Each month No 10 invites a professional historian to contribute a short article to this series.
“My Lord Bath, you and I are now as insignificant men as any in England.” Today often viewed as the first British Prime Minister, Walpole was described by contemporary opponents as the ‘Screen-Master General’, adept at pulling all the political …
...the atmosphere at the meeting and the spirit in which decisions were made. He depicts the sense of mounting concern within the government as well as the political dimensions of...
The centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War has encouraged a variety of reflections. To previous generations, the role played by their prime ministers would have been amongst the first items worthy of comment. In a less …
Clement Attlee bore little resemblance to the contemporary politician. He had no time for the things that are now the stock-in-trade of all serious aspirants for high office: image and public relations. Attlee was so apparently unconcerned with presentation that …
Ask anyone to name Winston Churchill’s best-known speech and nine times out of ten they will answer: We shall fight them on the beaches. It’s not an exact quotation – Churchill did not include the word ‘them’ – but the …
...a large extent on the team of personal staff he skilfully constructed, influenced by the coalition premier in the previous world war, David Lloyd George (1916-1922), whose innovations included the...
...them on a geographic basis. Holding one of these offices was not necessarily a guarantee of direct knowledge of the wider world. In 1748, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle (and...
On 20 February 1913 The Times reported: ‘An attempt was made yesterday morning to blow up a house which is being built for Mr Lloyd George near Walton Heath Golf...
When Parliament met on 10 April to pay tribute to Baroness Thatcher, Prime Minster David Cameron observed that, ‘at a time when it was difficult for a woman to become a Member of Parliament, almost inconceivable that one could lead …
...Edmund Spenser’s romantic tribute to Elizabeth I in his sixteenth-century poem of the same name, and allowed the septuagenarian Disraeli to pose as a chivalrous knight in Victoria’s service. Victoria...