Who would you say you feel has been the best PM in your lifetime, and why?
I think this needs a bump, or the UK dopers will never see it when they come online (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it…)
Looking back over the list of PMs since the 70’s I was depressed to see there wasn’t really anyone who seems to have done much positive stuff … with the caveat that I’m weak on knowledge of the Blair/Brown years and it’s possible Brown got unfairly shafted by the GFC just as he was starting his Prime Ministership.
However, clearly the most *competent * PM was Thatcher. I loathe her very soul and I think she did a heap of damage to the country, but pretty much what she decided to get done, got done. She wanted the Falklands to stay British - they’re still British. She wanted a Poll Tax - there’s still basically a Poll Tax. She wanted the railways privatised - they’re still privatised. And so on and so on.
I would say Thatcher did more meaningful reforms and helped the country most, but I was still a young kid in 1990 so don’t have much actual memory of her tenure. Cameron was a very good caretaker of the economy and if his gamble on Brexit had gone 1% the other way would probably still be PM.
It’s all but impossible for this thread not to descend into partisanship.
I think there is probably a rough correlation between how long each PM got and how good they were. I tend to believe in the wisdom of the crowd. Any PM before Thatcher is just a vague memory to me. All Prime Ministers since have made major mistakes, their actions and policies not without criticism. From 79 onwards the best have probably been Thatcher and Blair. Thatcher being the more significant of the two. On the whole both were competent, both ran well functioning governments even if you disagree with them policy wise. Major, Brown and May are all competing for the bottom spot. Cameron is kinda in the middle somewhere. Cameron’s upper class smoothness gains him extra points.
Can’t say I agree. Thatcher’s reforms led directly to high unemployment, despite her insistence it would do nothing of the kind; she ameliorated this by throwing North Sea Oil money at the benefits system instead of investing in new jobs - now the NSO money is gone and we have nothing to show for it; the sell off of council housing was the foundation of our fucked up housing situation; while Trade Union reform was necessary her ruthless breaking of them is part of what led us to the current massively exploitative labour market.
Cameron’s record on the economy is straight-up appalling - seven years of ideologically motivated cuts to services in return for sluggish growth and a persistent deficit. The original plan was for surplus in 2015 - now it’s maybe 2025, no promises. In return for this failure on its own terms we’ve seen local government services slashed, police numbers cut, prisons failing, schools struggling and the NHS registering an unprecedented number of “black alerts” (i.e. unable to deliver comprehensive care) as funding fails to keep pace with demand.
Cameron and Osborne gave us the slowest recovery from recession in recent memory, a decade of stagnating real wages and a total failure to even discuss let alone address the country’s major economic problem - low productivity - while they focused on the practically meaningless issue of the deficit instead. They took very bad care of the economy.
Poor form to come in to the thread only to argue about other people’s choices though, so I will stick my neck out a mile and say that Blair’s 1997-2001 achievements even when set against his subsequent failures of vision and judgement make him the best PM of my lifetime. (But this is up against a very bad bunch.)
Surely not!
Not British but my 2 pence, bit Re Blair. His “devolution” plans may end up breaking the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland was the work of several administrations; he just happened to be the guy incharge when it finally settled; as to be fair he was magnaimous enough in admitting in his memoirs.
He inherited a prosperous and stable country from his predesessor, in 1997-2001, he managed not to fuck it up; which admittedly is something politicians often fail to do, so there is that.
Excuse me, but what I saw of Cameron made me think he was a monumental jackass.
For a while I thought this too. For much of the past 20 years it certainly looked as if Devolution failed to halt the desire for independence. I think the jury is still out on whether devolution promoted independence or quelled it. I believe it probably promoted the Indie movement. However, in the Scottish case that’s all in the past. The Scottish Indie movement is in something akin to free fall. It turns out oil revenue was the main motor of the Independence movement.
Not Cameron.
I would agree with all of this, surprisingly.
Had Blair not been so gung ho about Iraq his legacy would likely have been significantly better, although we still would have had the 2007 crash.
I can’t imagine how this thread could be anything but a partisan thread. “Best” certainly involves some level of agreement with the accomplishments of a particular PM. Ms. Thatcher accomplished a lot; if your viewpoint is conservative, you’re going to say she was the best; if your viewpoint is liberal, you’re going to say she screwed things up monumentally.
We get the same thing here in the US when someone mentions President Reagan. As someone who is middle-of-the-road, I happen to think he did a pretty good job as President. But not as good a job as the conservatives think, and yet a much better job than most liberals here give him credit for.
Frankly, I don’t think you can have an opinion about who was “best” that isn’t going to involve personal politics until at least 100 years or so have passed. And even then I’m not certain; I would be willing to bet that discussions here in the US about Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson would inevitably devolve into discussions of personal politics. 
Not British, but from the outside I don’t remember a good UK PM since I was old enough to know what a PM was. Thatcher’s kleptocracy is legendary, Major seemed unremarkable, Blair was an acceptable mediocrity at best and too aligned to the USA when he should have told the White House to go hang, Cameron’s austerity was utterly counterproductive, and May is flailing. I guess Brown didn’t seem completely counterproductive, to damn with faint praise.
If we don’t bring into this sort of discussion a sense of what good governance is, then we end up with political analysis along the lines of “Francisco Franco was the best European leader of the Twentieth Century, because he held on.”
I don’t think Major was that bad, a treacherous little weasel certainly — I get the same shifty vibe off Macron — but stable and less dementedly destructive than Lady Thatcher.
I imagine the most intelligent PM of the 20th century was Wilson, but his energies were devoted to battling the Labour Party; the most affable and gentlemanly, post-Balfour, was Macmillan; the most cunning either Baldwin or Chamberlain.
