Election Election Election

Some thoughts on the forthcoming general election and reflections on past Prime Ministers I never knew

So we are going to the polls at last. Leaving aside the brilliant piece of media manipulation to force out of the headlines the inept performance of the former Chief Executive of the Post Office, explaining “I knew nothing” (Manuel style in Fawlty Towers) about the hundreds of sub postmasters and mistresses whose lives were ruined by wrongful (and it must be said, dishonest) prosecutions, leaving that aside, the sight of the Prime Minister dripping in the rain outside 10 Downing street did not seem to be a portentous beginning to the party in power putting its best foot forward. I will not comment further – yet – but will sit back and enjoy the spectacle of our 3 main political leaders each weaving their particular brand of lack of inspiration in the coming weeks.

But the election announcement made me reflect on how many Prime Ministers I have lived through so far. The total is: 17 and may be 18 if I live beyond the fourth of July. I have only met one Prime Minister.

Here are some random and entirely inconsequential comments vaguely touching on the Prime Ministers I have not known:

Clement Attlee. He was a Labour Prime Minister who ousted Winston Churchill at the end of the war. I was four when he was resigned but I was not much into politics then.

Winston Spencer Churchill needs no comment. I once met his daughter during my (not) sowing my wild oats days in London. She was drunk at the time. That was all I remember of our only encounter. Our family were on the Liner The Queen Elizabeth returning from the USA on 24 January 1965. It had run aground outside LeHarvre and was listing slightly, as was the hastily scribbled notice to passengers announcing that Churchill had died. The ship later refloated and the sign returned to the vertical.

Anthony Eden. Ah he was the one whose actions precipitated the Suez crisis, resulting in petrol rationing and preventing my parents from making any but infrequent visits to the boarding school in which I was incarcerated.  My wife refers to that place as “the Buggery School”. Someday I will post an account of it and all its awfulness.

Harold Macmillan. An elderly gentleman with grey hair and moustache. He seemed remote from the population. At some stage he had said he never met young people, so I wrote to him offering to come to 10 Downing street with some school mates so that he could see what young people looked like. His personal secretary John Wyndham wrote back politely declining. The combination of his prostate problems (my father once found himself standing next to him in a urinal and confirmed – or so he said – that there were difficulties with his waterworks) and the Profumo affair brought his tenure to an end. Years later I had lunch with his nemesis John Profumo and was supported by him in connection with a social work project I had taken on in London at the time. A nicer and more helpful man you could never meet. The friend who introduced him to me said that he once gave her a lift and he never took his hand off her knee during the entire journey.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He was brought in to replace MacMillan. He was initially Lord Home (pronounced Hume – aristocrats do this sort of thing. Try pronouncing Cholmondeley). He renounced his peerage and was found a safe conservative seat so he could become an MP. I remember very little about him, except that on the day of Kennedy’s assassination he gave a rather dysfluent radio tribute to the late President which contrasted with the polished performance of Harold Wilson

Harold Wilson. Our family had gone to watch television at the home of an elderly doctor in Upwell. My parents did not get a television until my brother and I had grown up. They read books instead and listened to the BBC Home Service on a wireless that was about the size of a tea chest and took 5 minutes to warm up before you could hear anything. Anyway, I remember the black and white television images of a beaming Harold Wilson, wreathed in pipe smoke as news of his victory was announced. My parents’ friends thought that a Labour government would signal the end of civilisation as we know it. My father distrusted him, thought he was so devious that he was likely  to try a Trumpian style take over (except of course that at that time Trump was just a teenager). In the event Wilson was a pretty good PM though not liked by all. And civilisation did not end.

Edward Heath. As a result of the miner’s strike he forced a 3 day week on the country, in between voyages on his yacht Morning Cloud. The knock-on effect was that our office life was disrupted by power cuts on an almost daily basis. Fortunately then we had manual typewriters and no computers. There were only 2 of us in my office and I rigged up a system of car batteries to provide faint light to enable us to carry on working during the absence of electricity. If my secretary (who worked on the floor beneath me) wanted to get my attention, she would turn out my battery light. That forced me to go downstairs to see a client or answer a query.

James Callaghan. I don’t remember much about him. Was it he who devalued the pound or Harold Wilson who had a second term after Heath?

Margaret Hilda Thatcher. The Iron Lady who was also not for turning. Scary!  She would apparently run her fingers along the tops of door frames to check if they had been cleaned properly. I knew a parliamentary under-secretary who attended cabinet meetings. She would tap her pen on the table to reduce her colleagues to silence.

John Major.  Portrayed as being entirely grey by Spitting Image. To be continued.

Tony Blair. He seemed a great hope for the country. I remember Bernard Levin writing in the Times saying that he liked the cut of his jib (whatever that is). He and President Bush did not acquit themselves well over the issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass distraction. There could be quite a lot to say about him and he is well within living memory, so let’s move on to -

Gordon Brown. Famously left his radio microphone on while on the campaign trail and commented, live on the bloody woman (or similar wording) who had been giving him a hard time.

David call me “Dave” Cameron. Presumably “call me Lord Dave” now. Called a referendum on our membership of the EU that led to Brexit – in my view one of our sillier national decisions, though it did enable us to get up and running with Covid vaccines faster than we would have done otherwise.

Theresa May. A grey individual who once ran through a field of corn

Boris Johnson.  Less said the better.

Liz Truss.  She comes from Norfolk so she must be perfect in every way, except in anything to do with politics

Rishi Sunak. Hmm.  Looking forward to a good holiday after 5 July with his billionaire wife?

Let’s drop in again on John Major. Dateline: early 1996. A client had managed to get an appointment. I came along to give support at the meeting in Major’s constituency office in Huntingdon. As we waited I looked around the panelled room in the constituency office. The wall was adorned with large photographs of John and Norma Major. Others came in for their appointments. My client suddenly became anxious. He had noticed too late that he was wearing a red tie. Would Mr Major take against him? I looked at my tie: scrambled egg motiv which at that moment was the turned inside out - politically neutral at least. Our time came. The Prime Minister’s secretary led us up some narrow stairs, passing boxes of papers and 2 policemen.

“I’m sorry, we need another seat,” she explained as she wheeled a secretary’s chair in front of her. There, sitting alone in a small office, head down, looking perhaps like a doctor waiting for the next patient, was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

“And what can I do for you?” You almost expected him to reach for his stethoscope.  He started like we all can do when first confronted by a troubling client; he was not sure he could help. But we kept talking, then suddenly the questions started coming: he was interested and concerned. The mask began to slip. He seemed to relax. He talked about a recent trip to the Middle East. He leaned forward and focussed on the problem, made jokes and even pointed out that in this job we did not need to tell him about chronic fatigue. He grasped the points quickly and showed surprise at my client’s plight. Our 30 minutes passed quickly. He asked to be sent more information which he said would be looked at. When our time was up, he gave us that slightly shy smile you sometimes saw when he was being bombarded by the opposition. We said our goodbyes and did a round of handshakes (these were pre-Covid days). He was rumoured to have had a limp handshake. My several crushed fingers put paid to that idea. Neither was he grey. He was also larger than I expected, having previously seen him only on television.

So, who will be next? A word of advice to the three main leaders, in no particular order:

Ed Davey: put yourself about a bit. I fear that a chunk of the population have not yet heard of you, or of what you represent

Rishi Sunak: stop smiling. You have nothing to smile about

Keir Starmer: bloody well start smiling. You are not playing poker. Allow some expression onto your face and show us who you are.

Do you think that whoever gets elected would like to meet an old man, so he knows what old people look like? I guess not, and I will not waste a stamp this time around.