Dr Peter Catterall is Reader in History at the University of Westminster and was Director of the Institute of Contemporary British History 1989-99. He also lectures on democracy and public policy for the Hansard Society and is a director of the Centre for Opposition Studies. His extensive work on nineteenth and twentieth-century British political, constitutional, social and cultural history includes a two volume edition of the diaries of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Having served as editor of Contemporary British History from 1991 to 2003, he founded the journal National Identities in 1999. His latest publications are Labour and the Politics of Alcohol: The Decline of a Cause (2014) and ‘Prime Minister and President: Harold Macmillan’s Accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis’ in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes (eds) The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (2015). In addition to an account of Churchill’s role in the 1926 general strike he is currently writing a monograph to be entitled Radicalism, Religion and Righteousness: Labour and the Free Churches 1918-1939.
The most detailed and literary diaries of all the occupants of 10 Downing Street were those kept by Harold Macmillan and William Gladstone. There are, however, two significant differences between these prime ministerial diaries. Gladstone kept a diary throughout his …