I’m old enough to say Clem Attlee: a “modest man with much to be modest about”, not without his limitations, but managed to steer a government of powerful personalities into creating the welfare state in the first place.
In those days, reporters, especially for the BBC, were much more deferential to Prime Ministers but even with a soft question like “Prime Minister, is there anything you can tell us about your talks with [whoever it was]?”, anyone with the self-confidence to reply “No, not really” deserves some admiration.
His problem was that, having already had a substantial record in the duller side of steering domestic policy and keeping the government on track while Blair was grandstanding around the place, he didn’t really seem to know what he wanted to be Prime Minister for, and fluffed the one thing that was unique to the office - being decisive about when to go to the country, leaving himself open to the deadly summing up “From Stalin to Mr. Bean overnight”.
That said, by some accounts (not necessarily his own) he may well have played a substantial part in staving off the worst international consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, but I suppose there may never be a definitive answer on that point.
Of your lifetime? That is a bit limited.
What criteria to use? Personality? Policies? Effectiveness - getting stuff done and most of all Dealing with a crisis?
I would certainly rate the 1945 Labour government led by Atlee who managed to found the principle elements of the welfare state as outlined by the Beveridge report. That gave the UK the NHS, Social Security, Free education. Everyone benefited from that. That post-war generation of Labour politicians was quite talented. Later PMs were Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. On the conservative side, there was Churchill, Anthony Eden, Macmillian and Heath. Mostly patrician, one nation Tories who tried to manage the economy under and uneasy social consensus. The UK was still recovering from WW2 and dealing with decolonization. Anthony Eden lost the plot with Suez.
That consensus was smashed by Thatcher, who was quite a remarkable Prime Minister. Whatever you think of her politics, she set about a programme of industrial economic reform that changed UK dramatically. She rode on the back of a sea change in political sentiment. Just as the 1945 Labour government rode on the back of tremendous appetite for social reform and the extension of the state. Thatcher rode on the back an electorate that was exasperated by economic mismanagement and governments dominated by the influence of labour unions. 1979 was the ‘Winter of Discontent’, it all came to a head and she was elected. Few thought the would last long. In fact she stayed in power for eleven years and won three terms. She was lucky, she had money from North Sea Oil to keep the economy afloat while she did major surgery to the big metal bashing industries and fought bitter battles with the powerful labour unions. Thatcher kept her nerve in a crisis and showed great leadership. The UK in the 1980s was a very divided country who a huge ideological split between left and right and Thatcher was a neo liberal. Many people who lived through the turmoil of those years detested her politics. It is often the case that the mere mention of her name causes people to come out with nervous ticks as they recall the high emotion of the big strikes and battles with her government.
She was followed by Major, who I think was a bit under-rated. He did a lot of work on trying to solve the Northern Ireland question and negotiated the EU Maastricht treaty. Constitutional matters are not glamourous, nor are international treaties, but they are essential political projects.
Blair and Brown were a good team in the early days and determined to achieve reforms of the public services. Look around in the UK and you will see lots of new schools and health centres and improvements to public housing. Most of that was down to them. Blair, of course, was caught out by Iraq and Bush and this destroyed his reputation. Nonetheless, he and Brown achieved a lot.
Cameron, was simply a public relations man. He was a social liberal and introduced equality legislation, but he really just minded the shop and was pre-occupied with internal party wrangles. His use of Referendums to deal with Scottish independence and latterly Brexit - that was a huge mistake. The UK will be living with the consequences for many years to come. It has effectively cancelled the EU single market policies of Thatcher and Major and given the next few governments the monumental task of dealing with the economic consequences.
I would say Thatcher was the best leader, she commanded huge respect for her political skills even if you did not like her policies. She fixed a broken economy and was hugely influential. She was also good on the world stage managing international crises and treaties. A lot of people on the left gave full support to her during the Falklands war.
Blair was also a very clever and drove through public sector reforms, we got new schools and hospitals. So he gets points for that, but his interventionist foreign policies led to failure and depended on Brown to manage the economy.
I think Thatcher wins.
There have been a number of polls about this (among historians, etc):
I have to go against the grain a bit here with regards to Blair and Brown on the economy and infrastructure. Both men presided over and economic boom neither men were much responsible for. They were responsible insofar as allowing the financial sector “to do it’s thing”. They benefitted from a boom in tax revenue; a boom in revenue largely due to an artificial increase in commodity & property prices. Despite this massive increase in revenue they saddled the public sector with off the books debt. Nevertheless, infrastructure and services improved but not without cost to future taxpayers. That cost came to a head with the financial crash when revenue suddenly crashed and government finances plummeted with it. This *all *before we get to the extra cost of the government having to bail out the banks. Imo this is why Brown was seen as such a poor PM. He could not afford to keep plowing excess money into public servicves. When the money dried up the New Labour project collapsed.
You are right, they wanted to borrow money cheaply for their projects and that led to a credit bubble. Excess credit finds a home somewhere and a lot went into dodgy mortgages and dubious financial derivatives. They took a risk, but at least we got some schools and hospitals, even if we will spend the next generation or two paying off the increased national debt. The same thing happened in several other countries and there are plenty of white elephant projects that came from that time of easy credit.
Prime Ministers come a cropper sooner or later. They screw the economy, mishandle international relations or they are stabbed in the back by their own party. If they can get out while achieving one or two positive things to leave as a legacy, that is a success.
Blair was doing quite well until 9/11 happened and he made the monumental mistake of going along with Bush. The way in which he manipulated the system to persuade the cabinet and country to go to war in Iraq was so bad. We went into war under equipped and under-financed on the coat tails of the US neo-cons and their mad escapade.
They say all political careers end in failure. Not many PMs retire while they are ahead, they push their luck.