Worst Ever PM?

[NHH]

Gordon Brown will be pleased to see his name not mentioned in this company ( until this post)

[San Bernardhinault]

That's true of a number of US Presidents, too (Taft and Hoover come to mind).

[Amor de Cosmos]

Fair enough. I admit to finding Balfour an oddly fascinating character, which probably fed into my initial post too.

[Central Rain]

No I'd definitely agree with you there. The whole Salisbury-Balfour era is strangely overlooked considering how dominant they were in British politics for a good few years.

[Lurgee]

I'm glad to see no-one is mentioning Chamberlain as a contender, a seriously maligned leader. In order to buff up Churchill's rather dubious credentials as the Greatest Evah it was necessary for his boosters to traduce his predecessor.

[3 Colours Red]

Gordon Brown will be pleased to see his name not mentioned in this company ( until this post)

I suppose being wedged between a PM who led us into an illegal war to boost his already inflated ego and the austerity-enabling, Brexit-enabling pigfucker makes him look less incompetent by default.
So many candidates though... makes you think that either outright anarchy or a benevolent dictatorship may not be such bad ideas.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I'd dispute that Hitler was competent at running the state. Other people did that for him. His skill was in having a genocidal, imperialist vision that he was able to build a movement around. Even there, though, he was aided by the massive grievances that came out of WWI and the desire of all classes to blame the Jews.

The Nazis were terrible at running things. All that they really did after 1933 was crack down on internal dissent, and spend every penny they could lay their hands on mobilizing their army. They would have run out of foreign reserves, and would have collapsed by 1940 if they didn't go to war then. they were incredibly bad at organizing things in a general sense.

Churchill has to be in with a shout. Yes they won the war, but he killed 4 million indians, to provide the food reserves for his insane plan to invade europe not on d-day, but instead to fight their way up through Greece, and the balkans. He spent all of 1943 and the early part of 1944 trying to undermine D-Day. His interference in strategy in the early part of the war nearly lost north Africa and forced the Germans to invade Greece, which had been handling the Italians very handily indeed by themselves. Oh and he was drunk for the duration, and gave his public addresses on the radio when he was so drunk he could barely stand. He was also the worst and second worst lord of the admiralty, the second time he made such a mess of Norway, that chamberlain had to resing. he also sent the black and tans to Ireland which was a major factor in losing the support of the population, the tony pandy incident, and by going back on the gold standard at too high a rate, he shoots right in there as worst chancellor of the exchequer. He also lost 200 seats in the post war election and lost the popular vote three times. Also building concentration camps in Kenya, less than a decade after the discovery of Belsen is something that someone like Theresa May really can't hold a candle to.

Margaret Thatcher was just a particularly and astonishingly successful class warrior who turned the worst instincts of english people against each other.

[Sporting]

Great post if I may say so.

[ooh aah]

I would defend Churchill's Mediteranean strategy overall, although it wasn't without it's peculiarities (insisting on liberating Rhodes in 1944, during the d-day preparations being the most obvious example). I'd say there were 3 main reasons.

Firstly, both the British army and the Americans needed to learn to fight and beat the Germans before d-day itself, otherwise it would have been a disaster, as the Dieppe raid had proven.

Secondly, an attack from the south east rather than through France was also the only possible way of saving Eastern Europe from Soviet domination, which of course was the very reason why Stalin was so opposed to it. FDR thought it was better to win the war, and then trust that Stalin would play fair. Clearly Churchill was a far better judge than FDR on that one.

Thirdly, it was also completely in keeping with British strategy as far back as the Seven years war, whereby European allies do most of the actual fighting in Europe, whilst the British engaged on the periphery until the last moment. This had always enabled the British to administer the coup de grace, gain all the credit, expand their overseas empire whilst minimising casualties. Churchill didn't actually rate the British army very highly at this time, and was pretty convinced that it would lose in a straight fight with the Germans in the West. He probably over estimated what Germany's military capability actually was in 1944, but I think he was right in 42 and 43.

I pretty much agree with everything else you said there though.

[SouthdownRebel]

He might not have been wrong in 44 either. There was the disaster at Arnhem combined with the strategic failure to clear the Scheldt estuary. Arguably the Allies advances were a result of American successes - who by the time were losing faith in the British (and Montgomerie in particular) - and the Canadians.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Hitler was dead for two days when the Allies finally captured Italy. An attack through the "soft underbelly" of Europe would have been an utter fucking disaster. It would have negated the Allies huge advantages in mobility, and armour and numbers by turning it a war where a limited number of defenders would have had a massive tactical advantage just have been thousands of battles of Monte Cassino, and the Russians would have ended up liberating France. Churchill thought this was the way to go because he thought that southern europeans were little more than cowardly apes. The man was a mental and moral degenerate.

Also a Southern Invasion would have required a supply line running from Portsmouth to Alexandria, as opposed to across the english channel. It was the deluded ravings of a man child who just wanted to be involved in the planning regardless of the cost in human lives.

