-wing press, but he should not have ignored his own Labour M.P.s. He needed to consult and to listen, and to find out what Labour M.P.s thought and could accept before making policies public. Hence the humiliating U-turns. Either the unpopular decisions on welfare were essential and he needed to convince his own party of them, or they were not, and best avoided. Those economic policies that he did manage to pass were not all unproblematic, either. Gunning for employers’ national insurance, when this was bound to have a knock-on effect on prices, and for farmers’ inheritance, when we need smooth successions to keep the fragile British-based food chain going, were bound to work against the growth and better standard of living that Labour promised in 2024. It’s about time a Labour P.M. just bit the bullet and found a way to tax the wealthy, the landowners, and the leaders of megacompanies very substantially. In hard times, everyone has to do their bit, or what does it mean to be part of a national society?
I can credit Keir for the unheralded good policies, and I certainly think that he’s a decent man of principle. But he wasn’t a leader. The U-turns and sticking by that sleazebag Mandelson (you know Labour isn’t really Labour when he’s involved) suggest a lack of direction and a failure to really listen to your own party.
7. Ted Heath (1970-74, 1 victory and 1 defeat)
Ted Heath’s premiership, which I have lamented above should never have been allowed to happen, was marked by industrial unrest and economic instability. The fact that he is only half way down my list does not say a great deal about those further down! But at least he was a pre-Thatcherite ‘one nation’ Tory with some sense of responsibility for the most vulnerable, and he could not disguise his dislike of the ‘Iron Lady’ after she succeeded him. So, for those reasons, he gets a decent position but I haven’t really got much more to say about him! I was only twenty-one when he stepped aside, after all.
8. James Callaghan (1976-79, no victories as P.M., and 1 defeat)
James Callaghan is my lowest ranked Labour P.M. This is because he presided over the rapid decline of 1970s Labour which led inevitably to the Thatcher era. In 1980, after one year of the Thatcher government which saw considerable increases in unemployment and the first attacks on the unions, the trade union movement called for a day of action with marches. I wrote a ‘Mr Angry’ letter which was published in the Guardian. I berated the unions for causing the Tory victory of 1979 and then expecting people to march against it. I was referring to the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978-79, when many unions called strikes, in particular the infamous bin strike with rubbish rotting the street (repeated in Birmingham recently).
A Labour government which cannot keep the unions happy is not likely to survive, because it is supposed to represent working people and their aspirations to decent pay and conditions. I accept that, in the 1970s, some unions did perhaps feel emboldened to push cases too far, but at the same time I am convinced that, generally, workers do not really relish going on strike, as this causes considerable hardship, not to mention the unsettling feeling of a job not done which may mean challenges when one returns to work. I have participated in lecturer’s strikes, and certainly did not welcome them. They are usually forced on people because of unfairness in conditions and pay.
I am aware that the dark and depressing feel that characterised Britain in the 1970s was for the most part a media creation. It was a decade dominated by industrial unrest and from 1974 a Labour government, and so the right-wing press made a great deal of Britain’s plight, a memory of that decade which lingers even today. Nevertheless, for the average person the standard of living increased to the same extent as it did in other decades before the recession of 2008. I became a homeowner in the 1970s and established myself in London. Other members of my family and many of my friends did well. We should not allow ourselves be misled by media myths.
Nevertheless, the ‘winter of discontent’ was a massive own goal. How far Jim Callaghan was responsible for all that, I am not sure, but he was the man at the top wherein the buck stops. Therefore, he has to appear in the bottom half of my list!
9. Theresa May (2016-19, 1 victory, a minority)
I am a great advocate of equal opportunities and the desirability of women leaders, and so it is disappointing that the three women P.M.s all appear in the bottom five of my list. For this we can partly blame Labour for not appointing any woman as leader in its history! But, given that I have already graded three male Conservative P.M.s higher than any women, this does suggest that it also has to do with the women themselves. As David Steel, the 1980s Liberal leader, said of Margaret Thatcher, he welcomed women leaders but why did it have to be that woman?
Theresa May was on my side of the Brexit referendum debate, and she did make a reasonable attempt to find solutions to the mess created by the vote to leave, and so I can give her some credit. But we cannot ignore the fact that she presided over such a horrible mess, made worse by her decision to go to the country in 2017 and turn a majority into a minority. And she will forever be associated with the Windrush scandal in my book, as she was Home Secretary at the time. Trying to create a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants, her department ending up questioning the credentials of people who had arrived from the West Indies quite legally, and at the invitation of the British government, some decades before. Oddly, this nervousness around the status of immigrants didn’t seem to extend to many white people.
Theresa’s farewell speech, like Keir Starmer’s later, appealed to the fact that she loved her country. I am a little sceptical of such utterances from people who seem far more to love their successful political careers and don’t want to let them go. But at least she gave her successor, Boris Johnson, some uncomfortable moments in the Commons, and for that, I do thank her!
