2

            Democratic Leadership: Myths, Powers, Styles

Tony Blair gets no further than the second page of the introduction to his memoirs before announcing: ‘I won three general elections.’1 He later adds: ‘Political analysts and practising politicians love to speculate on this or that voting trend – and very often there is much truth in it – but there is always a tendency to underplay the importance of the leader.’² But is it a case of ‘underplaying’ or of recognizing that some political leaders are not quite as important as they think they are? If leaders are perceived by themselves and others to have played the decisive role in the winning of elections, this will have an impact on the way the government operates. Leaders who believe that election victories are more their personal triumphs than victories for their parties are inclined to take this as an entitlement to concentrate power in their hands. These quotations from Tony Blair (which could be multiplied from answers he has given in interviews) raise two questions. The first, and more important, is a general one: when people in parliamentary democracies cast their ballots, are they voting primarily for (or against) particular party leaders? Presidential systems, in which the chief executive is directly elected by citizens, are a separate case. The second question is more specific: how justified is Blair in using the first person singular when he refers to the Labour Party’s victories in the British general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005?

Of still greater concern than either of these questions is the issue of how we assess democratic leaders once the elections are over. That raises different questions. Is it true that heads of governments in democracies have become more dominant over time? Are calls for more power to be placed in the hands of the individual who heads the government justified? Or is there more to be said for collective leadership, in which at the national level authoritative figures in a political party are firmly in charge of government departments, but on major issues require the support of a group of their senior colleagues, to whom they are accountable (as well, of course, as being accountable to parliament and, ultimately, to the electorate)?

            LEADERS AND ELECTION OUTCOMES

The political scientist Anthony King has described the ‘near-universal belief’ that leaders’ and candidates’ personalities are hugely important factors in determining the outcomes of elections as ‘simply wrong’. That is not, King observes, to deny that leaders’ personal characteristics count for something, simply that it is ‘not for nearly as much as is generally supposed’. Summing up a study of modern elections in six countries, King concludes that ‘it is quite unusual for leaders’ and candidates’ personalities and other personal traits to determine election outcomes’.3 Among specialists who have made serious studies of the role of leaders in the determination of electoral outcomes – and their number has increased in the decade since King’s work was published – there is no consensus. Some attribute more electoral significance to leaders than do others. Their work contains little, however, to justify certain political leaders’ attribution of election victories primarily to themselves.

Given that there has been a general decline in the membership of political parties in democracies, and a decline also in long-term party allegiance, it might be supposed that the characteristics of the party leader will have become increasingly influential. Some evidence has, indeed, been adduced to support the proposition that leaders have become more important in the minds of voters, in substantial part as a result of change over the past half-century in the way the mass media report politics.⁴ Quite often an increased ‘personalization’ has been turned into a case for the ‘presidentialization’ of politics within parliamentary systems.⁵ Yet, while a greater focus on the top leader by parties and the mass media can be observed in many countries, this does not mean that voters are as obsessed with the top leader as are many politicians and most political journalists.6 Not only is the idea that leaders everywhere have become more important for the outcome of elections highly questionable, but the portrayal of prime ministers as increasingly ‘presidential’, and more autonomous in the performance of their duties, has been overdrawn.

A recent scholarly monograph by Lauri Karvonen on the ‘personalization’ (as distinct from ‘presidentialization’) of politics brings together research on almost all of the world’s most stable parliamentary democracies. This Finnish political scientist found ‘no clear evidence for the notion that the importance of party leader evaluations for party choice has increased over time’. And contrary to some earlier speculation that people with a weak sense of party identification would set more store on the personality of the leader, the evidence pointed the other way.⁷ It is party loyalists who have more intense support for particular leaders, suggesting that it is loyalty to the party that determines support for the captain of the team rather than the leader having great influence over the uncommitted. Another recent study underlines the point that the ‘party label gets applied as a stereotype when voters are confronted by party leaders, and determines (to a large extent) how leaders will be perceived by voters’.⁸ Thus, if you are already well disposed to the Christian Democrats in Germany, to the Liberal Party in Australia, to the French Socialists or to the Labour Party in Britain, you will be likely in the run-up to an election to approve of the leader of those parties, whoever he or she may be.

A focus on leaders is hardly an entirely new phenomenon, especially when the people in question were particularly formidable. William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, rival politicians of legendary standing in nineteenth-century Britain, are obvious cases in point. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, television added a new dimension to the personalization of politics. The appearance and performance of the leader, as a significant component of the party image, became a more prominent feature of the electoral contest than it was in the century’s earliest decades. As a source of information on the rival candidates, TV has, however, almost certainly passed its peak – especially in the majority of democracies, which do not allow money to determine who gets television time. The United States, with its paid TV political advertisements, is a partial exception here. Many people watching programmes far removed from ideological debate are not able entirely to escape from political propaganda in the advertising breaks, but, even then, only if they are watching live rather than recorded TV. More generally, however, the vast increase in the number of television channels has enabled those viewers who are not already politically engaged to avoid politicians and their debates. Still more important – and here the USA is very far from being an exception – has been the rise of the internet and the huge array of alternatives to political discussion that it offers, while at the same time providing opportunities for political argument unrelated to the views and personalities of leaders.

While no serious analyst suggests that the assessment of leaders is irrelevant to voters’ choice, ‘this effect is dwarfed by such “usual suspects” as party identity and preferences, as well as by socio-economic factors’.9 Overall, neither the personalities of leaders nor citizens’ evaluation of political leaders have become the main determinants of voter choice or of electoral outcomes.¹⁰ A study of the impact of leaders in nine different democracies over half a century of elections concluded that the leader counted for something in all of them, but – unsurprisingly – more in presidential than in parliamentary systems. In particular, the impact of the leader on the outcome of presidential elections was found to be substantial in the United States.¹¹ Yet, even in America, the significance of the personality of the presidential candidates and the minutiae of the campaign, including presidential debates, can be overstated. If we take the examples of two highly articulate presidential candidates, with attractive personalities, who ran successful campaigns – John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Barack Obama in 2008 – it is tempting to attribute the electoral victories to their magnetism. On the basis of relevant survey research, Anthony King is dismissive of the view that Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon was due ‘to his youth, charm, and elegance compared with Nixon’s five-o-clock shadow and generally shifty demeanor’. King observes that ‘Kennedy won because he was the Democratic Party’s candidate in a year when the Democrats were almost certainly going to regain the White House anyway, not least because a substantial plurality of American voters were Democratic Party identifiers’.¹²

Obama also won in a propitious year for a Democratic contender for the presidency. The outgoing Republican president was exceptionally unpopular. One pollster in 2008 quipped that George W. Bush’s ‘job approval is almost as poor as that of King George III among the colonists 240 years ago’.13 In a country where money matters much more in elections than in Europe – and where the sums involved are vastly greater – the Democrats, most unusually, outspent the Republicans. In their campaign advertisements, they successfully portrayed John McCain, who wished to distance himself from the unpopular Bush, as more of the same. When the campaign ended, McCain, as a major study of the 2008 election put it, was ‘more likely than before to be seen as McSame, in part because, abetted by the media, the Democrats scraped the maverick label from him and sutured the name and face of the Republican incumbent in its place’.¹⁴ The condition of the economy in late 2008, as the financial crisis began to manifest itself, also meant that this was not a good time to be representing the party which had occupied the White House for the previous eight years. The Wall Street Journal characterized the US economy’s performance in the closing months of 2008 as the worst in a quarter of a century.¹⁵ That was all the more damaging for the Republicans, since the eight years when the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had occupied the White House were recalled as a time of economic buoyancy. Obama won convincingly in 2008 notwithstanding the fact that in surveys he scored no more highly than McCain in ‘leadership qualities’ or ‘trustworthiness’. Only in empathy was his rating significantly higher than that of his Republican opponent.¹⁶

While the personality of the leader tends to count for more in presidential than in parliamentary systems, it is usually far from being the overwhelming determinant of voter choice. Thus, a survey-based study of French presidential elections between 1965 and 1995 found only one out of six in which the candidate’s personality had a very substantial impact on the outcome – the election of General Charles de Gaulle in 1965 – as well as one in which it probably had a substantial impact. This was the next presidential election, that of 1969, which resulted in the victory of Georges Pompidou. The election had been triggered by the resignation of de Gaulle after he lost a referendum.¹⁷ Discussing de Gaulle’s earlier electoral victory, Roy Pierce noted: ‘It requires a large imbalance in perceptions of leadership attributes to attract people away from a candidate whom they are predisposed to support on grounds of established political orientations. Such an imbalance existed in France in 1965.’¹⁸

Within parliamentary democracies with majoritarian (first-past-the-post) electoral systems, the impact of leaders is somewhat more of a factor in electoral choice than in countries that have proportional representation. PR makes coalition government more probable, and the electorate is further removed from the decision as to who will be prime minister. That will have to be agreed among the parties who are becoming coalition partners. There is also a modest general tendency for the electoral effect of leaders to be greater when the policy differences between parties are small. This leads two scholars to conclude: ‘If parties abdicate, leaders may take over. However, if party polarization increases in the future, we would expect to see decreasing effects of party leader popularity on the vote.’19 The same authors find some long-term increase in the impact of leaders on electoral outcomes in the United States and Sweden and a small downward trend in Canada. Importantly, however, their comparative study does not provide ‘any clear confirmation of the hypothesis that the influence of party leaders [on elections] is generally on the rise’.²⁰

