Who is the best UK Prime Minister of all time in your opinion? I've made this list of Prime Ministers under the assumption that no one on Buzzjack will be able to remember or know much about prior Prime Ministers.

Attlee and Corbyn.

And neither is on the list lol.

including Douglas-Home but not Attlee

 

also I'd say Attlee and/or Campbell-Bannerman.

 

from the list, Harold Wilson is the only one I'd respect and say had a successful premiership doing things I agree with for the country.

including Douglas-Home but not Attlee

 

also I'd say Attlee and/or Campbell-Bannerman.

 

from the list, Harold Wilson is the only one I'd respect and say had a successful premiership doing things I agree with for the country.

Just realised this error. Is it possible to add him to the list? I can't do it myself.

Harold Wilson or Attlee.

Just realised this error. Is it possible to add him to the list? I can't do it myself.

 

Yeah I'll add Attlee (unfortunately at the bottom of the list because it'd be a right pain to add him to the top).

 

as much as I'd love to extol the virtues of Disraeli, William Pitt and the Marquess of Salisbury (the Tories used to have PROPER leaders), I'll leave it to just post-war.

Yeah I'll add Attlee (unfortunately at the bottom of the list because it'd be a right pain to add him to the top).

 

as much as I'd love to extol the virtues of Disraeli, William Pitt and the Marquess of Salisbury (the Tories used to have PROPER leaders), I'll leave it to just post-war.

Thanks!

Definitely Major Clement Richard Attlee.

Definitely Major Clement Richard Attlee.

 

 

x2

 

Far better domestically than Churchill - night and day, really, and he keot the country going during WW2, and then gave us the welfare state and fought for us, the people! Coebyn was his spiritual successor.

Atlee!

Of course, Clement Attlee.

Bojo 1 vote 0_0

Bojo 1 vote 0_0

 

We all know who that’s from. :rolleyes:

to attempt to add some definitiveness to this thread let's do a ranking:

 

1. Clement Attlee - the clear winner of this poll for a reason, and in some ways it's an indictment of both the parties and the people who vote for them that the only time we've had a glorious progressive centre-left administration that improved public services was when we had a literal war to recover from, that his party won a record votes in history that lasted until 1992(!!) when they were defeated in 1951 is an indictment of our electoral system, and the Attlee administrations' enduring successes to this day are something that too few politicians try to emulate. How often do you get a full turnabout from an empire to near completely decolonised, from tiny public services to the NHS and social security. And all that while personally not being too much of a "figure". It's this society and the celebration of it that Labour should seek to build even now, even as the ghost of 'there is no alternative' hangs over them.

 

2. Harold Wilson - while people underrate him a lot, his electoral ability to put Labour on par with the Tories throughout two decades while not... ahem... selling out (per se), there's a lot of achievements his government got done in the 60s especially. Probably set us well on the path to becoming a modern secular accepting nation while winning from the soft left. Compared to his rival Heath even from a neutral standpoint he got more done and was more effective.

 

~~~~ big gap ~~~~~

 

3. Gordon Brown - probably the most moral PM in my lifetime, but 10 years of Blairism and the financial crash had him running scared of doing anything too radical and while he would have been vastly preferable to the coalition, he could have been a lot better if he'd had some greater courage to own a center-left position and advocate it as the way out of the financial crash (not a position I held at the time mind you! I'd heard how bad the Labour government was growing up and while a lot of that was Iraq and Blair, Brown looked quite inept at the time).

 

4. Harold MacMillan - now who is the best of the Tory PMs I ask? Probably this guy, solid One Nation Tory who supported the welfare state and realised why Attlee's government was as popular as it was. Also continued decolonisation and while stuffy and conservative, wasn't too far off some Labour governments. Got done in by quite an mild scandal for our times too (Profumo would have been another lie for Johnson's admin but beyond that... kinda tame, look how Johnson successfully distanced himself from Hancock for example).

 

5. Tony Blair - sigh, look I'm ranking on in part in effectiveness at getting things done, should I approve of them at least a little bit, and Blair's advances were poor for a Labour government, but good compared to most PMs. Still many advances in police powers that make me shiver, he started the introduction of tuition fees, and of course Iraq. National Minimum Wage and increased spending on healthcare and education while raising taxes are good but the base expectation of most Labour governments.

 

6. Winston Churchill - hate him, post-war government was so-so, kinda did us a solid defending us from the Nazis, caused the Burma famine, see that Churchill thread I made last year for further details.

 

7. John Major - relatively harmless as far as Tory PMs go and tainted by his association to a period of low growth - worth noting while I was born under him I remember nothing of his government.

 

8. James Callaghan - obviously I am biased towards Labour PMs (and objectively, they're generally better) but leading to the Winter of Discontent and providing a generation of Mail-reading dipshits the ammunition to rail against even the most agreeable left-wing policies deserves a bit of a knockback.

 

