Ranking the Prime Ministers of the UK is an idea which has been conducted surprisingly few times, compared to the number of articles doing the same for US Presidents. The Times, and a few select political journalists (most recently Iain Dale) have given it a shot. But as these things are reliant on personal bias as much as history, it takes a considerable ego to consider putting a list together. So, take that as read.
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This list was achieved through aggregate scores. I listed every achievement the Prime Minister’s government had, and gave each achievement a score from 200, to minus 200. This would give them an overall score and rank them. Now, not all achievements are equal. Ending the slave trade gave a considerably higher total of points than, for example, The Corn Laws. It’s also notable that as a personal bias, I am quite strongly against policies which infringe on civil liberties. So, if your favourite Prime Minister was a strong authoritarian type, they’ll find marks against them. However, what I discovered most telling was that some Prime Ministers are exceedingly difficult to judge. They achieve great things, and terrible things. One of the more controversial Prime Ministers on the list managed to score both one of the worst minus scores for a single policy, and one of the best positive scores for a single policy! But what this allows me to do is to be fairer to some people than I might otherwise have been, and to stress the points that put people at specific points on the list.
As my wife says my posts are entirely far too long, this ranking list will be split up into chunks, since brevity is the enemy my writing fights constantly against.
And with that said, let’s go to bottom place, and see a Prime Minister who reached the top 20 in all the other published rankings. Start as you mean to go on, I guess!
54. Lord Liverpool
(1812-1827)
We start with my view on the Worst Prime Minister of All Time, a hard-fought title with a few contenders. There’s no obvious contender, such as the Americans have with James Buchanan. Recently Iain Dale looked over each of the office holders and concluded the worst, in his opinion, was the Viscount Goderich. And to be sure, that struggling non-entity will not be making a spirited break for the top ten here, either. The Times in 2010 ranked all fifty. This was in the days before Cameron, May, and Johnson. They went for Lord North as the worst, another understandable choice. Matthew Parris also ranked the fifty in 2010 for the Times and went for Gordon Brown as the worst Prime Minister of all time. Which is certainly a point of view, though not one shared by this writer. The placement, or the idea you can accurately judge a PM while they are incumbent or have just left. Therefore, we have omitted Boris Johnson from this list.
This is good news for Boris Johnson, to be fair.
Your own view of worst Prime Minister tends to be geared towards your own views. Some of you might view the 1980s as a period of PTSD and consider this spot Margaret Thatcher’s in perpetuity. Some of you might think a non-entity in the role deserves the most scorn. Others might hate Harold Wilson because he legalised gayness. And those people scare me.
But no, for me it had to be someone who ticked all the wrong boxes. Which is why, at the bottom of the list, I present to you a four-time election winner and the Prime Minister who defeated Napoleon. Some of you might be asking why this alone doesn’t make him a contender for the top 20 instead, as Iain Dale and the Times suggested. Liverpool created a defensive alliance with France, he allowed unions to form, how could he possibly be bottom place?
Well, those unions had criminal sanctions on their picketing placed soon afterwards.
Liverpool’s spot on the list is set for me, by three events: the Corn Laws, the Six Acts and Peterloo. Each of them changed the UK for the worse and set the scene for conflict and damage for the next half century onwards. He was also an opponent of Catholic emancipation, to the point of resigning rather than allow it to happen under his watch. I may be an atheist but one cannot change ones familial historical kin.
The Corn Laws implemented tariffs on corn imports from abroad, which created a cost of living crisis in Britain and led to rapidly rising food prices. Intended to keep the bread prices high (which helped landowner friends), Liverpool’s decision saw widespread rioting. This wasn’t just unpopular with the public. Merchants petitioned the government to remove the Corn Laws during Liverpool’s tenure and beyond, as it was screwing around with their trade. The Anti-Corn Law movement pushed the need for free trade. The problems grew worse in Ireland, which was exporting food to Britain but struggling to afford imports. The cost of living crisis and historically low wages inflicted on the country only helped to worsen events, even before the Famine.