            Leaders’ Influence on Electoral Outcomes in Britain

Before we turn specifically to the assertion of former British prime minister Tony Blair with which this chapter opened – and his role in the determination of victories in the British general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005 – it is worth putting it in the context of post-Second World War elections. (Prior to that period, serious studies of elections, based on contemporary interviewing and survey research, did not exist.) In a very close-run election, since evaluations of leaders do count for something in voters’ minds, the comparative standing of the two main rival party leaders may at times be of decisive importance for the victory of one party rather than the other. But it is very rare for this to occur. If any post-war British party leader made just that difference between victory and defeat for his party, it was Harold Wilson. It is even possible that Wilson did this twice, but only because the gap between the two main political parties was very close in these elections and his personal ascendancy over the Conservative Party leaders then was particularly wide. The first occasion was in 1964 when opinion polls showed Harold Wilson to be vastly preferred to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and the other time was February 1974 when Wilson had a large personal lead over Edward Heath. Labour ended only 0.7 per cent ahead of the Conservative Party in the 1964 election and had a majority of just four seats. In February 1974, the first of two general elections that year, Labour were 0.8 per cent ahead, but did not achieve an overall majority in the House of Commons.21*

Referring to the second of the two general elections of 1974, the director of a conservative think tank Policy Exchange wrote in 2012: ‘No sitting prime minister has increased his or her share of the vote since 1974.’²² Wilson’s popularity no doubt played its part in that October 1974 victory when Labour won eighteen more seats than in February, but it was hardly decisive. The real point here is that ‘prime minister’ is being used as if it were a synonym for political party. As a plain statement of fact it is wrong. If we are to go no further back than the 2010 general election, we find that the sitting prime minister, Gordon Brown, increased his share of the vote by more than 6 per cent in the only election in which people were casting their ballots directly for or against him – the voters in his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.²³ The use of ‘prime minister’ as a substitute for ‘party’ is both misleading and an astonishingly widespread confusion.

It is, indeed, quite possible for a political party to win a general election even though its leader is less popular than the person heading the rival party. Thus, for example, when the Conservative Party comfortably won the British general election of 1970, the poll ratings of their leader Edward Heath were far below those accorded their party, and Heath was less popular than the Labour leader (and prime minister for the previous six years), Harold Wilson.²⁴ And when the Conservatives still more convincingly won the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher trailed well behind the Labour leader and outgoing prime minister, James Callaghan, in popularity. The election took place on 3 May and in polling conducted on 28–30 April, Callaghan’s lead over Mrs Thatcher was as much as 24 points. His personal lead appears to have declined somewhat in the last few days, but he remained far ahead of Thatcher, while his party went down to defeat.25* Other parliamentary democracies offer similar examples, including Australia with its Westminster-type system. John Howard led the Australian Liberal Party (its name notwithstanding, the equivalent of the Conservative Party in Britain) to four successive election victories between 1996 and 2004. In two of these elections Howard’s principal opponent, Labor Party leaders Paul Keating in 1996 and Kim Beazley in 1998 scored more highly in surveys of leadership qualities than did Howard.²⁶

So what of Tony Blair’s claim that he won three general elections? In an interview with the editor of the Financial Times in 2012, he said: ‘Sometimes the way the media talks, you’d think that I’d lost three elections rather than won them . . .’²⁷ In fact, it has been much more common for journalists and many others unthinkingly to go along with Blair’s belief that these victories were, above all, his than to question this repeated assertion. The extent to which attributing electoral outcomes to party leaders, not least in the case of Blair, has become commonplace but illusory has been brought out by the political scientists John Bartle and Ivor Crewe, the joint authors of a study of party leaders and general elections in Britain. Crewe (former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex and now Master of University College, Oxford) and Bartle write: ‘We have experienced at first hand the stunned disbelief, bordering on hostility, of a non-academic audience on being told that the impact of Blair’s and [John] Major’s personalities on the 1997 election was negligible.’²⁸

Although party loyalties are more fluid in Britain and in most democracies than they were half a century ago, it is still the case that people vote for a political party. In the general election of 1997 the main opposition party had an overwhelming advantage. It is very difficult in a genuine democracy for a governing party to win four, never mind five, elections in a row. The Conservatives had, against the odds, won four, but ‘time for a change’ sentiments militated strongly against them winning a fifth. Moreover, they had lost their reputation for economic competence, which had traditionally been one of their perceived strengths. While Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister, they had joined in 1990 a European economic project that was to be a forerunner of the common currency, the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). On 16 September 1992, a day that became known as Black Wednesday, there was such a run on the pound sterling that the government had to make an ignominious exit from the ERM in order to devalue the currency, having first hiked interest rates to a level that would have been devastating for the domestic economy. The prime minister at the time, John Major, was later, quite correctly, to observe: ‘On that day, a fifth consecutive Conservative election victory, which always looked unlikely unless the opposition were to self-destruct, became remote, if not impossible.’29

Until his sudden death in May 1994, John Smith was destined to be the next British prime minister. He had served in a Labour Cabinet under the leadership of James Callaghan and was a formidable politician known for his wit and common sense. He was not likely to ‘self-destruct’, to use Major’s term.* However, Peter Mandelson – who had been close to Smith’s predecessor, Neil Kinnock, and was to become still closer to Tony Blair, but was kept at arm’s length by Smith – is just one of the politicians from Blair’s circle to suggest that a Labour victory would have been less likely under Smith. He cites as evidence that at the end of 1992, Smith’s satisfaction rating in opinion polls had fallen ‘to plus 4’. He notes that at the same time Major’s ratings were ‘minus 30 per cent’.³⁰ There was, in other words, a gap between the two leaders of 34 points. While the gulf between Blair and Major was to become still wider, no serious study of the leadership effect in the 1997 election has indicated that Labour would have had less than an overwhelming victory in Blair’s absence.

The landslide – an overall Labour majority of 178 – itself owed much to an electoral system which translates a fairly modest percentage increase in popular votes into a disproportionately great advantage in seats. Labour’s share of the popular vote was lower in 1997 than in all elections between 1945 and 1966, including those which Labour lost. The Conservatives, however, fared catastrophically. They had their lowest share of the vote of the century, as well as their worst result since 1906 in terms of seats.31 They had become so unpopular that any Labour leader who did not ‘self-destruct’ would have led the party to an overall majority of well over a hundred seats in the House of Commons. Bartle and Crewe calculate that had Major and Blair ‘been evaluated equally favourably, Labour’s majority would have been cut from 11.9 to 11.0 points, altering the outcome in just four seats’.³²

Labour’s second successive election victory – in 2001 – owed a great deal to the perception that they had, in contrast with their predecessors, been running the economy competently. As the major study of this election noted, that ‘was crucial as a determinant of voting choice’.³³ It was loss of confidence in the Conservatives’ economic competence which contributed greatly to their electoral defeat in 1997, while doubts on this score about Labour had been disadvantageous to them in the past. The person who was running the economy in the government led by Blair was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Treasury ministers in virtually all governments in any country are important, but it is generally agreed that Brown’s dominance over economic policy was more than usually great. No doubt in 2001, as in 1997, Blair was still an electoral asset, but it is no less clear that he was a far from decisive one in securing the party’s electoral victory.

By 2005 the increasing unpopularity of the war in Iraq, launched two years previously, meant that Blair was even further from being the reason for Labour’s election victory. As was widely known to the electorate, Blair had taken a lead in backing the administration of George W. Bush in their desire to initiate military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and in committing British troops to this war of choice. Since, however, the main opposition party, the Conservatives, had also given vociferous support to the invasion of Iraq, it was the Liberal Democrats who were able most effectively to tap into popular discontent with Labour’s Middle East policy. Their share of the vote increased by almost four percentage points to 22 per cent and their number of parliamentary seats from fifty-two to sixty-two.³⁴ This was far less dangerous to Labour than any addition to the swing to the Conservatives would have been. Neither of the main political parties could generate much public enthusiasm. In their victory, the Labour Party received just over nine and a half million votes, more than two million fewer than they obtained in 1992 when, on a higher turnout and under Neil Kinnock’s leadership, they lost the election to the Conservatives.* Taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that Blair’s electoral value was less than has been widely assumed. And, contrary to what appears to be his own belief, it did not make the difference between victory and defeat in any of the three elections which the Labour Party won during his leadership.

            HAVE DEMOCRATIC LEADERS BECOME MORE DOMINANT OVER TIME?

