The hot seat

The history of the British prime minister, 300 years old this April, is riddled with mysteries, in large part because no one has joined together all the dots. It is nearly 50 years since someone tried, when historian Robert Blake wrote a book that discusses the office and its holders going back to the beginning.

We have biographers who dive down deep shafts into the ground to mine everything about an individual prime minister, but sometimes know little about who came before and after. History has become segmented by period and specialism. Some know a great deal about the early 18th century, or the mid-19th century, about economic or cultural history, but few take the long view. Rare are historians like Jeremy Black, or journalists like Daniel Finkelstein, who have a rich understanding of the entire 300 years of British prime ministers.

In place of a wide horizon, we have gone in for polls, plenty of them, ranking prime ministers from “first” to “last”, as if they were artists whose work we can see now, or footballers who have scored a given number of goals. We attempt to determine a prime minister’s “greatness”. But great at what? Everyone knows about Winston Churchill’s achievements. But what about William Pitt the Elder (PM from 1766-68) or Earl Grey (1830-34), both of whom were considerable figures. Polls are fun but we should not treat them as a substitute for serious analysis.

In the Radio 4 series that I’m presenting in April, and the book I’m writing to coincide with the anniversary, I