Portraits and Miniatures(55)

However, the beginning of the end of the Empire meant that there was a great range of external affairs with which a Prime Minister could concern himself without impinging on the prerogatives of even the most truculent Foreign Secretary. On relations with America, Russia and the continent of Europe, Attlee supported Bevin. On India, with a rather weak Secretary of State, he made his own policy. And determining the future of 450 million people, now 800 million, was by any standards in the major league. Perhaps the two biggest impacts on history made by Britain during the past two hundred years have been first to govern and then to leave both America and India. So Attlee ranks as a major agent of Britain’s world impact.

Internally, constitutional affairs engrossed Attlee less than they did either Asquith or Baldwin. On the other hand, he took more part in the social legislation of his government than did Asquith in the previous wave of advance in this field. The Attlee Government was also memorable for six or seven major measures of nationalization. Attlee did not much involve himself in the detail, but supported them all with commitment, even enthusiasm.

He presided over a highly interventionist government but he did not find it necessary to overwork. He once told me that being Prime Minister left him more spare time than any other job that he had done. It was partly, he said, because of living on the spot and avoiding the immensely long tube or Metropolitan Railway journeys, to which his modest suburban lifestyle condemned him, both before and after Downing Street. But his modesty should not be exaggerated. No other Prime Minister in British history was ever so richly honoured, as he noted in the little piece of doggerel which he wrote about himself:


Few thought he was even a starter

There were many who thought themselves smarter

But he ended PM, CH and OM,

An Earl and a Knight of the Garter

His reputation went steadily up and he and Macmillan were almost the only Prime Ministers who enjoyed themselves in retirement more than in active life. Not Lloyd George or Churchill, Rosebery, Asquith, Wilson, Eden or Heath. And I doubt whether Mrs Thatcher will be very content.



The government that Mrs Thatcher ran bore less relation to the three previous administrations I have considered than they each did to the other two. The comparison is by no means wholly to her credit. In terms of the quality of the other ministers, I think it must be regarded as the least illustrious government of the four. It is always necessary to be on one’s guard against underestimating contemporaries compared to their predecessors. It is easier to admire those on whom the gates of history have slammed shut, and there is a fairly constant tendency to see things as always going downhill: to say that the younger Pitt was not as good as his father, that Canning was not as good as Pitt, that Peel was not as good as Canning, or Gladstone as Peel, or Asquith as Gladstone. Such constant regression is biologically improbable. But even with that warning I do not think that Messrs Howe, Lawson, Parkinson, Tebbit, Baker and Hurd can be put in the same league as the Asquith, Baldwin or Attlee lists as outstanding political personalities, nor can they match the Asquith list as men of distinction outside politics.

To some substantial extent this goes with the dominant position within the government of the recent Prime Minister. She certainly did not leave ministers as secure in their offices as did Gladstone or Baldwin. She was not as addicted to the annual gymkhana of a reshuffle, almost for its own sake, as was Wilson. But she none the less wrought great changes of personnel in her eleven and a half years. It is remarkable that there was no member of the Cabinet, other than herself, who survived throughout her term. In addition, her changes had far more of a general purpose than did those of Asquith or Attlee. They were not primarily made on grounds of competence. They were steadily directed to shifting the balance of ideology, or perhaps even more of amenability, within the Cabinet.

As a result of these various factors, she must be counted the most dominating Prime Minister within her government of any of the four. Her control over the House of Commons I would regard as much more dependent upon the serried majorities she had behind her than upon any special parliamentary skill. Her combative belief in her own rightness ensured that she was rarely discomfited and never overwhelmed. But she brought no special qualities of persuasiveness or debating skill that enabled her to move minds where others would have failed. Even an unsuccessful Prime Minister like Eden had, in my view, more capacity to do this than she had. And the serried majorities were a direct function of having a split opposition with a voting system designed for only two parties. She never exercised any special command over a medium of communication as Baldwin did in the early days of broadcasting, and for much of her fifteen and a half years as Conservative leader, before and after 1979, she was personally below rather than above her party’s poll rating.