In the course of the twentieth century most central governments in democracies acquired more powers. The dominance of the central executive, to the extent that it has occurred, is not, however, the same thing as the domination of the head of government within the executive, even though there is some limited evidence to support the idea that democratic leaders have become more powerful over time. That applies most unambiguously to the role played by heads of government internationally. They have, as was noted in Chapter 1, been thrust into the forefront of foreign policy-making as a result of the growth in the speed of communications. That has facilitated both the ease of interaction among prime ministers and presidents and the expectation that this would take place. Wise heads of government pay great heed to the expertise accumulated in their foreign ministries and work closely with the senior politician who heads it, for even those whose interest hitherto has been mainly in domestic politics cannot avoid the international stage. Most of them come quite quickly to enjoy it. As Harold Macmillan – the British prime minister whose period of office coincided with Dwight D. Eisenhower (in his last years in the presidency) and John F. Kennedy in the United States, General Charles de Gaulle in France, Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in West Germany – wryly observed, he was a ‘politician’ at home but a ‘statesman’ whenever he went abroad.35 (Harry Truman put it differently, but no less ironically, when he said that ‘a statesman is a dead politician’.)³⁶

            The Constraints of the American Presidency

One of the reasons why the term ‘presidentialization’ is misleading when used to describe the role of prime ministers in parliamentary democracies is because the best known presidency of all, that of the United States, is an office which constrains its leader domestically more thoroughly than do the limitations on the power of most European premiers. That results, above all, from the strictness of the American separation of powers. A different electoral cycle for presidency and legislature means that Congress can be under the control of a different party from that of the president, and there are times when, with Congress responding to different pressures and lobbies, even a majority in the legislature belonging to his own party has been no guarantee that the president will get his way. In recent years, however, the split between the party represented in the White House and that controlling the House of Representatives has become a still greater limitation on presidential power than in the past. This results from a rise in unyielding partisanship, with fewer members of Congress voting independently.

The autonomous political power of the US Supreme Court, willing on ostensibly legal grounds to strike down presidential decisions or legislation which had the president’s backing, is also a greater judicial impediment than most prime ministers have to contend with. And though the American president is the embodiment of the central executive power in a way in which a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy is not, the sheer size and complexity of the federal government makes it difficult for the president to determine government policy. Indeed, it has even been argued that ‘the White House staff constitutes the only organization in the federal government on which the president can put his personal imprint, and from which he can expect accountability and loyalty’.37 As a former US government official turned scholar, Harold Seidman, observed, even if an American president dislikes members of his cabinet, disagrees with them, and suspects their loyalty, ‘he cannot destroy their power without seriously undermining his own’. Seidman adds:

The occupant of the ‘most powerful office on earth’ quickly learns the harsh truth. His executive power has a very frail constitutional foundation – the power to appoint officers of the United States. Appointing authority may be so hedged with qualifications as to limit severely his discretion. He can fire officers performing administrative duties but here again his power is limited. Dismissal of a high official is a measure of last resort which can be utilized only under extreme provocation.³⁸

The limitations on the power of appointment were well illustrated by Bill Clinton’s difficulty in appointing an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993. His first choice was Lani Guinier, a University of Pennsylvania professor who had been one of his Yale Law School classmates. It soon became clear that there was sufficient opposition to her from within the Senate that her nomination was unlikely to be ratified and, rather than suffer a drawn-out defeat, Clinton abandoned the effort. His next candidate for the same post, another African-American lawyer, John Payton, also encountered opposition from within Congress, and he himself withdrew from contention. ‘Eventually’, as Clinton notes, he nominated Deval Patrick, ‘another brilliant African-American lawyer with a strong civil rights background’ and ‘he did a fine job’. But Clinton was left to regret that he had lost the friendship of Guinier.³⁹ More recently, President Barack Obama ran into trouble, trying to fill a much higher governmental office. His first choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in 2013 was the US ambassador to the United Nations (and his long-time foreign policy adviser), Susan Rice. Fierce Republican opposition led the president reluctantly to agree to her withdrawing her candidacy.⁴⁰ And these are just a small sample of the limitations on what is regarded as one of the president’s main prerogatives, ‘the power to appoint officers of the United States’.

No one doubts that in the USA, if not quite to the same degree as in European democracies, more power over the past century has accrued to central government collectively. However, if we look at the past hundred years and more, it is a great oversimplification to see the power of the chief executive in America following an upward curve of increased power within the government. Theodore Roosevelt was a more dominant figure than such inter-war presidents as Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover’s successor, brought about an upsurge in presidential dominance through political skill and his popular appeal. It was he who first took advantage of radio as a way of influencing public opinion with his highly effective ‘fireside chats’. Roosevelt had a supremely confident leadership style, but the instant impact he made was based also on concrete actions, including an impressive inaugural address, his calling Congress into emergency session, and his tackling of the financial crisis. He was sensitive to public moods and adept in the timing of his initiatives. He was an unusually forceful president and made dramatic use of his power of veto.* So much so that by the end of his second term his vetoes amounted to ‘more than 30 per cent of all the measures disallowed by presidents since 1792’.⁴¹ For a time there was an assumption that Roosevelt’s incumbency heralded a long-lasting increase in the power of what was to be dubbed ‘the modern presidency’. The advent of it has generally been dated to the late 1930s and FDR’s second term. It was at that very time, however, that Roosevelt overreached himself by trying to expand the membership of the Supreme Court in order to change the political balance within it. Having won a landslide victory in 1936, Roosevelt appeared to be at the height of his powers when he tried to increase the size of the Court in order to add justices who would be supportive of New Deal policies. His bill not only failed to pass, it also consolidated a coalition of opponents of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda. As a leading specialist on the American presidency observed:

Some members of Congress who broke with FDR in 1937 never again would accord him the same degree of loyalty they had in his first term. Similarly, the dispute produced divisions among reformers of many types, undermining the bipartisan support for the New Deal and confirming for Republican progressives their suspicions that the New Dealers were interested in self-aggrandizement and concentrating power in Washington.42

Truman, as already noted in Chapter 1, reposed greater trust in his cabinet secretaries than had been characteristic of Roosevelt and was generally more supportive of them. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was also a less dominant policy-maker than Roosevelt and was readier to devolve responsibility to his subordinates, and to trust them, than FDR had been. Eisenhower’s Second World War career, which had involved a good deal of diplomacy, had given him incomparably better preparation for his international role than is afforded presidents who move directly from state governorships to the White House. When, for example, his foreign counterparts were French president Charles de Gaulle and British prime ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, in each one of these cases he was dealing with people whom he had known during the war. Yet, Eisenhower allowed his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, great leeway. Much disliked in Western Europe, Dulles was described by Churchill as ‘a dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending, insensitive man’ and, more pithily on another occasion, as ‘Dull, Duller, Dulles’.⁴³

            Presidential Powers and Leadership Styles – the American Case

The Supreme Court can be a real obstacle to a president’s ambitions, as Harry Truman found when, during the Korean War, the Court stopped him from temporarily nationalizing the steel industry, which was undergoing at the time a major industrial dispute. However, the Supreme Court at its best can on occasion add lustre to a presidency. This was surely the case with Dwight Eisenhower. He wished to avoid conflict over civil rights and reluctantly accepted, rather than welcomed, the Supreme Court’s landmark verdict in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, which desegregated schools and presaged conflict between the federal government and southern states wishing to maintain separate and unequal education. The driving force behind federal support for civil rights was Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and the most crucial judgements were those of the Supreme Court, headed by the liberal Republican, Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower himself had nominated. So far as civil rights – those of black Americans, most specifically – were concerned, Eisenhower’s recent and sympathetic biographer, Jim Newton, observes that ‘Eisenhower’s record in that area reflected a triumph of leadership style over personal conviction: he trusted Brownell to lead’. Thus, while Eisenhower ‘balked occasionally, the administration made progress despite Ike’s own reservations’.44

Although the Supreme Court’s ruling brought about the backlash in southern states which Eisenhower had feared, he was determined to uphold the federal law. When a white supremacist mob tried to prevent black students from attending school in Little Rock, Arkansas, the mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, appealed for federal troops to ‘restore peace and order’. Deliberately bypassing the state government, the mayor was only too well aware that they were fully supporting the violent opposition to integration. The response of the federal government was much more receptive. In addition to his commitment to the rule of law, Eisenhower was acutely conscious of how damaging it was to America’s reputation internationally to have pictures going round the world of a white mob bullying black pupils who were doing no more than asserting their legal right to attend school. The president sent in federal troops and their presence enabled the law to be implemented. As Eisenhower’s biographer notes: ‘The racists who were brave enough to confront defenceless high school students shrank back in the face of the U.S. Army.’⁴⁵

Although styles of presidential leadership vary, and some have found more time for leisure pursuits than others, they have in common the fact that every American president comes under immense pressure. Throughout the twentieth century the United States was a major power, then one of the two ‘superpowers’, and subsequently, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, indisputably the world’s most politically influential and militarily powerful state. While American presidents have also encountered – sometimes to their surprise – the very real limitations on their authority worldwide, it remains the case that their international policy decisions tend to matter more than do those of their foreign contemporaries. They would all, no doubt, have felt able to sympathize with Eisenhower when, following a serious heart attack, he expressed some exasperation with the medical profession in a letter to a friend: ‘“I am to avoid all situations that tend to bring about such reactions as irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear and, above all anger”, Ike wrote. “When doctors give me such instructions, I say to them, ‘Just what do you think the Presidency is?’”’46

Of the presidents who have held office since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps only Lyndon B. Johnson has exercised as much power both within the executive and vis-à-vis the other branches of government as FDR, albeit over a much shorter period and with far less popular acclaim.* One of Johnson’s major biographers describes him as ‘the most ardent presidential lawmaker of the twentieth century’, outdoing even the hyper-activist Roosevelt.⁴⁷ In foreign policy, too, LBJ personally took big decisions, though with much less positive outcomes than those of FDR. Johnson’s domestic achievements were ultimately overshadowed by the great loss of American lives – and far greater Vietnamese losses – in an unnecessary war which the United States lost. Although Johnson considered American involvement in Vietnam to be a poisoned chalice he had inherited from Kennedy, he also believed that once the USA was committed there, it could not afford to fail.⁴⁸