“The Corn Law… was certainly open to attack on the grounds it caused unnecessary suffering for the hard-pressed working classes by artificially raising the price of their bread simply in order to maintain the artificially high profits of the landed interest, who comprised the country’s lawmakers. It also damaged industry to the extent that it made the manufacturers wage bill unnecessarily high and hindered international trade… it could be regarded as selfish class legislation which ran counter to the national interest and the new ideas of free trade, and which merely encouraged inefficiency and greed.”
Plowright, J. (2006). Regency England: The Age of Lord Liverpool. (n.p.): Taylor & Francis.
In the end, a Tory Prime Minister sacrificed his own government to get rid of this protectionist tosh. However, by that point, Lord Liverpool was long dead. And it’s worth pointing out, if Sir Robert Peel and Karl Marx are both against your law, you know it was bloody unpopular!
As bad as the Corn Laws were for everyone bar the richest in society, the Six Acts legislation was much worse. We’ve jumped ahead of Peterloo for a moment here. The British government in 1819 was paranoid. Fears of revolution, like the French, grew large, and weren’t helped by the assassination of Lord Liverpool’s predecessor, Spencer Perceval, in 1812. Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1817. Despite being watered down by Whig opponents, the Six Acts heavily censored the press and the right to free speech, deported blasphemers, banned public meetings about politics or religion (bar church of course), reduced bail, sped up convictions, and otherwise cut down civil liberties significantly. The Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth (more on him later), considered the public protests over food and parliamentary reform the biggest threat to the country “since the accession of the present Royal Family”. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, made famous by Shelley, argued in favour of it silencing the treasonable and seditious. (This was before he made himself even more famous by suicide, of course.)
Defenders of the Liverpool era note that, by the standards of the time in the world, Liverpool’s Acts were quite lenient compared to European neighbours. This is like claiming one of the people convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Yugoslavian War wasn’t as bad as the others, in my book.
But even if it wasn’t, Peterloo lingers over the rest like a foul smell, the tell tale heart of the government. It all started in Indonesia. Everything is connected, you see, and in 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora exploded, one of the most violent volcanic explosions in recorded history. The aftereffects lead to what we know now as the Year Without a Summer, as the ash clouds lowered world temperatures and brought in a brief period of extensive climate change.
This eruption led to widespread European harvest failures, on the back of Napoleon’s Waterloo, and the introduction of the Corn Laws into this maelstrom of misery was akin to handing a box of matches to the local arsonist. Parliamentary reform, and the necessity of your average person to have the right to vote, became pressing issues. Parliament on its own seemed removed from the struggles of your working poor.
(Look, you know history repeats itself, I know it, we don’t need to go all Theresa May and say “remind you of anything” anytime you recognise an element of the modern day. Take it as read.)
The House of Commons wasn’t interested in having their positions decided by the plebs, but reformers held mass campaign meetings to promote their cause. And so, in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, August 1819, a crowd of 60, 000 met to demand the vote. Authorities responded by sending in a cavalry charge to disperse the crowd, killing fifteen and injuring hundreds, including women and children. Troops had been sent in to kill peaceful protestors on British soil.
Now, Lord Liverpool didn’t officially send in those troops. He just gave the local magistrates the powers to send in the troops. In fact, George Canning was quick to point out that if the magistrates had followed the letter of the law, there wouldn’t have been an incident. The buck stops with the person who gave the order, but also with the person who gave the law which allowed the order to be carried out. Liverpool’s government reaction to this was for self-protectionism, with the Six Acts.
During his tenure, he cracked down on civil liberties, he created his own cost of living crisis, and worst of all, he defended the massacre of innocent civilians. He acted for fifteen years to protect the privilege of a corrupt rich elite, and left the fallout of this for his successors to deal with. Foreign policy successes can only take you so far, if your economic and social policies are so rotten to the core.
53. Duke of Newcastle
(1754-56, 1757-62)
A protégé of Robert Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle preferred to have yes men in his Cabinet, and so promoted a number of inexperienced politicians. He was also the Prime Minister who, in Canada, expelled the Acadian people. To protect his own neck from losses in the Seven Years War, including the Menorca debacle, he had the commander of the British Fleet, John Byng, court martialled and shot.
