Nigel Jones: Who are the best Prime Ministers we never had?

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist who has contributed to The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, released by Biteback today (RRP £15). The book is available for ConservativeHome readers for the special price of £12 plus free UK P&P. Please contact [email protected] to take advantage of this offer.

The Prime Minister, David Davis, answering Labour leader David Miliband, said that holding an In/Out referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, far from being a reckless gamble at a time of economic crisis was essential to safeguarding our historic freedoms and democracy.

If you can easily imagine the above exchange taking place in today's House of Commons, you can well envisage how often history turns on the great might-have-beens or almost-wases. A new collection of counter-factual political essays, The Prime Ministers Who Never Were imagines fourteen such scenarios in 20th and 21st Century Britain, presenting the potted and partly fictionalised biographies of the wannabe Premiers whom only accidents, bad judgement or a few votes prevented from crossing the threshold of 10 Downing Street.

In making his selection, the book's editor, Francis Beckett, had one golden rule: that although the candidate in question never attained the supreme prize in British politics, there was a particular moment (or in Rab Butler's case, two particular moments) when he might easily have done so had the chips fallen differently (sadly, the potential PMs are all male).

There is, it must be admitted, a Labour bias to the book. Beckett is a declared Labour stalwart, and only four Tories and no Liberals make his final cut. The nine Labour virtual reality PMs he picks are: J.R. Clynes, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Gaitskell, George Brown, Michael Foot, Denis Healey (who writes the book's foreword) Neil Kinnock, John Smith and David Miliband. (There is also Oswald Mosley who was both Labour and Tory - and much else besides). But more of him later. So, to even things out a little, let me profile the outnumbered non-Labourites.

Of the quartet of Tories - Austen Chamberlain, Lord Halifax  Rab Butler and Norman Tebbit - Chamberlain was by far the most ineffectual.  Upright, decent, dull, a physical clone of his dynamic father Joe, down to the monocle in the eye and the orchid in the buttonhole, he entirely lacked old Joe's charisma and drive. In Churchill's damning, though accurate phrase: "Poor old Austen - always played the game and always lost it."

Nigel Jones: How long will the Coalition last? History suggests that a Liberal split is likely

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

In the space of a couple of days I have heard two violently contrasting predictions of the future course and duration of the Coalition: one, from a Liberal Democrat Minister who believes the Government will last the whole term of a full Parliament; the other, from a Tory Parliamentary candidate turned Civil Service Mandarin, who reckons it will collapse in 2012.

So: sunshine or storms - which long range forecast of the political weather is likelier to be correct?

I have a lot of respect for my Lib Dem informant as a shrewd political reader of the runes based on a remarkable prophecy he made to me several months before the election. In our conversation he not only exactly accurately predicted the number of seats the Lib Dems would be left with after the election; but also foretold the coming of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition based on what he called 'a Green agenda'. He even hazarded a guess that he would hold the Government job that he is now in fact performing. He ended this remarkable display of clairvoyance with the quote: "I did not go into politics to stay permanently in opposition". Naturally, out of politeness I forebore to ask why, in that case, he had chosen to be a Liberal Democrat, and dismissed the conversation, like Macbeth after his first encounter with the soothsaying witches, as the ravings of a deluded fantasist. But lo! All that he said has indeed come to pass.

I therefore listened to him with a great deal more attention the other day when he told me that the Coalition would go the full term, and reap the electoral rewards of a slow return to stability and prosperity after a couple of years of austerity and pain. His logic being that Labour will remain unelectable for the foreseeable future with an inept leader and an unpopular left-wing programme; and that it will be in neither the Tory nor the Lib Dem interest to bring the Coalition tumbling down prematurely.

Equally, my  Tory informant also commands a respectful hearing. (A seasoned political wonk, and walking Wikipedia of statistics, trends and numbers, he is the sort of man who can tell you what Sir Alan Beith's majority was in the 2005 election without missing a beat). He believes that the fatal flaw in the Coalition that will rapidly widen into a yawning chasm will be a haemorrhage in electoral support for the Liberal Democrats. For why, he reasons, would a Liberal Democrat voter who cannot stand the Tories continue to support them now that they are in bed with the hated enemy? As a programme of savage cuts is implemented, all protest votes will naturally go to the party of the Left that is now once more in Opposition: Labour.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones: The lesson of the last Lib-Con Coalition is that leaders should ignore their parties at their peril

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

When considering the future of the newly-minted Conservative-Liberal coalition - the first full marriage between the two oldest parties in British politics in 90 years - it is worth recalling what happened the last time the couple walked down the aisle.  Not because history necessarily repeats itself, but because human nature - particularly human political nature - remains much the same. And the gravitational pull that drew the two parties together then - and eventually dragged them apart - may well come round again.

That pull is the weight of the membership of the two parties, both in the country at large and among their MPs. For it was backbench discontent that brought down the coalition in 1922, and it is backbench discontent that is the most potent threat to the future of the civil partnership solemnised and celebrated between David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Downing Street rose garden.