Ronald Reagan’s presidency has been described as one of ‘extreme delegation’, which worked well when he had appointed highly competent people with strong political skills – George Shultz as Secretary of State was a notable example – but which ‘turned into a disaster’ in the persons of Donald Regan, John Poindexter and Oliver North.⁴⁹ Reagan’s background as a film actor had led to scepticism about his qualifications for the presidency – although they had been bolstered by his governorship of California – but his response, as his second term of office drew to a close, was to say that ‘there have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor’.50 It was generally agreed that Reagan conducted the ceremonial aspects of the presidency with aplomb. He was also an effective communicator in set speeches, although much less so in open-ended press conferences when his lack of detailed knowledge was a serious handicap. Speaking in 1984, Reagan said: ‘FDR, Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt loved the Office of the Presidency and the bully pulpit it afforded them. And so do I.’⁵¹

Reagan focused on a few big issues that he felt strongly about. These were, most notably, cutting taxes, promoting his Strategic Defense Initiative, aiding anti-communist guerrillas in Central America, and fighting the Cold War both rhetorically and through increased defence spending, while looking for a Soviet leader with whom he could begin a dialogue. In principle, he was in favour of small government, low taxes and balanced budgets. However, any idea that he achieved this is wholly fanciful. The tax reductions benefited mainly the wealthy, and as a share of national income, federal income tax remained steady throughout the 1980s. As for ‘small government’, there were more people employed in the federal government by 1989 than there were in 1981. And, having poured scorn on the federal budget deficit left by the Carter administration, Reagan bequeathed a vastly greater deficit to his successor, George H.W. Bush.⁵² On most issues, Reagan was ‘exceptionally detached from details’ and even his closest aides frequently had to guess what he wanted them to do.⁵³ He was lucky in two respects. One was that the 1980s saw a sharp decline in the price of oil, which helped the American economy and damaged that of the Soviet Union. The other was the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader early in Reagan’s second term. During his first term, relations with the Soviet adversary had gone from bad to worse and Gorbachev’s fortuitous elevation, after the deaths of three aged Soviet leaders in quick succession, had nothing whatsoever to do with Reagan’s policies.

Nevertheless, just as Napoleon liked lucky generals, so millions of Americans decided they liked a lucky president. Reagan also made some of his own luck. He was unlucky to be shot in the 1981 assassination attempt – although fortunate that the bullet narrowly missed his heart. However, Reagan’s ‘Honey, I forgot to duck’ to his wife, and saying to the medical staff when he was wheeled into the operating theatre, ‘I hope you are all Republicans’, confirmed his sense of humour and enhanced his popularity. Reagan’s charm and optimism, which many Americans appreciated, served him well when he approved a deal which on the face of it was duplicitous and later more or less shrugged it off as an oversight. Admittedly, this ‘Iran and Contras affair’ saw Reagan’s approval ratings fall to 47 per cent, but that was not a bad level of support in the circumstances. He fared much better than the charmless Richard Nixon did when, with the Watergate break-in and cover-up, he committed what could be considered a somewhat lesser offence. Reagan, for his part, had authorized secret arms deliveries to Iran in the hope that this would lead to the freeing of American hostages being held in Tehran. Oliver North came up with the ‘neat idea’ of overcharging the Iranians and siphoning the profits to support the Nicaraguan Contras.54 The enterprise was not only against the law, but also botched. The illegal arms went not to Iranian ‘moderates’ but to hardliners who had supported the taking of American hostages in the first place.⁵⁵

Yet, this discreditable episode paled into insignificance compared with a major achievement – the part Reagan played in the ending of the Cold War in the second half of the 1980s, once a Soviet leader had arrived on the scene with whom, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, it was possible to ‘do business’. The idea that Reagan could take a friendly stroll alongside the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Red Square or deliver a stirring and well-received speech to Moscow State University students, standing underneath a framed portrait of Vladimir Lenin, would have seemed preposterous in 1980. Yet these things happened in the summer of 1988. In the final analysis, Reagan’s popularity both during and since his presidency is further testimony to the importance for a political leader of being able to tap into emotions and feelings, since they often count for more than the most cogent arguments.

If one possible criterion of a successful presidency is popularity at the end of two terms of office, then Bill Clinton qualifies as the most successful of the last half-century. It is not a wholly satisfactory standard of judgement, for Truman’s up-and-down poll ratings were particularly low in his last two years in office, yet his stock has risen with the passage of time.⁵⁶ Clinton, for his part, was not ‘strong’ in the LBJ sense, for he had far less sway over Congress. For much of the time he faced an unremittingly hostile Republican majority, with Newt Gingrich at its head. To win over the likes of Gingrich was impossible, but Clinton also failed to forge good relations with the veteran Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at a time when Moynihan still chaired the Senate Finance Committee.57 In his first term, Clinton’s Health Care flagship legislation – the detailed preparation of which had been entrusted to his wife, Hillary – came a cropper. Clinton’s foreign policy record was mixed, but he did have much more success in his second term in getting incremental domestic change through Congress. And while safeguarding such programmes as Medicaid (which provided safeguards for the poor, whereas Medicare, which he also supported, benefited mainly the middle class), he, nevertheless, was able to leave his successor the gift of a balanced budget.

Especially from 1998, with the revelation of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton was battered by unremitting attention to his personal life from the mass media, his Republican opponents and an obsessively hostile Special Prosecutor (or ‘special persecutor’), Kenneth Starr. Yet, he ended his second term of office with the highest presidential approval ratings at the close of a presidency since Kennedy’s at the time of his assassination.⁵⁸ Clinton combined intelligence and an impressive grasp of policy detail with enormous skill as a campaigner and speaker. He was able to radiate optimism. He had an empathetic and emotional appeal, which goes quite a long way towards explaining not only the survival of his presidency (in the face of attempts to impeach him) but also of his popularity while he was under prurient and sustained onslaught from press, television and rampaging political opponents. His focus on the economy, and the sense of economic well-being in the United States in the 1990s, was a major buttress of Clinton’s popularity. Yet his presidency in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War was also one of missed opportunities. His basically sympathetic biographer, Joe Klein, concludes his appraisal with the back-handed compliment: ‘He remains the most compelling politician of his generation, although that isn’t saying very much.’⁵⁹

The constraints upon the American president, the variations in power relations from one president to another, and the oversimplification involved in seeing a linear increase in presidential power within the system are not only important in themselves. They give grounds for caution about using ‘presidentialization’ as a way of describing a conjectured increase in the power of prime ministers in parliamentary democracies. Another reason why this is a misleading term to apply is that in the many dual-executive systems that now exist, there is a wide variation in the distribution of power between the president and the prime minister. In some, including France, the president is very much the senior partner in determining policy, although that applies significantly more to foreign than to domestic policy. In other countries, including Germany, Israel and Ireland, it is the chancellor in the German case, the prime minister in Israel, and the Taoiseach (prime minister) in the Irish case who is the undisputed head of the government, while the president, as head of state, has high status but negligible power.

            PRIME MINISTERIAL POWERS AND LEADERSHIP STYLES – THE BRITISH CASE

If we turn to the other main case (besides the United States) explored in this chapter, namely the United Kingdom, it is also an oversimplification, if we look at the past hundred years and more, to see the head of executive following an upward curve of increased prime ministerial power. There have been a great many zigzags. If we take the popular view that a strong prime minister is one who intervenes frequently in a variety of policy areas, imposes his or her will on colleagues and takes many important decisions personally, then David Lloyd George, not only during the First World War but also as head of the government which followed it, was more powerful than any of the three prime ministers (Arthur Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin) who held that office between his removal in 1922 and the elevation to the premiership of Neville Chamberlain in 1937.

When Lloyd George wished to come to an economic and political settlement with the new Communist regime in Russia, he took with him Lord Swinton, then the Secretary for Overseas Trade, rather than Lord Curzon who, as Foreign Secretary, might have been expected to conduct the negotiations and who was, at the very least, entitled to be present. Swinton recognized this, and once said to Lloyd George: ‘If you treated me as you do Curzon, I would quit. I cannot understand why Curzon does not resign.’ Lloyd George replied: ‘Oh, but he does, constantly. There are two messengers in the Foreign Office: one has a club foot, he comes with the resignation: the other is a champion runner, he always catches him up.’60 Curzon liked office too much to relinquish it voluntarily. His arrogance meant that he was little liked not only by Lloyd George but also by his Conservative colleagues in the coalition government, so he contented himself with letting off steam to close friends and to his wife. Writing to Lady Curzon about Lloyd George, he complained: ‘I am getting very tired of trying to work with that man. He wants his Forn. Sec. to be a valet, almost a drudge . . .’⁶¹