10. David Cameron (2010-16, 2 victories, 1 a minority, the coalition with the Liberals)
Jeremy Paxman, who is known to be on the right of centre, once described David Cameron as the worst P.M. that Britain has ever had. It’s true that he said this before we experienced the more recent incumbents.
Paxman’s problem with David Cameron was that he allowed nervousness about the growing anti-E.U. movement to cause him to take a great gamble with the country’s future, which he never should have done. He promised the electorate a referendum on E.U. membership. This was successful in giving him the outright victory that had eluded him in 2010, but it was disastrous for both him and the country. The chances of a befuddled electorate voting with a slim majority for something, simply on the basis of vague promises and a kind of illusory wartime nostalgia for Britain going alone, were too great to take a risk on. And the lack of clarity about exactly what kind of ‘Brexit’ we were voting for took some years or unravel! Did anyone mention Ireland, for example? David Cameron campaigned against Brexit, but he failed and lost his job as P.M.
David is also associated with the period of austerity that followed the recession. This has caused considerable problems in social care, especially for the young and vulnerable, in funding for local government, the police, the armed forces, etc. etc. Austerity seemed to most affect those least able to bear it. And so, David’s legacy is a very unhappy one indeed.
11. Liz Truss (2022, the only one of these P.M.s who never faced an election)
Liz Truss achieved only one thing in her brief premiership: she survived a few days longer than Brian Clough did in his infamous manager’s role at Leeds United in the 1970s (the subject of the film The Damned United). Her generous tax giveaway for the rich resulted in a collapse of confidence in the economy which worsened an already bleak situation after Covid, and pushed interest rates up. Oh dear!
I’m afraid that Liz comes across as a complete wally. Her rather manic smile, her strange right-wing free-market utterances and sour grapes after she was forced out: these make one very pleased that she didn’t last long. Queen Elizabeth died two days after installing Liz as P.M.; perhaps meeting the other Liz was the last straw! It’s as if, after Brexit, the Tories let all their more unpleasant characters out of the bottle, and like evil genies they now rattle around with serious ambitions for power. Several of them made a rush for the Reform Party after Sunak’s defeat in 2024. Liz seems to be in a party of her own. I was surprised to discover that Liz had campaigned to remain in the E.U. during the referendum; she seems to have converted to the Brexit cause afterwards.
Liz avoids last place because she didn’t survive long enough to inflict decades-long damage on British society. That (dis)honour is reserved for the last two.
12. Margaret Thatcher (1979-90, 3 victories)
This, I suspect, will be the most contentious placing. In league tables I have seen, Margaret Thatcher gets a high place among British P.M.s, behind only Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in post-war lists, and often first among more recent incumbents. After all, one cannot doubt her strength of resolve. She was the first female P.M., she faced down her opponents, particularly the unions, she went to war when British subjects came under attack in the Falklands, and the economy experienced an upturn during her premiership. Despite all that, I agree with those, including our new P.M., who see the 1980s and ‘Thatcherism’ as an unfortunate legacy which has left us in the poor state that we find ourselves in during the 2020s.
I moved to the north of England shortly after Margaret’s second general election victory in 1983. And it was here in the north that we felt most acutely the shadow side of the 1980s. Industrial communities, particularly the miners, were discarded without any effort being made to find new careers and purposes for them so that communities could continue to live together. All they got was Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘get on your bike’ to find work. How far did he expect them to cycle?
The economic boom helped some but not others. Harry Enfield’s comic and satirical character ‘Loads a’ money’ summed up the winners. The gap between the richest and poorest took a substantial leap towards the wide discrepancy that we see today. The abandonment of the deprived and vulnerable caused the British churches, especially the Church of England (once known as ‘the Tory party at prayer’), to react radically in a number of initiatives and publications critical of the government. Margaret’s classic statement that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’ indicated a flawed moral compass, an endorsement of the ‘I’m all right, Jack’ sentiment. If there were no society, why were people being asked to fight for Britain in the Falklands? The Thatcher government must have been brutal for the sleepy Church of England to join the revolution!
I joined an organisation called Church Action on Poverty and participated in a number of marches and campaigns against new policies that punished the poorest and most vulnerable. But the last of these proved too much for even Margaret’s adoring Conservative Party to stomach, and many of them started marching too. The ‘community charge’ or ‘poll tax’ charged individuals and not properties for council expenses, irrespective of how packed into houses people were. It would have put household bills for low income crowded houses up two or three-fold. Consequently, Margaret’s premiership came to an inglorious end, ejected by her own party. If I have got my facts right, she is the only P.M. in my adult life to have resigned only after a challenge to her party leadership was formally made (rather than resigning beforehand, anticipating it).
The economic boom of the 1980s was fuelled by a great privatisation sell-off that is still affecting us very adversely now. Water, rail, gas, electricity – so many of these national assets ended up in private, often foreign hands, and bills went up as shareholders and executives demanded their profits. Council houses were deliberately made easy to sell off and entered the private rented sector, an area which had already been deregulated on the basis that tenants and landlords could ‘negotiate’ fair rents. What an absurd notion, a negotiation between total unequals! The single mother desperate for a home striking a bargain with the wealthy landowner who owned many properties? I don’t think so. If you want to read about the unfortunate effects of the policies of the 1980s, read Nick Davies’ Dark Heart (the same Nick Davies, Guardian journalist, who later exposed phone hacking in the media).
