Iain Dale

I have been reading each chapter of this excellent survey of each of the 55 British Prime Ministers for Walpole to Johnson, each week after listening to the podcast interview with the author of each chapter. It's an interesting approach (the podcasts haven't been in chronological order, though they started and ended with Walpole and Johnson respectively). Each chapter summarises the subject's life and career, especially but not exclusively his or her premiership, in between roughly 6-12 pages, enough detail to inform without being burdensome. Maybe some further reading recommendations would have been the icing on the cake, but this is very good.… (more)

This is one of a series of books of counterfactual historical essays edited by Liberal Democrat historian Duncan Brack and Conservative radio host Iain Dale. The title essay is obviously out of date now, this book being published in 2011; in this scenario Boris becomes PM in 2016 in a set of circumstances unrelated to the UK's membership of the EU, but deriving from an earlier collapse of the Coalition government due to disagreement on anti-terror legislation.

Nearly all the essays relate to British politics, with the earliest dating from the First World War (Lloyd George and J M Keynes drowning in the same ship where Kitchener died; and proportional representation being introduced for the 1918 general election which, to my surprise, did nearly happen, with both Commons and Lords supporting a form of PR but unable to agree on a system). The exceptions were two US ones (Nixon beating JFK in 1960; and Hillary Clinton as the 2008 Democrat candidate instead of Obama) and one Russian (the 1991 coup against Gorbachev succeeding and the Soviet Union surviving in some form).

The essays are a bit of a mixed bag, almost always intriguing but some more plausible than others. Among the ones I thought were implausible were Mrs Thatcher settling with the miners in 1984; the consequences of Ken Livingstone returning to the post of London mayor in 2012 defeating Boris Johnson; and Pope Benedict XVI being assassinated on a visit to Britain by someone disillusioned with the Catholic Church's handling of child sex abuse. Some of the more interesting ones personally I thought were more recent scenarios such as Tony Blair remaining Prime Minister beyond 2007; Gordon Brown actually calling an election in autumn 2007; and two relating to the Coalition government, one where the Tories win sightly fewer seats, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats slightly more, thus making the negotiations more open-ended and the final Coalition less secure, and one where Nick Clegg opts for a looser confidence and supply agreement with David Cameron rather than full Coalition.

An intriguing set of essays and I will read more in this series.… (more)