Oliver Kamm

Reconsidering war

Here’s a fair and important question, put by philosopher Chris Bertram:

Following Fallujah, I see that liberal and leftie bloggers who are pro-war (such as Oliver Kamm , SIAW and Norman Geras ) have been linking to a WSJ piece by Christopher Hitchens which argues that the disgusting behaviour of the Fallujah mob vindicates the decision to go to war. (If we hadn’t acted now, the whole of Iraq would have become like this, in time ….) I have to say that my reaction to their reaction is somewhat sceptical. If the people of Iraq are happy and peaceable (as claimed by some opinion pollsters) then this is supposed to vindicate the war; if they are rioting and murderous, then this also vindicates the war! One has to wonder whether there is any development in Iraq that Hitchens wouldn’t use as confirming evidence for his worldview and which wouldn’t then be cited in this way by pro-war bloggers! Perhaps the news of increased antagonism from a section of the Shia will make new demands on Hitchens’s ingenuity?

[Lest this post be taken as more hostile to the pro-war bloggers than intended, I’d add that it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.]

Of course I speak only for myself. There is no development that would cause me to conclude I was wrong to support war. It’s not that type of issue. Few people are consistent consequentialists (probably fewer than those, such as Osama bin Laden, who are consistent deontologists, unfortunately); though I consider the consequences of invasion to have been overwhelmingly good, both for Iraq and for the international order, I should still be a warmonger had they been substantially worse. We can make reasonable estimates about some immediate consequences of war (civilian and military deaths, but also the overthrow of despotism and the sudden interest of other tyrants in renouncing weapons of genocide); we cannot make accurate assessments of what would have happened if we had left Saddam Hussein in power, and we shall never be able to. On that counterfactual proposition, we can gain some additional and even important information, but nothing that is definitive or that alters the character of the argument.

Not finding stockpiles of WMD is additional but tangential information: it doesn’t enable us to judge the capability of a bellicose and irrational regime to threaten its neighbours and us with such weapons in future, including the near future. On that question, we just don’t know, because Saddam would not comply with what the United Nations Security Council required of him. We do know enough – and did before the war - about internationally-mandated inspections that we should be unwilling to rely on them in the case of recalcitrant regimes. Hans Blix, as head of the IAEA, notoriously failed to find evidence of Saddam’s nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s and described Iraq’s co-operation with the inspectors as ‘exemplary’. (Blame for North Korea’s having been able to embark undetected on extracting plutonium for use in weapons also rests with Blix, a man whose self-importance outstrips his abilities.)

Finding mass graves and torture chambers is additional information, for it extends our knowledge of the barbarity of Saddam’s regime. It’s also more important information than the absence of WMD stockpiles, for reasons I’ll return to.

The reason it was so important that we invade Iraq and topple Saddam was – just as Tony Blair said – weapons of mass destruction: not because Saddam had them, but because he didn’t have them (at least in the form in which they were strategically usable) and wanted them. By some margin the most facile argument of the anti-war campaigners – I heard it, unsurprisingly, from Shirley Williams, Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords – was that containment of Saddam worked, as containment of the Soviet Union had worked, and that we should continue to rely upon it. It was a disconcertingly myopic analogy. We had practised containment of the Soviet Union because we had no option but to do so: the USSR was a nuclear-armed power, and to confront it militarily was to run a very high risk of nuclear war. Containment of the Soviet Union was, moreover, a reasonably stable system because the Soviet leadership – while totalitarian and expansionist (witness its aggression by proxy that started the Korean War) – was nonetheless susceptible to traditional deterrence. We know that Saddam was not that type of minimally rational political agent, because he launched three aggressive wars in 16 years, each of which almost destroyed his regime. After September 11, it became urgent that the free world, which Islamist totalitarians wish to destroy, interdict the obvious route by which that aim could be realised. The obvious route was, of course, a regime with a demonstrated wish and ability to wage aggressive war, use weapons of genocide and support terrorism.

