#6. Bonar Law
Serving less than a year in office due to throat cancer, Law remains another forgettable PM.
He was the first PM to be born outside of the United Kingdom. Law was actually born in New Brunswick, Canada and remained the only PM born outside the UK until 2019.
Locations in his birthplace have been named after him such as the Bonar Law Memorial High School in Rexton (called Kingston at the time of Law’s birth), New Brunswick.
#7. Stanley Baldwin
Returning to the office on three occasions, the only person to do so in the 20th century, Stanley Baldwin took over from Law after his resignation over ill health although his most remember tenure was his third stint at the premiership. This was as his run the third time around saw various foreign crises such as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the expansion of German national socialism through the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin.
As well as these, Baldwin had domestic issues to deal with. Coming to office under George V, who eventually died (effectively from euthanasia) in 1936. After this, he was succeeded by the controversial Edward VIII who was forced to abdicate after a moral backlash after his plan to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, lasting less than a year as the monarch from January-December 1936 – making Baldwin the only PM under Edward, something even odder considering that Queen Elizabeth saw 15 different PMs during her reign.
Despite Edward VIII’s controversy during his reign of possibly remarrying an American divorcee, he is now seen as more derided for his association with Nazism, with Christopher Hitchens describing him as a “Hitler-sympathising…firm admirer of the Third Reich.” George VI eventually took over and reigned longer after Baldwin took office.
Baldwin remains the only modern PM to reign through the entirety of a monarch’s reign whilst also being the only one to serve three different monarchs, which he managed to do in the space of fewer than two years.
#8. Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924. The 1923 election saw a Conservative win, gaining 38% of the vote in an unusually close result but failed a majority whilst Labour, the party with the second most seats, were able to take power, propped up by third parties such as a supply and demand deal with the Liberals.
As a potential risk of being in a minority government, Labour fell to a decisive no-confidence vote later that year which collapsed the government, which later reformed in 1929 after the result of another hung Parliament, ruling until 1935.
During this stint, MacDonald appointed the very first woman to the Cabinet when Margaret Bondfield was appointed the Minister of Labour, a position she held from 1929-1931, appointed just 11 years after women gained the ‘right to vote’ (exclusively for those over 30) and a year since the mass enfranchisement of women in 1928. Bondfield apparently rejected a Cabinet position during the earlier government of 1924. She called the historical appointment “part of the great revolution in the position of women.”
#9. Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain is regularly positioned at the top of lists of the worst British PMs of all time, ranked 0/5 by the historian Francis Beckett whilst he came second to last in a BBC survey on the worst prime minister, only beating Anthony Eden. The main reason for this – and the only reason he is really remembered as a whole – is his inability to stand up to Hitler, with his attempted appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany resulting in the culmination of the First World War.
The son of the highly influential Liberal-turned-Unionist Joseph Chamberlain, seen as one of the most important figures to never be prime minister (described by Churchill as having “made the political weather”) and half-brother of ex-Cabinet minister Austen Chamberlain (who later went on to become the Conservative leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner), it might seem surprising that Neville joined Parliament as late as 1918. Winning the seat for Birmingham Ladywood, author Dermot Engelfield notes in Facts About the British Prime Ministers: A Compilation of Biographical and Historical Information that Chamberlain is the oldest PM to be first elected to Parliament, doing so aged 49; he became PM at 68.
If Keir Starmer wins the next election, however, he will become the oldest, with the 60-year-old first elected to Parliament in 2015, aged 52.
#10. Winston Churchill
Churchill is a man who needs no introduction. For those of you who do need an introduction, he was a bulldog who said “Oh, yes!” and sold people car and home insurance, at least I think that’s the right Wikipedia page.
I’ve written a lot about Churchill recently, namely his skills as a passionate and patriotic orator. It is apt then that the peace symbol-gesturing pop culture icon was involved in the invention of one of the most widely used initialisms in the world.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the phrase to a 1917 letter written by the retired ex-First Lord of the Sea Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill on September 9th. In the letter, he penned: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!!”
The explanation of the initials OMG shows how the term was not then in current usage, with this the first known instance of the phrase, evidenced here in its most preliminary form.
Leave a Reply