Worth a read
Just a snippet to whet your appetite, an interview with Francis Beckett, a biographer (apparently) who has rated all the Prime Ministers on a rating out of five. Eden and Chamberlain get 0, Thatcher and Atlee get 5, Blair gets three.
I particularly agree with what Beckett says here:
FB: This series will (hopefully) serve as a political history of the 20th century - 20 prime ministers in 20 books. In my view the best way to understand history is through biography. There are "great forces", the Marxist idea of history, operating, but even then I find it more interesting to see those forces acting through individuals.
And I do actually believe individuals make a difference, and history would be different without them. Does anyone, for instance, think we would have been better off if Halifax had become prime minister in 1940, rather than Churchill? Or that things would not have been different if Rab Butler had won the Tory leadership rather than Harold Macmillan?
And not least, I, for one, believe things would have been fundamentally different if John Smith had lived - no Iraq, no PFI, no dome, no city academies, a proper comprehensive system of education based on what he had seen had worked in Scotland, and higher taxes, or at least hypothecated ones for education and health. And, basically, a Labour party not enslaved to Thatcher's idea that the private sector is always best.
It's a moot point whether you agree with the specifics of what Beckett has to say (I do as a matter of fact) but biography is the most interesting way to study history. Maybe it doesn't help you (as much) to understand root causes, but it's more fun reading about the lives of the medieval French kings than economic and social changes in twelfth century France, for example.
-posted by Roy