~~~absolute shite tier below here~~~

 

9. Theresa May - better than the two that surround her only in so far as she was hamstrung by all the more insane Tories in her party and at least tried to adhere to democratic norms and reversing some of the worst Cameronite policies.

 

10. Edward Heath - take on the trade unions would you?

 

11. Boris Johnson - not at the bottom because those below him actively harmed the country, in ways that we are still recovering from, whereas I think that Johnson's damages will be easier to recover from given the mercifully short amount of time he was able to be at the premiership and how much of a disgrace he left in. A little early to say though. Also his policies, while mostly empty, signalled somewhat of a consensus towards the economic left which, like with Macmillan, shows a decent direction of travel.

 

12. Anthony Eden - one single act destroyed the British Empire for good, and yes you could say it was "based" that he and Suez are responsible for the end of the Empire but the damage to our international standing has had huge knock-on effects on geopolitics, some of which are good, some of which aren't. None of which makes him a better PM though and a less damaging blow would have perhaps enabled a more multipolar world today, though that is spitballing a little.

 

13. David Cameron - one of the most damaging PMs in history through an absolutely inhumane set of policies from the coalition government that started off this 12 years of Tory decline, and of course further damaging our international standing in the world by losing a referendum and refusing to own that loss.

 

14. Margaret Thatcher - yeah, a generational trauma upon this nation that has made it dedicated to the cult of capitalism and individualism and destroyed any sense of community, I don't know if we'll get that back but having been in nations that haven't had a Thatcher, the difference is stark. When we die in the climate crisis it will lead back to Thatcher.

 

n/a Douglas-Home - not got anything to say about someone who was in it for less than 12 months

 

basically, the HISTORICAL f***ING RECORD tells you that Tory PMs are ineffectual at best and iniquitous whenever given the opportunity, and that's become more of the case ever since Thatcher.

The thing with McMillan was that he grew up in the same era as Atlee and understood Keynesian economics and Breton Woods were the way economies were run and old enough to remember the Edwardian slums and poverty so the post war consensus was born with him!

 

Thatcher unfort didn’t have that background!

Find it hard to judge those before my lifetime but sadly in my lifetime 4/7 have been so ineffectual they might as well have not been there (Major, Brown, May and Johnson). The other 3 at least got some stuff done whatever you may think of that stuff.

I'd actually put Cameron below Thatcher and comfortably worst PM of my lifetime. Not really sure what Cameron got done apart from slash public services, 'cutting the green crap' leaving us exposed to gas/energy price volatility, cutting the red tape of health and safety which ultimately led to the Grenfell disaster, producing a housing price boom from which has made homes completely unaffordable for a generation and left that generation exposed to the private rental sector, and finally.. the kicker.. running scared into calling a pointless ideological referendum to settle a long-running debate in his own party that has irreversibly damaged the UKs reputation for at least a century and may ultimately lead to its breakup or the secession of Scotland and reunification of Ireland within 10 to 20 years. There's a special place in hell reserved for Osborne as well, I still remember when he extended the Help To Buy Sell scheme to benefit property developers in Oct 2013 that I almost threw the TV out of the hotel window. His policies were actually worse than this current lot, and that's saying something.. but Cameron didn't have any principles or vision for the country, he just thought it would be a 'bloody good laugh to be PM for a bit old boy, LOL'

 

Clement Attlee by far the best for many of the reasons covered- though I would say as a caveat to that though that some of his foreign policy was a bit of a disaster.. India partition in 1947 and Palestine (although hands tied by the Balfour Declaration?), sad that the consequences of these actions are still causing much bloodshed over 70 years later.

It was right that India was given its freedom and was t really Clems (or Bevins) fault there was so much division within the country although they could have done it more carefully and long term.

 

Palestine is another issue of course and as an Irish man I wish the British would stop playing divide a rule before they left a colony they were never wanted in in the first place, it felt vindictive if nothing else.

I voted for Blair. Although he is controversial due to the Iraq war, the labour government brought in a lot of positive policies during their time in office. Sadly, all of the PMs since have ranged from bad to absolutely awful.

 

Cameron - Terrible. Era of austerity, cuts and author of the Brexit referendum which should never have happened!

 

Johnson - Abysmal. His handling of covid pandemic was shocking and numerous others scandals clutter his era.