Lloyd George achieved his dominance with a mixture of guile and sheer force of personality. Even in a Cabinet that contained some outstanding people, none seemed to rival the brilliance of the prime minister. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from 1937 to 1940, had none of Lloyd George’s sparkle, and whereas Lloyd George never lived in fear of other strong personalities or of being outshone, Chamberlain kept out of his Cabinet able critics. There was no place for Winston Churchill, Leo Amery or Harold Macmillan who would have challenged his views. Churchill, as late as 1936, was still distrusted by most Conservatives because of his intemperate position on India, and he lost further ground within the House of Commons in that year with his championship of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. (The film The King’s Speech could not have been further removed from historical reality when it portrayed Churchill as an early ally of King George VI. The mutual esteem between the two men developed only after Churchill became prime minister in 1940.)⁶² Chamberlain lost his Foreign Secretary when Anthony Eden did what Curzon had merely threatened to do and resigned because of the way Chamberlain was conducting personal diplomacy. ‘It was,’ said Swinton, ‘an increasingly impossible position for a Foreign Secretary to be in, especially for one as sensitive about his importance and private feelings of pride as Eden was.’⁶³ Even before he became prime minister, however, Chamberlain had regarded himself as the strong man of the government at a time when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under MacDonald and Baldwin and nominally number three after them. The kind of prime minister he intended to become is foreshadowed in his comment to his sister in March 1935: ‘As you will see I have become a sort of Acting P.M. – only without the actual power of the P.M. I have to say “Have you thought” or “What would you say” when it would be quicker to say “That is what you must do”.’⁶⁴

            Churchill and Attlee

The principal difference between Mr Churchill and a cat, as Mark Twain might say, is that a cat has only nine lives. By all the laws of mortality, Mr Churchill should have perished a score of times, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in anger, sometimes in contempt; but the funeral has always been premature, the grave always empty. You may scotch him for a moment, but you cannot kill him, and we grow weary of pronouncing his obsequies . . . His failures are monumental, but the energy of his mind and the sheer impetus of his personality make his failures more brilliant than other men’s successes.65

So wrote the journalist and essayist, A.G. Gardiner – in a book published in 1926. At that time Churchill was a senior member of the Conservative government led by Stanley Baldwin. Churchill had first stood for parliament in 1899, successfully in 1900. At first a Conservative, in 1904 he switched to the Liberal Party, and by 1910 held the senior Cabinet post of Home Secretary. He was in government for most of the years between then and 1922 when the Lloyd George coalition government fell. Soon after that Churchill rejoined the Conservative Party. By the time Gardiner wrote so perceptively about him, Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Throughout the 1930s he was at odds with the leadership of his party, and only with the start of the Second World War in 1939 did he rejoin the government. A major issue which had caused the rift was India. Within government and out of it, Churchill objected to even tentative steps towards Indian self-government, a subject on which he felt strongly. In the second half of the 1930s, he also became increasingly critical of the government’s policy of making concessions to Nazi Germany, in the hope of averting war, and was a strong critic of the 1938 Munich agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain, which led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and Britain declared war on Germany, the policy of appeasement had manifestly failed to prevent major conflict. Churchill’s warnings were more widely seen as prescient and he was invited by Chamberlain to join the War Cabinet – as First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he had first held in 1911.

There was, nevertheless, an accidental element in Churchill’s becoming prime minister in May 1940. Chamberlain still commanded the support of a substantial majority of Conservative MPs but was thoroughly disliked by the main opposition Labour Party. In sharp contrast with his predecessor, Baldwin, he had treated them with disdain. When a significant minority of Conservative MPs criticized Chamberlain and the conduct of the war in a House of Commons debate on 7 and 8 May 1940, the Labour opposition took the opportunity to press a vote. The government majority dropped from 213 to 81 and Chamberlain’s position was fatally weakened. It was clear that the government had to be reconstructed, and under someone else. However strange it may appear today, had Lord Halifax, Eden’s successor as Foreign Secretary, wished to be prime minister, the post could have been his, notwithstanding the serious disadvantage of his being in the House of Lords, not the Commons.

It was not until 1965 that Conservative MPs elected their leader, and the constitutional convention (which still prevails) that the monarch asks a person who can count on the support of a majority in the House of Commons to form a government left, in 1940, some discretion in the hands of King George VI. The king made clear his preference for Halifax who was also the choice of Chamberlain. All the indications are that Halifax was also favoured by most Conservative members of parliament. The leading historian of the Conservative Party, Robert Blake, wrote: ‘By May 1940 there was a small minority of Conservative MPs who saw in Churchill the one hope of injecting purpose, energy, and originality into the war, but there can be little doubt that the party would have chosen Halifax had there been an election. But there was not; the question turned on advice to the Crown rather than counting of heads . . .’66

However, Labour made clear that they would not enter a coalition government led by Chamberlain, and, no less crucially, Halifax made it plain that he did not want the premiership. He recognized that Churchill’s talents were more suited to the task of mobilizing a nation than were his own.⁶⁷ Churchill proceeded to form a coalition government with strong Labour and some Liberal representation. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, became his deputy, chairing meetings during Churchill’s not infrequent absences. Neville Chamberlain remained in the Cabinet, and also as Leader of the Conservative Party, but by late summer 1940 he was terminally ill. He resigned from the Cabinet in October and died the following month. Only with Chamberlain’s departure was Churchill able to add the leadership of his party to the prime ministership. On this issue, Blake observes: ‘There was no lack of high minded persons to advise Churchill that he would be better placed to unify the nation if he was not tied to the leadership of a party. Churchill had more sense. He had seen the fate of Lloyd George . . . He at once indicated that he would accept the leadership, and by now his prestige made his unanimous election a certainty.’68

Churchill was the dominating figure in the government and in particular charge of defence and foreign policy. He had invented for himself the post of Minister of Defence, to accompany the prime ministership, just in case anyone should be in doubt about who was in charge of that area. A War Cabinet was formed which initially consisted of just five members, three Conservative and two Labour. By 1945 its membership had increased to eight. Other ministers attended when there were important matters arising from their departments. This smaller than usual Cabinet was supplemented, as had already become normal in peacetime, by a system of Cabinet committees. In the earlier days of his premiership Churchill read Cabinet documents more assiduously than later in the war. His focus, his private secretary, John (Jock) Colville, noted, was on ‘defence, foreign affairs and party politics’, much less on ‘domestic problems or the home front except when he was aroused for sentimental reasons’.⁶⁹

While some aspects of Winston Churchill’s wartime prime ministership are still a matter for debate, there is no disputing the inspirational quality of his leadership during those years. In the words of the great American broadcasting journalist, Ed Murrow, who was in London throughout the Blitz, Churchill ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’. It was not just Churchill’s eloquence and the manner of delivery which, in both his parliamentary speeches and his radio broadcasts, were so galvanizing, but, as the writer Vita Sackville-West put it, ‘the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them’.⁷⁰ Moreover, aristocratic lineage notwithstanding, Churchill established during the five years of his wartime leadership a closer rapport with the British people, including those in bomb-devastated working-class areas of London and other cities, than did the more middle-class representatives of his party in government. He also had the sense, in consultation with Attlee, to give highly visible Cabinet posts to two very able Labour politicians of humble origins, Ernest Bevin, who was Minister of Labour from the outset of Churchill’s government, and Herbert Morrison who, from October 1940, was Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security.71

These two leading figures in the Labour Party – who strongly disliked each other – were more in the public eye than Attlee. His work was behind the scenes (as a coordinator, chairman of Cabinet committees and of the War Cabinet itself when Churchill was ill or away) but all three of them were particularly important members of the coalition government. From the outset, Attlee was de facto deputy prime minister and from 1942 had that title officially. An outstanding administrator, Sir John Anderson (Viscount Waverley), who late in his career had become an Independent MP, was also to become a key member of the Cabinet. The most prominent Conservative within the coalition government was Anthony Eden who returned to the Foreign Secretaryship, from which he had resigned under Chamberlain, succeeding Halifax in late 1940. In the course of the war, he became the number-two figure within his party after Churchill. However, as the voice of his country at home and abroad, and in his detailed involvement with military operations, there is no doubt about Churchill’s wartime dominance.

Churchill’s very preoccupation with military strategy and interaction with the military high command and with foreign leaders meant, however, that the whole of domestic policy was more influenced by Attlee and the Labour members of the coalition government than by the prime minister. Among their Conservative colleagues within the government, R.A. (Rab) Butler played a significant role, both as the architect of the 1944 Education Act and as an important member of the Reconstruction Committee, established in 1943. Churchill’s interest in the domestic agenda was at best sporadic, and the observations of Colville on this are supported in a recent scholarly study by an author, Robert Crowcroft, whose findings are coloured neither by admiration of Churchill nor by any iota of sympathy for the British Labour Party. Absurdly, he describes Attlee as ‘an English Stalin’ who ‘would have thrived in the Byzantine politics of the Soviet Union’.⁷² Yet, the evidence Crowcroft adduces shows the limitations (much more understandable, given the circumstances, than the author allows) of Churchill’s control over the government. From 1943 the senior Labour members of the Cabinet were increasingly in charge of planning for post-war reconstruction and with laying the foundations of the welfare state. When he did get involved, Churchill had to concede a lot of ground. After one Cabinet meeting in October 1943, he complained that he had been ‘jostled and beaten up by the Deputy Prime Minister’.73 That hardly accords with the popular perception of Churchill and Attlee. Their personalities could not, indeed, have been more different. One was among the most theatrical of politicians, the other the least flamboyant.