Back in 1916 it was a Liberal Prime Minister - David Lloyd George - who sat in Downing Street and a Tory party who had been denied power for a decade, and were hungry for the fruits of office they considered theirs by hereditary right.  And then - as now - it was the Tories who had the numbers. The Liberals were fatally split between a majority who sided with the deposed veteran Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, and a minority who threw in their lot with the dynamic new PM, Lloyd George.

It was a Conservative coup that had brought Lloyd George to power in December 1916 in the midst of the First World War. Hardline Tories, egged on by the staunchly patriotic Northcliffe Press in the shape of The Times and the Daily Mail, organised the ousting of the laid-back and frequently alcoholically refreshed 'Squiffy' Asquith, whom they considered incapable of winning the war. Lloyd George was elevated to the Premiership by the same Tories who had once hated and feared him for his savage assaults on their wealth and privileges as a pre-war taxing and spending radical Chancellor.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones: Is David Cameron a new Churchill?

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Seventy years ago today, on May 10th 1940, Winston Churchill was called to Buckingham Palace and entrusted by a reluctant King George VI with the job of forming a new coalition government to confront the worst crisis Britain had faced in its history as a nation state.

That morning, the German Wehrmacht had attacked France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in a long-prepared ground and air offensive that would, within six weeks, conquer those countries, drive the British Army out of the European continent and leave Britain as the only combatant still standing in the fight against the Nazi juggernaut.

Churchill faced a grim and gargantuan task. Arguably, however,his job was easier than the one that David Cameron faces this week. In 1940 everyone in all parties knew what had to be done. The enemy was in plain view -  awesome and menacing, - and quickly and quietly members of the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties took their allotted jobs under Churchill's leadership and began the work of saving the nation and ultimately winning the war.

Today, the threat to our way of life may be less dramatic, but is no less dangerous. Bombs may not be raining down on our cities, our summer skies may not be criss-crossed by vapour trails as young fighter pilots clash in lethal dogfights; and our beaches may bristle with holidaying crowds in search of an elusive British tan rather than barbed wire laid down to resist a cross-Channel invasion.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones: What 20th Century British political history teaches us about coalition government

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

As Britain entered the 20th century, regularly alternating two-party Government was firmly established, and had been so for a century since a short-lived 'Ministry of all the Talents' under Lord Grenville was formed to fight the good fight against Napoleon in 1806. (It failed to defeat Boney, but did succeed in ending slavery in Britain in 1807). By 1900, as Gilbert and Sullivan had it,

'Every boy and every girl,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal.
Or else a little Conservative'.

But by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 a third force had arisen to disrupt this cosy consensus: the Labour party. Itself an alliance between working class Trade Unionists and middle class Fabian Socialist intellectuals, Labour was destined to eventually replace the Liberals as the 'Progressive' party in British politics. In 1915, when the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith formed an all-party coalition Government to bear the increasing strain of fighting the war, he felt obliged to include Labour - in the shape of their party leader Arthur Henderson - in the War Cabinet, alongside the official Tory opposition.

Although normal party hostilities were technically suspended 'for the duration', warfare inside the supposedly united Government was as fierce as the fighting in the trenches. Asquith - like Neville Chamberlain in the Second World War - was an able administrator in peacetime, but not an inspiring war leader. Though the majority of his Liberal party remained loyal to him, his Tory colleagues turned increasingly critical. Aided by an ultra-patriotic press, led by Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail and Times, Asquith's Conservative critics painted him as a fumbling peacenik, whose heart was not in the fight. Ironically, their candidate to replace the PM was the energetic Welsh radical Lloyd George, previously a Tory hate figure, but whose drive and determination were seen as crucial to achieving victory.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

As Britain entered the 20th century, regularly alternating two-party Government was firmly established, and had been so for a century since a short-lived 'Ministry of all the Talents' under Lord Grenville was formed to fight the good fight against Napoleon in 1806. (It failed to defeat Boney, but did succeed in ending slavery in Britain in 1807). By 1900, as Gilbert and Sullivan had it,

'Every boy and every girl,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal.
Or else a little Conservative'.

But by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 a third force had arisen to disrupt this cosy consensus: the Labour party. Itself an alliance between working class Trade Unionists and middle class Fabian Socialist intellectuals, Labour was destined to eventually replace the Liberals as the 'Progressive' party in British politics. In 1915, when the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith formed an all-party coalition Government to bear the increasing strain of fighting the war, he felt obliged to include Labour - in the shape of their party leader Arthur Henderson - in the War Cabinet, alongside the official Tory opposition.