Margaret was a free-market ideologue who remained insensitive to the effects of her policies on the ground; she claimed the moral high ground but without a sound moral compass; she sold off our assets to give the illusion that she had rescued the economy, the benefits of which were far from being universally felt, anyway; she had originally campaigned for E.U. membership but her Euroscepticism lit the blue touch paper of later right-wing (rather than the earlier left-wing) moves to leave the E.U., much to our detriment as a nation. In short, she was a disaster for Britain in the long-term. It may have sounded heartless when, at her death, some northerners sang ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead’ (quoting The Wizard of Oz), but this merely reflected the deep hurt and long-term damage that her government had caused in the mining communities and cities like Liverpool, Sheffield, and Middlesbrough. And I haven’t even mentioned the urban riots that often had their origins in racial inequality and the growing sense that certain groups and communities were being abandoned. ‘One nation Conservatism’ was a thing of the past. Events like those make me wonder how the media managed to convince us all that the 1970s were dark and dreary, and the 1980s bright and optimistic.
General Galtieri, the Argentinian dictator who tried to solve his popularity problems at home by military success in the Falklands, instead succeeded in solving Margaret Thatcher’s popularity problems at home and ensuring that she moved from a very uncertain first term to win a total of three elections before her own party finally decided that ‘the Iron Lady’ needed melting down. Gracias, señor!
13. Boris Johnson (2019-22, 1 victory)
If I am suddenly made supreme leader of the United Kingdom, then Boris Johnson had better run for the airport, as I would certainly throw him in the Tower to await his demise! I find it incomprehensible that ordinary working people admire Boris, let alone vote for him. He is the archetypal spoiled public schoolboy, accountable to no-one and obeying no rule whatsoever, and that is exactly how reports from his younger days describe him. I wasn’t sure what Conservatives voting for him as leader in 2019 were up to, just as I didn’t understand Republicans choosing Donald Trump. These people just aren’t serious leaders, it seems to me. Even Jeremy Hunt suddenly looked a better prospect!
Boris thought he was Winston Churchill, and I think many people shared that illusion, too. I remember my nephews being impressed and finding it funny when Boris barged into a German player for no reason whatsoever in the annual Soccer Aid match. He wanted to be seen as the British bulldog, the uncompromising action man with little regard for the niceties, or a proper hairstyle, for that matter. And that image worked for him.
But he failed his Churchill moment. He might have dealt better with the Wehrmacht than he did with the unseen enemy of the Covid pandemic. He needed to be on the ball, there at the crisis meetings, to be planning ahead, but it wasn’t his style. He ended up looking more like Francis Drake than Churchill, keeping the game of bowls going while the Armada sailed into view but, unlike Drake, he left it all far too late. And then he bungled just about everything, as we found out in the official Covid review. Then, finally, there were the parties at No.10; apparently, the bowls matches kept going whilst the Armada sailed into Bristol. The British people do not like a hypocrite, whether it’s a socialist with several vintage cars or a P.M. telling us how important the Covid rules were while not keeping any himself. A would-be Churchill who couldn’t be bothered to close the blackout curtains. And these and other moments of irresponsibility and dishonesty cost him the people he needed most – his own party (or most of them, except for the few very silly ones who ended up in the Reform party).
And before all this, of course… Brexit. He single-handedly took us out of Europe with all the mess, economic decline, and unfortunate distraction that that has entailed. Without him in the team, Farage, Cummings, and Cove would have fallen short, I’m sure of that. Boris was popular and provided the Brexit movement with its strongest possible front man. 52% would have been 42% with Boris on the other side, the side that, really, he should have been on. He dismisses claims that he used Brexit to gain power by saying that he would have become P.M. anyway. This confirms him as an egocentric who puts power above principle, and who lacks a clear and desirable vision.
He is the ultimate Toad of Toad Hall, conceited, over-privileged, and irresponsible. In stages, the British people have gone mad, first Brexit and then Boris, two things that no sensible person should have voted for. I can only hope that there is not a third moment of madness, as Nigel Farage as P.M. would be the end of everything, and I am glad that my wife has Irish, and therefore E.U., citizenship, giving us an escape route. If Farage makes it, then perhaps Boris will be promoted up from the very last place on my list of the future!
****
So, there it is, thirteen P.M.s during my adult life, and Andy Burnham is the fourteenth, but he has only been in post for two days as I write this. I hope he makes a success of what has become quite an impossible job. Probably, in a few months’ time I might order my list slightly differently, but what will never change is that the likes of Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher (not to mention Liz Truss) could never be the P.M. in the Britain I want to live in. So, if you admire them, then I guess we will have to agree to disagree!
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