Attlee, while notably loyal to every institution to which he belonged – including, naturally, the coalition government – was never a pushover. He was also a stickler for procedure. At the beginning of 1945, he typed with two fingers a two-thousand-word letter of protest to Churchill, doing so himself in order that his criticism would remain strictly between the two men themselves. This was an unusually long letter from Attlee, of whom it was aptly said that he would never use one word when none would do. He observed that it was ‘very exceptional’ for Churchill to have read Cabinet committee conclusions when these papers went to the Cabinet. Consequently, half an hour or more would be wasted ‘explaining what could have been grasped by two or three minutes reading of the document’. Moreover: ‘Not infrequently a phrase catches your eye which gives rise to a disquisition on an interesting point only slightly connected with the subject matter.’ But, said Attlee, there was ‘something worse’. Churchill paid far too much attention to two ministers who were not members of the War Cabinet, Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. (These were Churchill’s personal cronies. However, far from spelling that out, Attlee did not even refer to them by name – only by their official titles, the Lord Privy Seal and the Minister of Information.) Attlee strongly asserted the supremacy of the Cabinet, writing: ‘There is a serious constitutional issue here. In the eyes of the country and under our constitution the eight members of the War Cabinet take responsibility for decisions.’⁷⁴

Although Attlee had taken such pains to keep his missive confidential, Churchill read the letter over the telephone to Beaverbrook who the following day unexpectedly described it as ‘a very good letter’. According to the private secretary, and excellent diarist, Colville, this was the ‘last straw’ for Churchill.⁷⁵ Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife (whose judgement on a number of issues was better than that of her husband), had already reached a similar conclusion. She told Colville that she thought Attlee’s letter was ‘both true and wholesome’. Colville’s own response on the day the letter arrived was to write in his diary: ‘Greatly as I love and admire the P.M. I am afraid there is much in what Attlee says, and I rather admire his courage in saying it. Many Conservatives and officials . . . feel the same.’76 Churchill had been outraged by the letter. On first reading it, he ‘drafted and redrafted’, Colville’s diary records, ‘a sarcastic reply’, which he did not send. He went on at some length about ‘a socialist conspiracy’ and ‘harped on nothing but the inadequate representation of Tories in the Cabinet, in spite of their numerical weight in the House’. His private secretary’s diary entry noted that was ‘beside the point’.* By the following day, however, Colville believed that Churchill, while still ‘sorely piqued’, was ‘not unmoved by Attlee’s arguments’ and by the response to them of Mrs Churchill and, more surprisingly, Beaverbrook.⁷⁷ In the end he sent a terse, formal but not impolite letter to Attlee in which he wrote: ‘You may be sure I shall always endeavour to profit by your counsels.’⁷⁸

Churchill’s dominance as prime minister between 1940 and 1945 was very great, so far as the prosecution of the war was concerned, but negligible in the entire field of domestic policy. During his only spell as a peacetime prime minister, he was still further from dominating the policy agenda. This was understandable, given that military matters were no longer the top priority, and also because of Churchill’s advanced age and, for a time, serious ill-health (including a stroke), later to be extensively and indiscreetly documented by his physician, Lord Moran.79 R.A. Butler, when I interviewed him in 1966, said that when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in that government, Churchill ‘did not interfere at all’, except to hope, for example, that ‘you will be doing something for the pensioners’ or ‘I hope you are not going to forget the poor’ or ‘I hope it’s not just going to be more dividends for the rich’.⁸⁰ In contrast with his vast knowledge of foreign affairs and especially defence, Churchill was, in Butler’s view, ignorant of economic policy, but ‘he was very tender-hearted’.⁸¹ (On a rare occasion, somewhat illustrative of Butler’s last point, Churchill did bypass the Chancellor on an economic issue, in the company of Walter Monckton, the Minister of Labour. One morning in 1954 Butler was summoned by the prime minister and told: ‘Walter and I settled the rail strike in the early hours of this morning on their terms. We did not think it necessary to keep you up.’⁸²)*

While Churchill’s personality could be overpowering, he remained convinced of the central importance of the Cabinet, while also upholding the rights and substantial autonomy of individual ministers. He remarked to Moran in 1953: ‘We had 110 Cabinet meetings in the past year; while the Socialists had only 85 in a year – and that in a time of great political activity. I am a great believer in bringing things before the Cabinet. If a Minister has got anything on his mind and he has the sense to get it argued by the Cabinet he will have the machine behind him.’83 Ministers were allowed a great deal of freedom to get on with their jobs, subject to their accountability to the Cabinet. Even in Churchill’s special domain of foreign policy, Anthony Eden, thanks to his long experience and to Churchill’s respect for his judgement, enjoyed more autonomy than might have been expected. Sometimes, though, Churchill felt he should have been consulted more by Eden. ‘Anthony tells me nothing,’ he complained to Moran in June 1954. ‘He keeps me out of foreign affairs, treats them as a private reserve of his own.’⁸⁴

In between Churchill’s wartime and peacetime premierships came the Labour government headed by Clement Attlee. The most impressive of Labour prime ministers was also the most self-effacing, and the fact that his government set the course of British foreign policy for the next half-century had much to do with the political skills and judgement of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. That this first post-war government also laid down the main lines of domestic policy for a generation was a collective achievement, in which a number of ministers of different political dispositions played important roles, among them Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and Aneurin Bevan. The leader–follower dichotomy does not begin to do justice to this relationship. None of these people were followers of Attlee. Indeed, the deputy leader, Morrison, wished to take his place. Dalton also actively conspired to remove Attlee from the party leadership and premiership. Bevan was the most inspirational politician in this group. He came from the left of the Labour Party – unlike Attlee who was a party centrist – and had been a strong critic at times of Attlee’s moderate leadership and of the coalition government during the war. Later, in opposition, he was again to be at odds with many of his colleagues and was the acknowledged leader of a left-wing group within the party who became known as Bevanites. Furthermore, Ernest Bevin, who was loyal to Attlee, was not a follower of the prime minister, but a formidable leader in his own right who between the wars had built up the largest trade union in Europe. He had broadened his high standing within the Labour movement by serving as a highly effective Minister of Labour in the wartime government. Of all the Labour ministers in the coalition, he was Winston Churchill’s favourite – Attlee’s, too, for that matter.

Bevin, who grew up in poverty in West of England villages and left school at the age of eleven, quickly won the admiration of Foreign Office officials who were from a very different social background. Apart from his obvious ability, natural assurance and the ‘imaginative quality of his mind’, one reason for this, writes Bevin’s biographer, Alan Bullock, was his total absence of snobbery and lack of interest in ‘placing’ anyone socially: ‘Untroubled by any sense of class distinction he treated everyone he met, from the King to the office doorkeeper (both equally admirers of Bevin), in exactly the same way and always as human beings.’85 Arthur Deakin, Bevin’s successor as leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, said of him: ‘Ernie had no more ego than he needed to get where he did’, while the American ambassador to London, Lew Douglas, remarked: ‘He had no need, like Eden, to show that he was in the top class: he was, and knew it.’⁸⁶ Bullock himself notes that while Bevin obviously had none of the ‘aristocratic pride of family’ of one of his twentieth-century predecessors, Lord Curzon, ‘he enjoyed a self-confidence which was positively imperial’⁸⁷ – and, it hardly needs adding, he was a much more formidable and successful Foreign Secretary than Curzon.

Attlee’s strength as prime minister was to enable a team of ministers with hard-earned life experience to get on with the job and to preside over the coordination of their efforts. They did not all get on with each other, whether on political or personal grounds, but Attlee kept them together. As Bullock observed:

No politician ever made less effort to project his personality or court popularity; in place of Churchill’s heroic style, his speeches were dry, matter of fact and often banal. He preferred understatement to rhetoric, and his most effective weapon in debate was a gift for deflation which more than once took the wind out of Churchill’s sails . . . Attlee’s unassuming manner and laconic habit of speech, however, were deceptive . . . There were half-a-dozen men in the Government with more obvious talents than his own; it was Attlee’s strength as Prime Minister that he turned this to his advantage. Unaffected by vanity and with a shrewd eye for the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues, he left them a free hand in carrying out their different jobs and made little or no attempt to impose his own views on departmental policy.⁸⁸

A prime minister in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has rarely been only a first among equals, although Attlee came closer than most, provided we add that some government ministers were ‘more equal than others’. Attlee did not hesitate to dismiss ministers he regarded as ‘not up to the job’, but would – and could – not have dreamt of doing so with such senior colleagues as Bevin, Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan or (later) Hugh Gaitskell. Bevin and Cripps were removed by illness and death, and Bevan when he resigned from the Cabinet, along with Harold Wilson, after clashing with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gaitskell. Attlee was ill in hospital at the time. He believed that he could have found a compromise that would have kept both ministers in the Cabinet had he, rather than the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Herbert Morrison, been presiding at the time.89

An extremely brisk and efficient chairman of the Cabinet and of its Defence Committee, Attlee was responsive to opinion within the parliamentary party and government. Speaking in 1948, and referring to meetings of Labour MPs, he said: ‘They may not convince me that they are right, but I believe that the foundation of democratic liberty is a willingness to believe that other people may perhaps be wiser than oneself.’⁹⁰ In the same speech, Attlee emphasized the collective nature of government policy:

It is the practice of our opponents for obvious reasons to try to disrupt our team – and I am sorry to say that some of our own supporters are also led away – by ascribing particular policies to particular members: Thus they talk sometimes about ‘Cripps’s economic policy’, or ‘Dalton’s financial policy’, or ‘Bevan’s dealing with the doctors’, or ‘Bevin’s foreign policy’, as if there was no coordination in the Government. Nevertheless there is coordination. Whilst every Minister is responsible for his own departmental decisions the collective responsibility both in home and foreign policy is with the Cabinet. We share the blame or the credit for every action of the Government.⁹¹

