Viva Lewes Issue #153 June 2019

ON THIS MONTH: TALK
Sir Anthony Seldon
300 years of British Prime Ministers
“Walpole didn’t have it,
Gladstone didn’t have it,
Disraeli, Lloyd George,
Churchill didn’t have it,
Thatcher didn’t, Tony Blair
didn’t.”
On June 21st, the political
biographer Sir Anthony Seldon
is giving a talk on ‘300 years
of British Prime Ministers’ at
Lewes Town Hall. He reckons,
he says, being PM is an
impossible job to do perfectly.
“There have been 52 Prime Ministers between
Walpole and Theresa May,” he tells me, and in
his opinion, none of them has had the ‘complete
skill set’ that you need to run the country.
This set includes the need “to be able to
communicate very clearly, to be able to persuade
people, to have a physical resilience, to take the
extraordinary battering the PM has [to take],
to be physically very healthy; you need to have
a very calm and clear mind, to… be highly
intelligent, to process a lot of paperwork, you
need to be able to give a clear vision.”
He’s written political biographies of the last
five outgoing Prime Ministers. I wonder:
which one he has liked the most? “I like all
of them in different ways,” he says, “and they
all had extraordinary qualities. I mean world
class qualities.” He gives particular attention
to Gordon Brown, “who had a very powerful
intellect and a very deep compassion, but he
had the fatal flaw of not being able to control
his temper and being overly suspicious and
resentful of other people.”
Every Prime Minister, he suggests, has their
own fatal flaw. One problem with our system,
he feels, is that “the skills
that you need to get to
become Prime Minister are
very different from the skills
that you need to be Prime
Minister. And the system is
much better at identifying
people who have the skills to
get through the race rather
than people who have the
skills of leadership.”
And, like in a Shakespearian
tragedy, “it’s the flaws that
bring them down. Since 1945 every Prime
Minister has left prematurely, none of them
have left at a time of their choosing, with the
exception of Harold Wilson in 1976.”
We get onto the subject of power, and how
much rests in the hands of our PM. “The Prime
Minister’s power waxes and wanes,” he says.
Thatcher earned a massive amount of power,
then lost it. “When [Theresa May] became PM
on the 13th of July 2016 she was very powerful
indeed, and now she is very lacking in power
because she has lost so much authority.”
He takes pains to praise May for reaching such
an exalted position without having enjoyed the
privilege of a private education, but doesn’t go
much further. As a parting shot (he’s pushed for
time) I throw in a last question which, I promise,
requires a one-word answer. What percentage
chance has May – surely soon the subject of
his next political biography – of still being PM
when he comes to Lewes? There follows a long
silence as he computes the answer. “98%” he
says. Alex Leith
21st June, Town Hall, 7pm. Free, public talk
organised by Lewes U3A
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