You may say the incumbent, if you wish.
I’ll say Lord North, just to get the ball rolling. He lost the American colonies in a badly-waged war.
Neville Chamberlain because of the way he handled the Hitler situation.
It used to be Chamberlain until David Cameron had a fit of idiocy until Theresa May overtook him in a matter of weeks of taking office until Boris Johnson came along. I am beginning to fear Boris’ successor.
Things can only get better, right? Right?!?
David Cameron for me. Who calls a referendum for something they don’t want to happen? He called it because he was too weak to control his own party. It was a crisis entirely of his own making. There was not a social movement demanding it, the EU had not changed any policy. Eurosceptics had not imagined they would get what they desired.
His intervention in Libya was unnecessary, counter-productive, incompetent and arrogant. He tried to meddle in Egypt after the Arab Spring.
He increased tuition fees, cut benefits, pursued austerity, and presided over an increase in poverty, homelessness and food banks.
Lord North lost America but that was inevitable. Cameron might have precipitated the break up of the UK, which was not.
Neville gets a bad rap for waving a bit of paper around signed by himself and Hitler claiming it means ‘peace in our time’. His reputation never recovered.
However…another way of looking at it is that it bought a year of peace in order to build up the UK defences. He increased the budget of the RAF and understood the importance of preparing for an air war. Certainly, the year of peace gave Dowding time to put in place the Radar network and Observer Corps that gave the RAF the ability to defeat the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in 1940.
There was a very strong anti-war movement all through the 1930s in the UK at that time. Apeasement of German, Italian and Japanese expansionism was not confined to the UK and Chamberlain. The effects of the loss of million men in WW1 were felt very deeply in the UK and France and other victors in that terrible war of attrition.
How should we judge a Prime Minster?
Not dealing effectively with external threats, leading the country to be unprepared and facing disaster?
How about creating a home grown crisis? Dividing the nation into opposing factions?
Recently the UK and the US have experienced political leaders who divide rather than rule and think they can bluff their way around any issue. Noisy bagatelles.
On the other hand, there have been leaders who were doing okay until international ‘events’ exposed the flaws in their judgement. Blair and Bush come to mind.
A quick count reveals there have been about 77 UK Adminstrations lead by a Prime Minister since 1676.
It would be a tall order to examine the highs and lows of all of them.
Aha! Some one has kindly gathered together various polls and surveys.
In the 20th century Anthony Eden was pretty much held to be a disaster as a Prime Minister. Being largely responsible for the Suez Crisis where he completely misjudged the rising tide of Arab Nationalism in the Middle East and that the US might not support this colonial intervention. He had a medical condition and the drugs may have impaired his judgement. I guess that can go either way. Kennedy had serious medical conditions, but famously didn’t blink.
Unfortunately the effects of the Brexit debacle are disguised by the Covid lockdowns. So a verdict on Cameron, May and Johnson will have to wait.
I think Chamberlain is vastly underestimated. Not only did he buy that extra year, but he cleverly outwitted Hitler in order to do it. Hitler was expecting the West to support Czechoslovakia’s refusal to compromise, allowing him to start a war and occupy the entire country. By giving Hitler what he had said all along he actually wanted (only the small German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia), Chamberlain made that impossible.
The common belief has come down that Hitler played Chamberlain for a fool, but by all reports Hitler came away from those negotiations absolutely furious at having been thwarted.
What about Peg? Was she not a massive silk bag of festering turds?
I think Cameron is down there with Anthony Eden.
He used a Referendum, a mechanism which has barely any relevance in UK law, to solve a political crisis that had little relevance outside the Conservative Party. He totally misjudged how it would become weaponised and misrepresented by the Eurosceptic faction in the party and their business backers. The Scottish Referendum was responsibly managed and the public felt informed… The Brexit Referendum was run like a UK General Election, all over after a few weeks of campaigning. This was a huge mistake.