In British politics it is now more common, although often still more misleading, for government policies to be attributed to the prime minister as distinct from individual ministers – a Thatcher, Blair, Brown or (to a lesser extent) Cameron deciding on this, that or the other.⁹² Even in the 1960s, as Harold Wilson later complained, the headline of a regional newspaper attacked ‘Wilson’ for a local planning decision in Lancashire.⁹³ The main exception in political discourse, and not perhaps accidentally, is when the policies in question have become extremely unpopular. Then they are designated as those of the departmental minister. A case in point is Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health in the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government from 2010 until 2012. There was no shortage of references both from within the coalition and by commentators to ‘Lansley’s health reforms’.94

            The Macmillan Premiership

In post-war Britain both Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill allowed departmental ministers and Cabinet committees to work out policy and only rarely countermanded them. Anthony Eden, who succeeded Churchill as head of the government in 1955 and led the Conservative Party to victory in the general election of that year, was a fussy, interfering prime minister. He was very sensitive to criticism and especially to articles in the Conservative press critical of his performance and that of the government he led. R.A. Butler has recorded, in his ironic style, that Eden paid him the compliment of holding him responsible for Conservative success in the country, and so ‘I was therefore at the receiving end of those innumerable telephone calls, on every day of the week and at every hour of the day, which characterized his conscientious but highly strung supervision of our affairs.’⁹⁵ Eden had moved Butler from the Treasury to a non-departmental Cabinet post with the title of Lord Privy Seal.* Eden was especially preoccupied with foreign policy, particularly the Suez crisis, which is discussed in a later chapter, and he intervened less in economic policy than did his successor Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan succeeded Eden as prime minister in January 1957 and held that office for almost seven years – until his resignation in October 1963. He was the son-in-law of an English duke, the great-grandson of a Scottish crofter, and the grandson of the founder of the Macmillan publishing company. (Daniel Macmillan, the last of these, was the son of the crofter, and he himself left school at the age of ten.) For good measure, Macmillan’s mother (like Churchill’s) was an American. Harold Macmillan mixed contentedly in aristocratic circles. As Rab Butler said of him, he had ‘the soft heart for and the strong determination to help the underdog, and the social habit to associate happily with the overdog’.96 Which of Macmillan’s diverse backgrounds he chose to emphasize depended on where and to whom he was speaking. In Scotland the humble crofter was always well to the fore. On visits to his mother’s home state of Indiana, he projected himself as ‘one of their own, a home-town boy descended from a simple, pioneer family’, although he may have struck his enthusiastic audiences as a rather implausible ‘Hoosier’.⁹⁷ He came to the prime ministership with a wealth of governmental experience exceeded only by his rival for the post, Butler. Macmillan had been a wartime minister, representing the British government in North Africa. In the Conservative governments led by Churchill and Eden, he had been, successively, Minister of Housing, Secretary of State for Defence, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

As Prime Minister, Macmillan naturally played a major role in foreign policy, but had strong views also on the economy. His expansionist impulse, and willingness to risk inflation rather than increased unemployment, led to the resignation in early 1958 of all of his Treasury ministers, headed by Peter Thorneycroft. His next Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, was often at odds with Macmillan on economic policy, but when Lloyd objected to a policy supported by the prime minister on the grounds of its cost, as he did on a number of occasions, making clear that he regarded it as resigning matter, both Macmillan and the spending ministers gave way.⁹⁸ In an interview in 1966 (non-attributable at the time), Lloyd remarked: ‘If in June 1962 I had said I proposed to resign because the Prime Minister was not giving me adequate support, Macmillan might have fallen.’⁹⁹ Ever loyal, Lloyd did not do that and just one month later he became the most prominent name within the third of the Cabinet summarily dismissed by Macmillan in his ‘night of the long knives’. That was an attempt by the prime minister to refresh the government’s image and improve its standing after a series of by-election reverses. It backfired, and in the words of Macmillan’s most recent biographer, it showed him ‘at his most ruthless, and, ultimately, his most ineffectual’.¹⁰⁰ Macmillan had cultivated an air of unflappability which his sudden and sweeping use of his power of dismissal undermined.

More than once in his diaries, Macmillan himself commends ruthlessness as a worthwhile attribute of a leader. Thus, he wrote of the Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, that ‘he is able, full of charm, cultivated, and ruthless – all great qualities in a leader’.101 Ruthlessness, of course, means something different for a democratic leader (Nehru included) from what it connotes in an authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, Macmillan’s dismissal of a third of his Cabinet in one fell swoop in 1962 did him much more harm than good. If illness and tiredness had not caused his resignation in 1963, it is likely that he would have been replaced as party leader (and prime minister) before the next election, for the ‘night of the long knives’ had increased the number of his opponents. One of the ministers who survived Macmillan’s cull, Reginal Bevins, wrote: ‘This was making enemies on a grand scale, enemies of those dismissed, enemies of their friends in Parliament, and shattering confidence in the Party at large.’ He added: ‘Of one thing I was then convinced: no Conservative Prime Minister could behave like that and survive. In July 1962 Harold Macmillan committed political suicide more certainly than if he had himself resigned.’¹⁰² The backlash against his dismissal of colleagues illustrated the limits of ruthlessness in a democracy.

            Thatcher and Blair

No British prime ministers in the years since the Second World War have aspired to more control over wide areas of policy than did Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Thatcher made the greater impact of the two. Her period of office was linked to foreign policy successes, most notably the end of the Cold War. The part she played in East–West diplomacy was greater than that of any other post-war British prime minister. It was of real significance that she maintained cordial relations with both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, while never hesitating to argue with either one of them. Her foreign policy adviser, Sir Percy Cradock, took a dim view of Gorbachev’s becoming for her ‘something of an icon’, complaining that ‘she acted as a conduit from Gorbachev to Reagan, selling him in Washington as a man to do business with, and operating as an agent of influence in both directions’.¹⁰³ Cradock himself, however, was slower than Thatcher to grasp the extent of the change in the Soviet Union after 1985 and the scale of Gorbachev’s radicalism. In reality, the constructive role Margaret Thatcher played in East–West relations in the 1980s became her most notable foreign policy achievement. Her foreign policy instincts were far from uniformly impressive. During the years of Nelson Mandela’s incarceration in Robben Island prison, she was more sympathetic to the South African apartheid regime than to Mandela. She had a soft spot also for the authoritarian Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, partly in gratitude for his support during the Falklands War of 1982. That war is generally regarded as a foreign policy success, since it prevented the Falkland Islands passing to Argentina by force. Although the sovereignty of the islands is still a live issue in Argentina (known there as the Malvinas), the British military victory did the Argentinians a good turn at the time. A major reason for counting this as a foreign policy achievement is that the success of the British forces in recapturing the islands led to the fall of Argentina’s military dictatorship, headed by Leopold Galtieri, and the restoration of democracy.

Domestically, although Thatcher’s policies were extremely divisive, she was a redefining leader – one who redefined the rules of the political game. (As such a leader, she is discussed more fully in the next chapter.) The policies she vigorously espoused, enthusiastically backed during most of her premiership by a clear majority within her own party, broke with much that had been taken for granted (including the great power of trade union leaders) in the post-war period. When a political party is electorally popular, the leader’s senior colleagues and backbenchers will tolerate more high-handedness from their leader than they will when the party is losing ground. That is partly because, like many political commentators, they too readily believe that the leader plays a decisive role in determining election outcomes.

The growing unpopularity by the end of the 1980s of Conservative Party policies – most notably, the community charge, or ‘poll tax’ – made it easier for those who disliked Margaret Thatcher’s style of rule to rebel against it. Geoffrey Howe, one of the most outstandingly capable members of the government led by Thatcher, finally lost patience with her increasing belief that she alone knew best and, with his resignation speech in the House of Commons, precipitated her downfall in November 1990. Mrs Thatcher’s response, even following a lengthy period of reflection, was to observe that Howe would be remembered not for his achievements but only for ‘this final act of bile and treachery’.104 Following Howe’s quietly devastating resignation speech, Thatcher was subsequently abandoned by a majority of the Cabinet. She later wrote that ‘a prime minister who knows that his or her Cabinet has withheld its support is fatally weakened’.105

That was an understatement. Leaders who are disdainful of senior colleagues or of their parties will in due course be ousted. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair are notable examples of prime ministers who came to believe themselves indispensable to their party and country and to be convinced of their destiny to lead. They differ inasmuch as Thatcher, unlike Blair, did not try to define herself against her party, although her domineering style in Cabinet and in her relations with Cabinet ministers helped to ensure that when her leadership hung by a thread in 1990, she lacked allies precisely where she most needed them. ‘My biggest area of weakness’, she noted, ‘was among Cabinet ministers.’¹⁰⁶ Surveying her colleagues and finding most of them wanting, and anxious about her ‘legacy’, she decided that John Major was the person most likely to ‘secure and safeguard’ it, although she detected ‘a certain ambiguity’ even in his stance.¹⁰⁷

Tony Blair took a much more dismissive view of his party than Mrs Thatcher did of the Conservative Party. On his talks with the Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown (whom he had wished to include in the Cabinet in 1997 but could not because of the size of Labour’s victory) Blair wrote of ‘our cavalier attitude to our parties’.¹⁰⁸ Blair has noted that in order ‘to circumvent’ his party, ‘what I had done was construct an alliance between myself and the public’, an alliance that especially in the first three years of his leadership ‘was firm and unshakeable’.¹⁰⁹ Blair’s patronizing attitude to the people who had elevated him to a position of authority and privilege – the party members who, unlike the electorate as a whole, had voted directly for him – comes out most clearly when he writes that in a pre-election period ‘the party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance . . .’¹¹⁰

