This blog post examines the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit 2001 to 2005, which was created during Tony Blair’s premiership. The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit acted as a nexus of power between No.10 and Whitehall.
George Hamilton-Gordon, fourth earl of Aberdeen, was Prime Minister of one of Britain’s rare coalition governments, despite never sitting in the House of Commons or holding a significant domestic post, but his reputation was damaged by his failure to prevent …
The death of Lord Kitchener, who drowned when HMS Hampshire sank just off the Orkney’s north-west coast on 5 June 1916, came as a profound shock to the nation. The Secretary of State for War was the public face of …
Disraeli said of Derby that ‘he abolished slavery, he educated Ireland, he reformed parliament’, but only the last of these was done when he was a Conservative Prime Minister. He is remembered mostly for the 1867 Reform Act, a milestone …
Winston Churchill in a speech in the House of Commons in October 1943 famously described the unique and ancient friendship between England and Portugal as an alliance “without parallel in world history”.[1] It is 630 years since a treaty of …
...the visit to the UK of Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev, respectively Premier and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was...
Benjamin Disraeli remains one of the most intriguing of British prime ministers. Born into a Jewish middle-class family, he became famous through his novels and self-publicity, and eventually achieved high political office after many failures. Opinions differ about his achievements, …
The independence of many South American countries from Spanish and Portuguese rule followed uprisings and wars from 1806 to the mid-1820s. British diplomacy in the independence of South America was, generally, about trade. Britain was an ally with Portugal and …
"How much I wish that the public – the people, after all, on whose behalf Number 10 exists – could see beyond that famous front door…" - Margaret Thatcher Just off Whitehall, in London’s SW1 postcode, fronted by one of the world’s most …
Viscount Palmerston was over 70 when he finally became Prime Minister: the most advanced age at which anyone has ever become Prime Minister for the first time. Holding a large number of offices during the course of his career, he …
...ongoing espionage activities. Difficult memories suppressed during the 1941-45 Alliance returned thereafter on both sides to poison the wells of cooperation. History, as Roberts pointed out, showed that Britain and...