Although normal party hostilities were technically suspended 'for the duration', warfare inside the supposedly united Government was as fierce as the fighting in the trenches. Asquith - like Neville Chamberlain in the Second World War - was an able administrator in peacetime, but not an inspiring war leader. Though the majority of his Liberal party remained loyal to him, his Tory colleagues turned increasingly critical. Aided by an ultra-patriotic press, led by Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail and Times, Asquith's Conservative critics painted him as a fumbling peacenik, whose heart was not in the fight. Ironically, their candidate to replace the PM was the energetic Welsh radical Lloyd George, previously a Tory hate figure, but whose drive and determination were seen as crucial to achieving victory.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

As Britain entered the 20th century, regularly alternating two-party Government was firmly established, and had been so for a century since a short-lived 'Ministry of all the Talents' under Lord Grenville was formed to fight the good fight against Napoleon in 1806. (It failed to defeat Boney, but did succeed in ending slavery in Britain in 1807). By 1900, as Gilbert and Sullivan had it,

'Every boy and every girl,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal.
Or else a little Conservative'.

But by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 a third force had arisen to disrupt this cosy consensus: the Labour party. Itself an alliance between working class Trade Unionists and middle class Fabian Socialist intellectuals, Labour was destined to eventually replace the Liberals as the 'Progressive' party in British politics. In 1915, when the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith formed an all-party coalition Government to bear the increasing strain of fighting the war, he felt obliged to include Labour - in the shape of their party leader Arthur Henderson - in the War Cabinet, alongside the official Tory opposition.

Although normal party hostilities were technically suspended 'for the duration', warfare inside the supposedly united Government was as fierce as the fighting in the trenches. Asquith - like Neville Chamberlain in the Second World War - was an able administrator in peacetime, but not an inspiring war leader. Though the majority of his Liberal party remained loyal to him, his Tory colleagues turned increasingly critical. Aided by an ultra-patriotic press, led by Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail and Times, Asquith's Conservative critics painted him as a fumbling peacenik, whose heart was not in the fight. Ironically, their candidate to replace the PM was the energetic Welsh radical Lloyd George, previously a Tory hate figure, but whose drive and determination were seen as crucial to achieving victory.

Nigel Jones: Today the real rebels should be on the Right

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

One of the major attractions of the Left - especially to the young - has always been their identification with romantic rebellion and revolt against the stuffy, conventional established order. In England, this goes right back to the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men - cocking repeated snooks at authority in the shape of the Sheriff of Nottingham; living free under forest skies; and above all subverting the social order by robbing the rich and giving the proceeds of their muggings to the poor. Even though Robin himself may be a Myth, his outlaw image expresses a timeless ideal of the discontented and the restless.

It was no accident that the left-wing Hollywood screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter, blacklisted in the US by anti-Communist McCarthyism, found a refuge in Britain where they anonymously wrote the teatime children's TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood which slithered a seductively attractive message of social equality and anti-establishment revolt into millions of homes and impressionable young minds in the grey 1950s.

The arrival of rock 'n' roll in the same decade fed into the same stirring zeitgeist of revolt. The prevailing heroes of the hour - James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause; Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch and Elvis Presley, whose curled lip and gyrating hips seemed a permanant sneer and thrust against the old and the conventional. The music spawned a succession of youth movements - the Beats, the Teds, the Mods, Rockers and finally the Hippies, all dedicated in their different ways to beating a path away from the routes taken by their parents' generation.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

Nigel Jones: How the Tory leadership could emulate Stanley Baldwin in sugaring the austerity pill

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

There are two things that are absolutely certain about this election: whoever wins it is going to have to make swingeing, nay savage, spending cuts to bring down Britain's ruinous, and ever-ballooning debt levels. And an increasingly desperate Labour will again play the class war card to smear David Cameron and George Osborne as comfortable, privileged upper-class chaps insulated by their wealth from the pain produced by the cuts that the rest of us will feel.

I propose a cunning plan that would, at a stroke, defuse this potentially toxic issue, and set a shining example of rectitude and self-sacrifice to the nation at a time when we are already feeling bruised by the economic pinch before the real blows have even begun to rain down. How would it be if David Cameron and George Osborne donated a fifth of their income accrued over the course of this discredited Parliament towards reducing Britain's debt?

I hear your mocking laughter already. But before you start rolling about on the floor, listen up. There is a good Tory historical precedent for the sacrificial act that I am suggesting. In June 1919, then as now,  Britain was on the ropes. We had just emerged from the bloodiest and most costly war in history - the Great War - which had not only taken the lives of almost a million of the British Empire's finest young men, but had left the nation floundering in deep debt.

The Financial Secretary of the Treasury in Lloyd George's coalition government at the time was an obscure and relatively recently elected Tory, one Stanley Baldwin, a moderately wealthy Worcestershire ironmaster. Acutely conscious both of the nation's sacrifice in blood and treasure; and that he himself had been a tad too old to fight, Baldwin resolved to set an example to other politicians. He had a low opinion of his fellow MPs anyway, famously describing the post-war House of Commons as "A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war".