![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Polls are fun but we should not treat them as a substitute for serious analysis. But what about William Pitt the Elder (PM from 1766–68) or Earl Grey (1830–34), both of whom were considerable figures. But great at what? Everyone knows about Winston Churchill’s achievements. We attempt to determine a prime minister’s “greatness”. In place of a wide horizon, we have gone in for polls, plenty of them, ranking prime ministers from “first” to “last”, as if they were artists whose work we can see now, or footballers who have scored a given number of goals. Anthony Seldon’s is the author of The Impossible Office The History of the British Prime Minister ( CUP, 2021). Rare are historians like Jeremy Black, or journalists like Daniel Finkelstein, who have a rich understanding of the entire 300 years of British prime ministers. Some know a great deal about the early 18th century, or the mid-19th century, about economic or cultural history, but few take the long view. ![]() History has become segmented by period and specialism. Sir Anthony Seldon served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020, and is one of Britain’s leading contemporary historians, educationalists, commentators and political authors. We have biographers who dive down deep shafts into the ground to mine everything about an individual prime minister, but sometimes know little about who came before and after. ![]()
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