“They dispatched a scratch fleet of old, undermanned, and leaky ships under John Byng on the impossible mission of relieving the island. Newcastle and his government realised that, if the truth were known, the public would hound them from office. To save themselves, they shifted the blame onto the unfortunate admiral. H e was tried by a naval court martial, under a charge which, if proved, would result in a mandatory death sentence. He was not found guilty of cowardice, disaffection, or negligence. At most he was thought guilty of an error in judgment. Clemency was refused and the government saved.”
Williams, Jeffery. Byng of Vimy: General and Governor General. United Kingdom: Pen & Sword Books, 1992.
52. William Pitt the Younger
(1783-1801, 1804-6)
Another legend in the bottom five? Explain yourself, Collins.
William Pitt (the second) is famously the youngest Prime Minister we ever had, twenty-four when he got the job, originally as a stopgap leader who could be easily controlled. That often fails. He was the man who stood firm against Napoleon, and had all those Martello towers built, perfect for ghosts to jump out from in M.R. James classics. He lowered tariffs to take on smugglers, the modern-day equivalent of legalising weed to take down the drug trade. He formed the Triple Alliance and ended Spain dominance of South America. He was also massively popular for most of his tenure. How could he wind up ranked so lowly?
Well, for starters, the man was a colossal hypocrite. Now, on the matter of reorganising the East India Company after campaigning he wouldn’t, we can say, yes, but that was needed anyhow. (And to get it by the King was no small feat.) But he was a hypocrite on abolition too. Time and again you will hear Pitt praised as the first Prime Minister to take a stance against slavery, to be an ally of William Wilberforce. (Ignoring the fact that the slave trade only ended during Grenville’s reign, not Pitts.) Pitt was happy to portray himself as on the side of the abolitionists. Yet, when Haiti had a revolution, Pitt the Younger sent the British army to the island of Hispaniola to restore slavery in the country. Cometh the hour, cometh the conservative more interested in capital gains than human decency.
“We may now consider this trade as having received its condemnation, that this curse of mankind is seen by the House in its true light, and that the greatest stigma on our national character which ever existed is about to be removed. Mankind in general are now likely to be delivered from the greatest evil that ever has afflicted the human race – the most extensive calamity recorded in the History of the World.”
William Pitt, House of Commons, 2nd April 1792, 12 years before his decision on Haiti
He was also nearly as bad as Lord Liverpool on civil liberties, and possibly worse. He suspended habeas corpus, fearing the French Revolution would travel across the Channel. He had the parliamentary reformers tried for treason! He brought in the Seditious Meetings Act, he encouraged the public to denounce radicals in their midst, setting neighbour against neighbour to protect the government. He started the process of sending convicts to Australia. He used extensive force to crush the Irish Revolt of 1798, and pushed through the Act of Union in 1800. This caused countless headaches and problems, ever since.
“The [Treasonable Practices Act] defined treason so loosely that, as Fox sardonically observed, any politician advocating a measure of parliamentary reform – however mild – was liable to arrest under its provisions.”
Evans, Eric J.. William Pitt the Younger. N.p.: Taylor & Francis, 2002.
“The bark of the Two Acts was worse than their bite. It was the bark which Pitt wanted: fear, spies, watchful magistrates with undefined powers, the occasional example.”
Thompson, EP, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz (1963)
He also brought in income tax. Your mileage may vary on that one.
51. Lord North
(1770-1782)
“Not much more than three weeks later, the King sent for Lord North and made him Prime Minister. Many persons were surprised. That lord remained Prime Minister for the space of twelve years, and when at last he was overthrown, all men agreed that he had been the worst Prime Minister who had ever administrated the affairs of his king and country, and if it had not been that he was, when in power, civil to everybody, his head would have been cut off.”
Lawrence, Edmund. George Stalden: A Personal Memoir of the Time of the American Revolutionary War. United Kingdom: Remington, 1887.
(Harsh but not unique!)
When a common phrase is “worst Prime Minister since Lord North”, you know someone’s reputation is dire! Lord North was Prime Minister for 12 years, which is even longer than Blair or Thatcher, and he was promoted to the job as the ideal man for a back to basics, decency in public life role, after the debauched Duke of Grafton. More on him in a minute or two.