There is no information, even in principle, that we can obtain in order to judge whether our actions in insisting that Saddam comply with his international obligations or be overthrown have prevented that disaster. Nobody – probably not even Saddam – knows the answer to that question. We do know, however, that our enemies have declared war on us, and we have to respond not as agents of law but as wielders of the sword. As Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal puts it in an illuminating article comparing al-Qaeda and Hamas:

Denying that the war is a war has consequences—among them, reluctance to do what is necessary to win. A clever combatant knows that wars are won by many means (many of them nonmilitary) but that killing the other guy before he kills you is one of them. Is killing a Yassin or a bin Laden "extrajudicial"? Yes, but so is the war against militant Islamism. And our side didn't start it.

Our side didn’t start the war in Iraq either: Saddam did, when he annexed Kuwait in 1990 and then flouted the terms of the cease-fire agreement after his forces had been expelled from the country. Having now concluded that war, on our terms and not his, the US and UK governments have discharged their obligation to protect us from the most likely conduit for terror conducted with weapons of mass destruction. Even if Iraq fails to become a constitutional democracy, and even if – worse still - the barbarity at Fallujah becomes commonplace, that central case for war is unaffected. It’s for that reason that I conclude nothing will alter my view that the war was right.

My central argument for war is thus slightly different from that of other liberals or left-wingers (Michael Ignatieff, Independent columnist Johann Hari, political philosopher Norman Geras), who supported war primarily on grounds of removing a monstrous regime. But the character of the regime is still highly relevant to the question of what, if anything, would alter my judgement of the war. I have argued that this issue is not easily framed in consequentialist terms, and one of the reasons for this is that we can’t properly assess the consequences of allowing Saddam to remain in power. But there’s another reason. There are some issues in politics that are irreducible because they express our deepest values. There are probably people reading this (I hold this view myself) who are opposed to capital punishment and would continue to oppose it even if it could be reliably shown that the death penalty deterred potential murderers. I find the very idea of judicial execution an affront to liberal values – which is not to say it must always be avoided no matter what (it’s difficult to argue that the Nuremberg sentences were unjust, though in fact there is one case in which I think the death sentence ought not to have been carried out), but that there is an overwhelming presumption against it. If you don’t share that view, I can’t easily explain it or argue for it: it just seems to me an irreducible principle. On a much higher order of historical importance and potential suffering, a government in 1940 headed by Lord Halifax and aiming to settle with Nazi Germany in return for nominal sovereignty would have been the wrong course even if – as was believed by many observers at the time – military defeat under Churchill was all but certain.

Normally in political argument a comparison to Nazi Germany obscures more than it illuminates. But I choose it deliberately in this case because Saddam’s regime was modelled on both Hitler and Stalin. It is an apt comparison, but for the fact that Baathist Iraq did not imminently threaten us. (In my view the threat was not imminent but it was inevitable.) Deliberately allowing such a regime to remain in place when we had the power to remove it would have been to violate values that are axiomatic. Again, I can’t easily argue for them, they merely seem to me obvious and irreducible. That’s not to say it would be right to overthrow a bestial regime regardless of any other considerations, ever; there would, however, be an overwhelming presumption in favour of such action where it was possible to take it. This is why I say that the evidence of the mass graves is far more important than the non-appearance of WMD.

Consider again the analogy of containment of the Soviet Union. We had, as I say, no option (or at least no reputable option) other than this without a serious risk of nuclear war. But we did have an option other than containment in the case of Saddam Hussein. He didn’t have WMD in a form that could threaten us, and we therefore had the ability to overthrow him without undertaking excessive risks to ourselves, to the immense benefit of the people of Iraq and the entire region. To have failed to do that would have been morally wrong. I thus conclude, in answer to Chris’s question with a still stronger statement than I started with.

1. There is nothing that would alter my judgement that the war in Iraq was right.
2. The supporters of war have a monopoly of morality on the subject. There is no reputable anti-war position.

