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Who do you think were the worst 3 Prime Ministers of the last 50 years?
You must have been alive when they were in power to qualify. Excluding the current incumbent.
Mine were (in no particular order): Ted Heath, Gordon Brown and Jim Callaghan - none of them had a clue what was going on around them
8 Answers
- Comrade BolshevLv 78 years ago
Worst first: Thatcher, Blair, Heath.
Oddly enough, not Brown - he actually did more than most of his grotesque EU cronies to take a fire extinguisher to the flood the bankers caused - even if he couldn't tell it from a squeegee or a sandbag! Alongside Reichfuhrer Merkel, for example, he looks almost competent; alongside his Irish colleagues, he looks almost honest, and alsongside the Greeks he looks almost cuddly.
- PlanB™Lv 78 years ago
Mr. 'disappointment' himself - Tony Blair.
Mr. 'no personality' - John Major.
Mrs. 'anti-Scots herself' - Margaret Thatcher.
- ElmbeardLv 78 years ago
Heath, Brown and Callaghan all inherited terrible messes from their predecessors, attempted to take them on with only limited success.
The trade unions' reaction to Barbara Castle's 'In Place of Strife' campaign was deeply lamentable and justified their systematic demolition a generation later. Heath had no better answer, pushed us into the EU ill prepared, shamefully reorganised local government, and favoured the destruction of beloved landmarks by crony developers.
Gordon Brown was handed a poisoned chalice just as the Bankers' Bonus scam of the century blew up in his face, and he did his best to avoid a run on the banks and a collapse of the currency and the economy, and precious little thanks he got for it. Yet, he cannot be forgiven for selling off our gold reserves cheap, nor for indulging in a spending spree on dodgy consultants on the make and private finance initiative contracts as if money was water, just in order to win a popularity contest.
Jim Callaghan tried to bluff his way out of trouble, and was not forgiven for "crisis? what crisis?" during the winter of discontent in 1978, yet the country was in trouble after two years of half-baked politically correct psuedo-socialism under Wilson, and was himself handed a country at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund and inflation out of control, and along with David Steel, dealt with it the best he could, waiting for North Sea oil revenues to save the day.
For that reason, I have to say the worst Prime Minister must be Margaret Thatcher. She had all the benefits of North Sea oil, and used it to finance an orgy of crony party-going for some while dismantling so much of what was admirable about Britain - the public service ethic, a sense of fair play, artistic and natural heritage and much else - in the guise of taking on the very real bogeys of the trade unions and the eurocrats. She, who professed her dislike of Soviet centrally planned economics, was the one who brought about the European Single Market, and a set of rules forbidding cross-subsidy and non-conformity, while allowing the deregulation of corrupt practices in the City. Above all, as the party of small business and industry, she betrayed them in favour of the casino speculators and created a model of business that will need a revolution to escape from now.
Runner-up for much the same reason must be Tony Blair. He who pledged so much during the 1997 campaign to take Britian in a new direction, and resolutely steered it in precisely the same way. If Thatcher betrayed small business, Blair betrayed the honest worker, shutting down factories and replacing them with shopping opportunities on borrowed money provided out of our pensions by sharp operators his government should have re-regulated in his first parliament. As for being talked into sorting out unfinished business by the son of an old US President who promised support for the Marsh Arabs and then let them down, maybe Blair could claim he attempted to moderated George W Bush, but not many are convinced he was anything but his lapdog. Still Blair did very nicely for himself after he left office.
I have very little to say about Alec Douglas-Home, except that he inherited a fabulous legacy from Macmillan and did very little with it other than to lose the election. My condemnation of him was allowing Beeching's axe to pass to the Wilson government, when he could have buried it.
- Anonymous8 years ago
You forgot Blair...