Lord North won early, as he sent the troops to the Falkland Islands and they saw off the Spanish. This seemed to have given him an inflated belief in his own skills as an international diplomat, and that hubris changed modern history. After the Boston Tea Party (no tax without representation), North wanted to punish the American colonies, so he cut off their trade. This was one of many sparks at the time which set off the American Wars of Independence. On its own, a bad move. North’s aforementioned belief in his diplomatic skills led to him pissing off the French so badly they publicly supported the Americans instead, which turned the conflict from an internal affair into a world one in which the Brits were now utterly outmanned at sea, their best military position.
And at home, he had the Gordon Riots. In 1778, Lord North’s government had tired to reduce discrimination against Catholics. Lord Gordon, the top Protestant at the time, was against Catholics serving in any official capacity as he viewed them all as traitors. Large demonstrations against Catholics lead quickly to large spread rioting, and destruction of churches, embassies and even attacks on the Bank of England. Several hundred were killed. Lord North responded by sending in the army and declaring martial law.
When even someone’s attempts to do good spiral out of control, you know they were cursed in a job. With the American war nearly lost, and London damaged, Lord North lost a confidence motion in March 1782. In his tenure, the spirit of revolution was to frighten successive Prime Ministers into brutal civil rights crackdowns in the name of freedom. But his reputation will always be as the Prime Minister who lost America. And to turn a prosperous colony into a near-independent foe in the space of a decade is one of the more incredible achievements by any UK PM.
50. Lord Melbourne
(1834, 1835-1841)
Another man with a certain reputation, built up by countless dramas about the young Queen Victoria, for whom he played a mentors role (and for whom was once talked up as a possible husband). Melbourne is here because he stood as a bulwark against change. He was against the Reform Act, the emancipation of Catholics and abolition of slavery. Known as a solid conservative when he took the role. As Prime Minister, he ignored the Chartists movement and petitions, he refused to repeal the Corn Laws even as their negative impact became widely known, and he established compulsory admission to workhouses for the poor. When Dickens writes of the conditions of the poor in the early 1840s in A Christmas Carol, it was Melbourne’s England he is denouncing. While Dickens was starting out, Melbourne restricted access to poor relief!
“I don’t like that low debasing style. I wish to avoid them. I don’t like them in reality and I don’t wish to see them represented.”
Melbourne on Dickens, Collins, Philip. Dickens and Education. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.
Internationally, he took over Canada, and brought Hong Kong into the UK. Melbourne also invoked the First Opium War, though the idea of the UK being on the side that wanted to keep the legal free trade of what we now mostly call heroin is amusing given their 180 turn on it since. Vested interests, of course.
He also reduced the number of offences you could be executed for.
49. Sir Anthony Eden
(1955-57)
“Anybody would be better than Anthony who would make the worst Prime Minister since Lord North.”
Lord Swinton, to Winston Churchill, Hennessy, Peter. The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. United Kingdom: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2001.
Oh, Sir Anthony. One of the most popular Foreign Secretaries we ever had. The most popular politician in Britain at the time he became Prime Minister, and the man seen as most deserving to become Prime Minister. Where did it all go wrong?
Suez.
Of course.
The attempt to take control of the Suez Canal by deposing the Egyptian leader Nasser through clandestine relations with other countries wrecked his reputation, which had been built over thirty years service. It also failed, wrecked British diplomacy in the area, caused tensions with America and was, in general, a complete debacle.
It wasn’t helped his judgment was dimished by heavy supplies of Benzedrine, a then popular pain relief drug. During his time in office, he had insomnia, mood swings and hallucinations, all now known as symptoms of massive amphetamine use. One can feel sympathetic for Eden. That sympathy does not make his disastrous year and a bit as Prime Minister any more successful, however.
It is worth putting this man so low because of his own hypocrisy. A man, so famous for his numerous affairs, discovered his own wife had an affair, and so publicly outed, played the role as a shamed partner, and disowned her, to protect his own reputation. He was quite clearly a cad.
But out with that focus on his social life, he also buggered up the Corsican Crisis, where France annexed the island. The Corsican Republic, formerly a part of Genoa, had based itself on the British model and had close ties with the British. When the French invaded, Grafton did little but watch it be conquered. The British disinterest in protecting an ally scared away potential allies in the period, leaving us friendless in the event of the American revolution. Even low level incompetents can change the course of history…
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