Why Academics Were Right to Pick Clement Attlee as the Best Prime Minister of the Last 100 Years

Anthony Sampson, in the London Independent (12-4-04):

Does a prime minister today really have to say something every day, to have a policy about everything, to keep flying round the world, to appear charismatic always? Wouldn't he be more effective if he said less, and kept in the background?

My question follows the results of the survey this week by academics at the University of Leeds, who asked 139 historians and political scientists to give marks to the most successful prime ministers over the past century. They reckoned the most important qualities were leadership and sound judgement. But they put the two most obviously charismatic leaders, Churchill and Lloyd George, second and third.

At the top was Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour premier who has always been seen as the most laconic and least charismatic of them all. It might seem ironic that Attlee, the "little man", the "sheep in sheep's clothing" who was the butt of so many of Churchill's insults, should end up more highly rated than Churchill, the heroic victor of war.

Yet there were good reasons, it seems to me, behind the choice of Attlee. The demands of wartime required charismatic leaders like Churchill and Lloyd George, who could inspire with their images and words: when Attlee (who was Churchill's deputy in wartime) was asked how Churchill won the war, he said: "He talked about it."

But peacetime, in many ways, requires more subtle leadership and judgement; and by remarkable good chance, as well as good judgement by the electorate, Britain found the right leaders in both war and peace.

Attlee, for a few years after 1945, successfully kept together a team of powerful but difficult ministers - including Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevin, and Aneurin Bevan - who successfully transformed Britain from a wartime to a peacetime economy, nationalised most public services and set the basis of the post-war settlement.

He understood how to delegate, and leave ministers to themselves. He liked to repeat, particularly about Bevin, "If you have a good dog, don't bark yourself". He never worried about his prima donnas taking the stage, for he was quite able to handle them, or put them down, off stage. He had no cronies, no favourites.

He was very decisive when required. When President Truman refused to share the American atom bomb with Britain, he insisted on Britain developing its own bomb in the strictest secrecy, concealing the cost in the budget. When Herbert Morrison as foreign secretary wanted to use force to protect British oil in Iraq when it was nationalised, he firmly said no.

And he knew how to get things done. John Freeman, the last surviving member of his government - who later became ambassador to Washington and is still very active in London - remembers Attlee as a master of the Whitehall machine, who knew all about paperwork, parliament and, above all, about timing....