Foot again

David Boothroyd is the author of a fascinating collection of UK election data, in which I have happily immersed myself. I particularly enjoyed the detailed and annotated list of by-election results in successive parliaments. I had forgotten that the Liberal Democrat candidate in the 1994 Rotherham by-election was a Mr Wildgoose, with all that that implied for those who followed him (especially those who did so at a rapid pace); that Labour's candidate (an impressive one, at a time when good Labour candidates were sparse) in the 1985 Brecon and Radnor by-election was called Dick Willey; that Enoch Powell came close to losing South Down in the collective gesture of the Ulster Unionists against the Anglo-Irish Agreement; that the SDLP performed no service to democratic politics in failing to run a candidate against the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 1981; that Tony Blair lost his deposit in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982 (when the required percentage share of the vote was higher than it is now); and that a group of malcontents in Vauxhall ran a candidate supposedly representing the constituency's black population in protest at Labour's imposition of the excellent Kate Hoey (for whom I voted) in the 1989 by-election, managing a princely 300 votes (why are the self-appointed agents of the oppressed always let down by their ungrateful charges?). But I clearly remembered the disastrous victory of an excellent Labour candidate, Ossie O'Brien, in the Darlington by-election of 1983, and that brings me to the subject I wish to discuss.

Labour came to that by-election - which was a marginal Labour seat then, and is a safe one now - having lost the Bermondsey by-election a month earlier by a landslide. Bermondsey's candidate was Peter Tatchell, who was representative of much that repelled the public about Labour's extremism at that time. He was also - in a way that I am glad to say is now almost eradicated from British public life - the victim of a despicable personal campaign against his known but not yet declared homosexuality. (I should add that, while I considered Tatchell a perfectly dreadful candidate, I met him a couple of times after his humiliating defeat - when he spoke at my university Labour Club and Fabian Society about his experiences - and found him, as I believe everyone does who meets him, an exceptionally pleasant and decent man, who took in good spirit my own views on the merits of his candidature.) O'Brien was as far removed from the Tatchell stereotype as can be imagined: articulate, moderate (except on nuclear weapons) engaging and convincing, while the SDP candidate - a television presenter called Tony Cook - turned out to be a featherheaded blusterer. O'Brien won, and thereby saved the hopeless, pitiable leadership of Michael Foot. Labour went thus equipped into the 1983 general election, with predictably catastrophic electoral consequences (not least for O'Brien himself, who lost his seat to the Tories).

I recount this history because below my post about the worst of all party leaders David Boothroyd has added this comment, which I wish to respond to:

There is a defence of Michael Foot, although I don't happen personally to accept it. It is that the Labour Party was ripping itself apart anyway in the early 1980s and though Foot was obviously never going to win an election, he did manage to minimise the SDP split and keep the Labour Party going such that it got through the 1983 election in one piece and still the official opposition - so that the next Leader could start to rebuild it.

That is indeed the case of Foot's defenders, such as his biographer Mervyn Jones. It should be obvious that I don't accept it either, and it's worth saying why. Foot did not minimise the SDP split: he did the opposite. By 1981 the Labour leadership had already made too many concessions to the obscurantist elements of the Left to prevent the formation of a new party. Jim Callaghan had not fought hard enough against the Left's constitutional 'reforms' - in reality a means of supplanting MPs' independent judgement - and the party had ended up with Michael Foot as leader and a preposterous new method of electing future leaders (an electoral college in which trade union block votes were allocated the largest share). At that point, Foot ought to have fought back. In practice he was like a soft cushion with 'Sit On Me' embroidered in cross-stitch. He ought to have tried to keep in the party at least one of the founders of the SDP: had he offered Bill Rodgers, the most conspicuously social democratic of that group, a top post within the Shadow Cabinet, he might have succeeded. When Tony Benn announced his campaign for the meaningless post of Deputy Leader against Denis Healey, Foot ought to have stated bluntly that he wished Healey to continue. In every single case, Foot provided the most feeble and thus the most polarising of leadership styles. Even when he did the right thing - such as denouncing Tatchell in the Commons in an effort to head off a by-election - he reneged on his decision later on and thereby demonstrated his own weakness.

