I was only 11 at the time but I remember watching him as a child and thinking how impressive this man was. He inspired me as a youngster - he spoke with such truth and conviction that I wanted to vote for him. If only.

A bon vivant and accomplished painter, often described as “the best prime minister we never had”, Healey was an MP for 40 years until his retirement in 1992, serving as secretary of state for defence from 1964-1970 and as chancellor from 1974-1979. Eccleshall & Walker 2002, p.273; Englefield, Seaton & White 1995, pp.253–259; Mosley 1999, p.172; Pryde et al. 1996, p.48. Sir Winston Churchill resigns". On This Day 1950–2005. BBC. Archived from the original on 2 April 2003 . Retrieved 2 September 2018. Churchill... tendered his resignation as... First Lord of the Treasury.

Hung Parliaments

A similar sense of modesty might well have rescued Where Power Stops, David Runciman’s new collection of essays on political books. I say “new”: actually, only the introduction and the afterword are new; the rest are revisions of pieces that Runciman penned for the London Review of Books. Collections of this type are always something of a challenge to review: taken singly, the essays are well-written meditations on a biography or memoir of a major political figure; presented together as reflections on the nature of personality and what they reveal about the limits of power renders them irksome. The introduction, which claims that “once we can understand the character of a person, we can follow that character behind the curtain and get to see what is really there”, writes a cheque that the essays cannot cash, because Runciman is not familiar with the character of the people he is writing about – he is familiar with books written about and by them. Hopefully, the current leadership can take a leaf out of his book and employ it in the party before the infighting comes to the fore again. Castlereagh, Viscount, President of the Board of Control (29 April 1805). "Military Commissioners' Bill". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol.4. House of Commons. col.496. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) The angle, looking at those who were touted for the top job but never achieved it, allows for a lot more insight than I would have expected. I actually found it much more interesting and revealing than books charting the PMS we did get. Steve Richards is acutely fair-minded in his political analysis, but never at the expense of his prose becoming leaden or dull. He is also more than willing to challenge conventional political wisdom (his chapter on the gregarious Ken Clarke show the arch-Thatcherite economics lying behind his amiable public persona).

You have to say right away that Steve Richards is very fair to politicians. It is an admirably unfashionable habit among political commentators. Some scribblers nowadays would concoct an affair between David Attenborough and the Queen if either secular saint were to show an inclination to vote Labour. Butler, David; Butler, Gareth (2010). British Political Facts (10thed.). Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-29318-2.Pryde, E. B.; Greenway, D. E.; Porter, S.; Roy, I., eds. (1996). Handbook of British Chronology (3rded.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56350-5. As you’d expect, the chapters on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are the jewels in the crown, but the entire set glitters. Richards has a nice line in pithy summaries of the politicians who cross his stage – David Cameron, we are told, “possessed a sunnier personality than most leaders and yet his ending was uniquely dark”, while Harold Wilson’s deputy, George Brown, “was a formidable character when sober, but too often he was drunk”. Cook & Stevenson 1988, p.44; Courthope 1838, p.19; Eccleshall & Walker 2002, p.34; Englefield, Seaton & White 1995, pp.23–26; Schumann & Schweizer 2012, p.143.