H.H. ASQUITH, PRIME MINISTER during the first Word War, famously said that the job of Prime Minister
“is what its holder chooses and is able to make of it.” Peter Hennessy’s new book uses Asquith’s remark to weigh the personalities and achievements of Britain’s eleven post-war premiers, showing how each resident of 10 Downing Street has made the job his or her own.
Hennessy analyses the special chemistry of life in Number 10, scrutinizing what the Prime Minister actually does and the way that Cabinet government is run, to build up a picture of the generally hidden nexus of influence and patronage surrounding the office. Hennessy has had unprecedented access to many of the leading politicians themselves, as well as the key civil servants and journalists of each period, and draws extensively on a mass of recently declassified and sometimes electrifying archival material. He illuminates, often for the first time, precise Prime Ministerial attitudes toward, and authority over, nuclear weapons policy, the planning and waging of war, and the secret services, as well as dealing with governmental overload, the Suez crisis, and the “Soviet threat.” He concludes with a controversial assessment of the relative performance of each Prime Minister since 1945 and a new specification for the premiership as it meets its fourth century.
This masterly and wonderfully entertaining book, the most significant its author has yet written and based upon a lifelong study of post-war Britain, uncovers in detail the limits and possibilities of the job of Prime Minister. It is a book against which
all others that follow on the subject will have to be measured.