[ooh aah]

Nah the failure of the Italian campaign should be laid squarely at the feet of Mark Clark. He had the chance to cut the Germans off, but instead was more interested in liberating Rome in order to get his name on the front page. The Germans avoided being cut off and regrouped along a strong defensive line. The Mediteranean strategy had worked up until that point really, forcing the Germans to fight in North Africa relieved the pressure on the Eastern front, gave the Western Allies an important morale boost and valuable experience, and had much the same effect on the Germans as the peninsular war had on Napoleon. Without it the Western Allies would have gone into D-Day completely green, having spent the previous 3 years doing fuck all. I'm not convinced that would have been a winning strategy.

[Duncan Gardner]

Can we go provincial? Craig, Brooke, Chichester and Faulkner were all pretty dire. O'Neill at least made an effort and Andrews had a war on.

Craig named a new town after his house.

Ps top rant by Berbs above

[MsD]

Thatcher knowingly let a lot of evil prevail, from NI to paedophilia, and she seemed to enjoy being openly, deliberately divisive, taunting the poor and all the moaning Minnies. Her remarks about people feeling "swamped" by immigration set the tone for her leadership. The cynicism and open nastiness seems to have been a first, I don't recall any PM being so sneeringly dismissive of half the country. Heath wasn't, for all his faults.

The only good thing I have to say about MT's leadership is that she opened that door for women, albeit without that being her aim. She demonstrated that women can be competent, don't always crumble under pressure, aren't necessarily nurturing or empathic. Those are good qualities, but having them designated as 'female' traits does no-one any favours.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

As per my original comment on the other thread, I would go for May.

The brilliant and coruscating piece by Ian Dunt in the attached link tells you why.

https://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/201...hfj2lbqAui9ymw


Also, by way of additional material on just what a killer combination of cynical let thoroughly inept she is, see Rafael Behr's piece linked here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...inished-brexit

I recognised that material on May is only one side of the comparison with any given other PM, and other than Thatcher I'm not heavily up on political biography details (that being a large part of my "to read" list, I've been collecting biogs of PMs for a few years now), but I'm pretty sure I'd have heard if there had been another PM who combined so totally the combination of utter moral corruption with stunning ineptitude, as well as having no redeeming features. Eden may have been imperialist and inept but I suspect he had at least some positive attributes. And Thatcher, much as we might hate the way she changed Britain, had some positive achievements as well and was a powerful operator who stuck by her own principles. Looking back to PMs before the 20th century, PMs had fundamental policies that were callous and wrong by today's standards (presiding over the cruel inequality of society, not to mention in a couple of cases faiing to relieve the Irish famine), but they were operating by reference to the standards and beliefs of the time, so can hardly be measured by the same yardstick as more recent ones.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Nah the failure of the Italian campaign should be laid squarely at the feet of Mark Clark. He had the chance to cut the Germans off, but instead was more interested in liberating Rome in order to get his name on the front page. The Germans avoided being cut off and regrouped along a strong defensive line. The Mediteranean strategy had worked up until that point really, forcing the Germans to fight in North Africa relieved the pressure on the Eastern front, gave the Western Allies an important morale boost and valuable experience, and had much the same effect on the Germans as the peninsular war had on Napoleon. Without it the Western Allies would have gone into D-Day completely green, having spent the previous 3 years doing fuck all. I'm not convinced that would have been a winning strategy.

yeah, Mark clark made an utter hames of things. But even if the early part of the invasion had gone well, you were still going to run into the series of defensive lines that Kesselring constructed across Italy. They would always have had enough troops to construct the first line, and the others could have been filled in later. Any invasion of southern Europe was going to run into the same problems. Southern Europe is a mountainous nightmare for an attacking army. Northern europe on the other hand is basically as flat as a pancake, and once the allies broke out of Normandy, they drove virtually non-stop to the German Border. There was no good place in France to construct a defensive line, against a massive tank army, with complete aerial supremacy.

It's also important not to overstate just how much of a drain the war in North Africa was for the Germans. The numbers involved were very small, relatively speaking, and the huge swings in territory are kind of testimony to that. Rommel was sent to North Africa with a rather small army with limited supplies, in order to stiffen the italian defence of western Libya. He quickly realized that the UK had withdrawn most of their small army and lost them in Greece, and was able to regain huge amounts of ground (which he couldn't hold) pretty much against orders. I'm also not exactly sure what lessons the British army learned in North Africa. They seemed to have been very much on top of things by early 1941. The Americans certainly learned a lot in the capture of Tunisia, but it mostly only taught them what the British had already worked out. That and the M-3 tank was only good for practicing in. Invading Italy was a good idea as far as it went, but focusing the main efforts to conquer europe on the balkans would have been a disaster.

[ooh aah]

Well they certainly learned about seaborne invasions. Every single landing from Torch to onwards was a complete shambles, and would have resulted in disaster had it been against stiffer resistance. The first landing that was vaguely well carried out was Anzio, and then having landed well they then promptly fell asleep and forgot that breaking out of the bridgehead was quite important. By the time they woke up it was too late, and everything ground to a halt. These were all part of a valuable learning curve that simply would not have happened without the mediteranean campaign, and enabled a much smoother D-day and Normandy campaign than would otherwise have happened.

I think the invasion of Southern France was a bit pointless and those resources could have instead gone towards the Adriatic. Yeah it's mountainous, but it's a lot easier to reach Prague and Vienna from Slovenia than it is from Marseilles.