It led the UK to abandon a 40 year investment in the EU trading block and the treaties it negotiated. It passed on the poisoned political chalice to May who was unable to unite the party behind an agreement. Leaving it to Boris Johnson to be elected on a ‘get Brexit done’ ticket. He hasn’t, there are lots of loose ends they he has been trying to ignore. The effects on trade the prospects for the UK economy for decades is not looking good. The UK shot itself in the foot in order to solve an internal party spat. That is not the mark of a statesman, it is the mark of a party hack who put his position within the party before the interests of the country.
He made a monumental misjudgement and created a wholly avoidable crisis. He lays pretty low these days.
Yeah, I’d be tempted to nominate Bloody Stupid Johnson, but nobody else currently in British politics seem to have been capable of doing much better. So one might as well lay the blame on the guy who started the whole thing.
Instead he got to occupy the whole country without a war. It’s amazing Hitler could remain in power with defeats of that magnitude.
But it showed Western publics still deeply scared by World War I that even if you gave Hitler exactly what he said he wanted (and he had said in September of 1938 that the Sudetenland was “the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe”), his territorial ambitions were, in fact, unlimited. Appeasement gets a bad rap, but it’s failure may have been a necessary condition to bring a war-weary citizenry around to opposing Hitler militarily.
The 80s child in me is so tempted to say Thatcher, but I’m afraid Cameron is it, for Brexit if nothing else.
You think it’s going to get better?
Nope. It is a case of how bad is the economy going to get.
The way to deal with the debt mountain is to grow the economy. Do more business with the rest of the world. Brexit has undermined all that.
There are supposed to be huge benefits to leaving the EU but look at the politicians that have been sent out to cut deals. Liz Truss, that relentless self publicist.
Brexit is an article of faith in UK Conservative politics now. It is supposed to bring untold benefits to the UK. Unfortunately for the Conservatives they have to convince the rest of the world that the UK is serious about international trade. Having torn up its most important trade agreement with the EU. Other countries may well be wary that if another UK PM has some internal party tensions a similar tearing up of long standing agreements will happen again.
The UK now has a monumental credibility problem. You can flatter the electorate as much as you like and tell them what they want to hear. But that won’t cut any ice outside of the UK. The business community warned of this and all the disruption to trade. Boris Johnson had a typically robust response: f••• business.
A fine legacy!
To think that Conservative was once the party of business and free trade and responsible management of the economy. How times have changed.
Whoever replaces Johnson faces a huge task to sort out the UK economy after all of these years of populist nonsense.
Could Rishi Sunak be that person?
“We ought to have gone to war in 1938 … September 1938 would have been the most favourable date.”
– Hitler, February 1945
There was a general opinion at the time, by people other than me, that Reagan was a good/great president, and Baroness Peg was apparently well thought of in her country as well, but the far-reaching effects illuminate administrations yielding long-term damage. In my view. Those two were a matched set in their time, their examples encouraging subsequent Tory-types to push further bad policies. Through that lens, viewing their time in power merely on the basis of the events of that time brings the analysis up short.
Thatcher won three elections and was Prime Minister for 11 years. Blair also won several elections. If that is any measure, they were successful politicians.
I disagree as to Lord North. A more capably-waged military campaign, with a well-chosen, smart, capable commander there in the colonies and able to make decisions on the spot, could have defeated the “rabble in arms” several times from 1775-83. The long decision-making lag time between the colonies and London, given the inherent delays in sea travel, was an ongoing problem for the British during the American Revolution.
And of course a wiser, more nimble diplomacy, such as by granting expanded powers to colonial legislatures which recognized royal authority, might have averted war entirely, or brought it to a negotiated peace that would not include independence, sooner. If Lord North had given the colonists representation in the House of Commons, taking away the potent “no taxation without representation” rallying cry, they would have been outvoted anyway and His Majesty’s Government could have pretty much done what it wished.
For a great book on the British side of things - political, military, diplomatic, social, economic, etc. - check out Stanley Weintraub’s Iron Tears. The Revolution really was, in some ways, the UK’s Vietnam War.
The loss of the colonies was a terrible blow to the British in the short term. King George III, who was a very hands-on monarch before he became ill, actually drafted a letter of abdication after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, so closely was he associated with the failed British policy.
That’s the real kicker. We know the British empire could handle colonies better, because they did just that with the Canadian ones.
Any one want to change their vote ?