Reform of public services, with an increasing market and private sector component, was one of Blair’s priorities, along with foreign policy. He also devoted much time to seeking a compromise resolution of the Northern Ireland impasse, and there was general – and well-merited – praise for the part he played in that process. On domestic ‘reform’, however, if the party disagreed with Blair’s views, it was the party that had to give way, not the person they had elected leader. As Blair puts it: ‘I didn’t choose to have rows with the party; I chose to reform. But if the reform was resisted, then you couldn’t avoid the row.’111 Like Margaret Thatcher, Blair worried about his ‘legacy’. As his relations with Gordon Brown during his final incomplete term of office went from bad to worse, Brown ‘felt I was ruining his inheritance and I felt he was ruining my legacy’.¹¹² From time to time, Blair thought of taking the risk of removing his most formidable rival within the government, but when it came to the point, he refrained, being aware that it might merely hasten his own exit from 10 Downing Street. Observing also that Brown’s ‘energy, intellect and political weight were undeniable’, he believed that his presence was ‘a massive plus’ for the government, notwithstanding the tensions between the two men. The longer Blair was in office, the surer he became of his own stature and the superiority of his judgement. ‘If there was a clash,’ Blair wrote of his relationship with Brown, ‘it was at least a clash of the titans.’¹¹³ He had become confident he could recognize a titan when he looked in the mirror.

During Blair’s prime ministership his chief of staff Jonathan Powell and press secretary Alastair Campbell were, in a break with British tradition (discontinued by Brown and Cameron, his successors), given the authority to instruct civil servants, a power previously reserved for ministers. They also had a great deal of authority vis-à-vis ministers and (in Campbell’s case, especially) backbench Labour MPs, since they were so close to Blair. Lesser figures than Campbell and Powell also, however, acquired an enormous sense of their own importance from working in 10 Downing Street. Just as in the United States, where a vast growth since the Second World War in the size of the Executive Office of the Presidency has led to complaints from those at the receiving end of ‘too many people trying to bite me with the President’s teeth’, so ministers and MPs have found themselves being patronized or scolded by persons who assume the authority of the prime minister. Tony Wright was a Labour MP much respected by fellow parliamentarians. When he became Chair of the Public Administration Committee of the House of Commons, he turned what had been a little regarded committee into a body which produced high-quality reports that were taken unusually seriously. Before Wright acquired that position, which gave him a greater independence from the executive, he made his views known on a variety of subjects, drawing on knowledge of political and constitutional issues acquired during his previous career as a university teacher. On one such occasion, a message appeared on his pager which read: ‘The prime minister is pissed off with you. Phone No. 10 at once.’114 Wright observed later that his offence had no doubt been to express a view that was regarded as ‘unhelpful’. However: ‘what really shocked and appalled me was that some No. 10 apparatchik had thought it appropriate to put such coarse language in the name of the prime minister, who almost certainly knew nothing about it, and that it was acceptable to communicate with a Member of Parliament in this way’.¹¹⁵ The underlying problem was the assumption that the prime minister was a general who stood so far above his party that it was his prerogative to determine policy and strategy. Thus, even senior parliamentarians should jump to attention at the command of a Downing Street lance-corporal.

*

A number of conclusions from the points elaborated in this chapter may be briefly stated. Party leaders have some effect when people are thinking about voting, but only very rarely are they of decisive importance in securing election victories. It is also largely a myth that over time their electoral influence in Western democracies has grown stronger.¹¹⁶ In office, presidents and prime ministers have shared in an increase of power which has accrued to central executives in modern states. However, other than in foreign policy, there are insubstantial grounds for supposing that their personal power vis-à-vis their colleagues has become significantly greater over the past hundred years, although some are more presumptuous than others in staking a claim to domination. There has been wide variety in the style of leadership from one president and prime minister to another and great oscillations in the extent of the power they have personally been able to wield. The evidence, taken from the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, does not suggest a graph or marked trend of ascending power on the part of democratic leaders. Finally, those prime ministers, such as Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, who aspire to equate headship of government in a democracy with personal hegemony, pay a serious political price – removal from office as a result of alienating a sufficient number of their own colleagues rather than by the more usual form of rejection at the hands of the electorate.

* Wilson also happens to share with the Conservative Party leader throughout most of the inter-war years, Stanley Baldwin, the distinction of being the only British prime minister within the last hundred years to leave 10 Downing Street at a time unambiguously of his own choosing, neither forced out by the electorate nor – with varying degrees of gentle, or not so gentle, pressure – eased out by his own party.

* The size of Callaghan’s popularity advantage over Thatcher has done nothing to inhibit journalists from referring to the 1979 election as Mrs Thatcher’s rout of James Callaghan.

* Sir Leo Pliatzky was the most senior civil servant – Permanent Secretary – at the Department of Trade when John Smith was Secretary of State for Trade in 1978–79 and the youngest member of James Callaghan’s Labour Cabinet. In a conversation I had with Pliatzky at a time when Smith was Leader of the Opposition, he said: ‘John Smith was a very good minister, and he’ll be an even better prime minister.’

* A separate issue is how much the emphasis on change within the Labour Party, and the use of the term ‘New Labour’, of which Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown were the main progenitors, contributed to the scale of the electoral victory in 1997. The crude dichotomy between ‘New Labour’ and ‘Old Labour’ had some appeal for conservative newspaper proprietors, but it was oddly indiscriminating. Blair, in particular, seemed to distance himself from his party’s history – with the term ‘Old Labour’ apparently embracing such major Labour figures as Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Denis Healey, as if they belonged under the same label as Trotskyists, ‘trendy lefties’ or socialist fundamentalists who had been among the party’s members in the past but who had no influence on the policies of previous Labour governments. By 2005 any novelty value that the image of ‘New Labour’ may have possessed had worn off. More fundamentally, although Blair and some of his colleagues continued to talk about ‘Old Labour’ and ‘New Labour’, no party called ‘New Labour’ ever appeared on the ballot paper in a general election, and the significance of the notion can easily be exaggerated. Voters cast their ballot for the candidates of the Labour Party, albeit by 2005 in far smaller numbers than in the past. In any event, this attempt at rebranding was quietly abandoned by Blair’s successor but one as Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

* When Congress presents the president with a bill to sign into law, he has the option of vetoing it. The presidential veto can, however, be overridden if both chambers of Congress vote by a two-thirds majority to overturn it. The very fact that the veto exists can lead to bargaining between the different branches of government in order to avoid a presidential veto. Use of the veto, however, carries risks, since much depends on whose side the public takes. A president who is popular at the time, as Roosevelt was, may use the veto more profusely than one who is unpopular.

* While Roosevelt had more followers than Johnson, he was scarcely less lacking in enemies. A Connecticut country club is supposed to have banned mention of his name as a precaution against apoplexy. In Kansas a man disappeared into his cellar, announcing that he would not come up until Roosevelt was out of office, although before he had a chance to re-emerge, his wife seized the opportunity to go off with a travelling salesman.

* One of Churchill’s most misguided speeches was his first broadcast in the general election campaign of 1945 when, after five years of successful collaboration with Labour ministers in the war with Nazi Germany, he said that ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo . . .’ Mrs Churchill, when she read the speech in advance, advised her husband to cut that passage out, but he preferred the advice of ‘party advisers who had excitedly been reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and that of Lord Beaverbrook . . .’ (Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness, Penguin, London, 2002, p. 268.) Geoffrey Best describes this as an example of Churchill’s ‘impetuous liability to go over the top at the wrong moment’ and Clementine ‘as usual the more commonsensical of the two’. Attlee’s response, in his first broadcast of the election campaign the following day, was, as Roy Jenkins observes, ‘quietly devastating’. He said that the prime minister wanted ‘the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party Leader of the Conservatives’. Churchill had feared, said Attlee ironically, that ‘those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further’, adding: ‘I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly. The voice we heard last night was that of Mr Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.’ (Roy Jenkins, Churchill, Pan Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 793.)

* R.A. Butler had been strongly opposed to Churchill becoming prime minister in 1940 and tried hard to persuade Halifax to allow his name to go forward. Later he became more appreciative of Churchill’s strengths, while remaining far from uncritical. To put in fuller context the quotation above from my interview with Butler on 23 September 1966, he said: ‘Churchill is someone whose reputation has been grossly inflated, especially with the recent spate of books of adulation. Of course, he was a great leader. He was a great lion – I am a mouse in comparison – and he was absolutely straight. But he could be extraordinarily stupid. He knew practically nothing about economic policy. He scarcely understood the meaning of inflation. But he was very tender-hearted.’ In his memoirs, Butler writes of Churchill telling him, after his 1953 Budget, that ‘I like the spirit in which you conduct our affairs’, and adds: ‘I record with strong emotion that however exasperated one became at times, a word of commendation from him always set one up cheerfully.’ (Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler, K.G., C.H., Hamish Hamilton, London, 1971, p. 165.)

* With kind intentions, Attlee had given that office to Ernie Bevin when his health had deteriorated too much for him to continue as Foreign Secretary. It was not much appreciated by Bevin who said he was not a lord, or a privy, or a seal.