There are some political leaders who manage to get by with a hazy grasp of policy but a forceful personality. Foot had a pitiable knowledge of politics and an even smaller grasp of economics, coupled with a personality of scant distinction apart from insuperable vanity. Even his supposed literary accomplishments were a joke, as his superficial and ahistorical musings on Swift and H.G Wells among others demonstrate.

Labour's survival as Opposition after 1983 was determined by one factor alone, and it was not Foot. The British electoral system, in which Labour's vote was concentrated while the SDP-Liberal Alliance's support was dispersed, ensured that no matter how badly Labour did in the popular vote, there was no way the party could fall below 200 seats in the Commons. Even with its pitiable harvest of 209 seats, Labour took years to attempt even rudimentary steps towards realism and sanity. It took six years for Foot's successor, Neil Kinnock to jettison the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

I voted Labour in the 1983 general election, when Foot was party leader. Indeed I heard him speak at an election rally in Oxford town hall, at which he gave a ludicrous performance attacking Lord Hailsham for his stance on appeasement in the 1930s - not an entirely unfounded case, but hardly a pressing issue of public policy. I speak only for myself, but I can only say that I felt much easier casting that vote than I might have done in other circumstances - for I knew, without the merest flickering of doubt, that the man I was thus voting for to be Prime Minister had as much chance of occupying the post as I had of becoming Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

The BBC does history

Do see this BBC report about the remarkable Maurice Druon, hero of the Free French cause in World War II, before it gets taken down:

He is one of the last remaining links with a piece of France that for two years flourished in wartime London, as humbled fugitives from Marshal Petunia's defeated Vichy government gathered around General Charles de Gaulle and prepared for revenge.

Fortunately they were eventually aided by the United States under President Franklin D. Rosebush.

The Very Worst

I undertook to name the ‘Worst Party Leader of the 20th Century’. There are many contenders, and I shall name merely the most obvious.

I ought however to have referred to the ‘Worst Party Leader Since 1900’ (and yes, I know that takes in one year of the 19th century too), for there is a highly plausible candidate in Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative leader from 2001 to 2003. If anything, IDS – a transparently useless and embarrassingly inarticulate politician – has become a still more diminished figure since having been superseded (the politest term I can find for a commendably unsentimental despatch) as leader by Michael Howard. There is no disgrace in being limited in ability and intellect. There is something undignified, however, first in refusing to recognise your own limits and secondly in castigating those who do it for you once you’ve made them evident.

The farce – not tragedy - of IDS’s tenure has its counterpart in Michael Foot’s pitiful ‘leadership’ of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. That experience – miserable for a Labour Party activist, as I was at the time – demonstrated above all that Labour in the 1980s was a party as sentimental as it was absurd. Only two MPs – Gerald Kaufman and Jeff Rooker – are on record as having urged Foot to resign, yet everyone knew he was ignorant and unelectable. Securing the party over 100 lost deposits and utter humiliation at the polls, he was given an ovation at its annual conference just three months later. I was, and remain, less generous. It took astonishing vanity for the man ever to have allowed himself to be convinced by his wife that he was suitable to run for the party leadership, and he thoroughly deserved the derision and contempt that accompanied him thereafter. To this day, he maintains that a party programme of unilateral nuclear disarmament, sweeping nationalisation, compulsory planning ‘agreements’ with industry, price controls, rent controls, doubling of the pensioners’ Christmas bonus and – the final absurdity – unification of Ireland ‘by consent’ represented a sensible programme for government.

A good and mildly revisionist biography of Anthony Eden by D.R. Thorpe was published last year. It portrays Eden more sympathetically in the Suez crisis than we’re accustomed to. There is little doubt that American foreign policy over Suez was duplicitous - a severe blot on the generally capable foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration – yet so was Eden’s (lying about Israel’s role), and with scant prospect of success. It was a politically stupid course, compounded by his abandoning his post after the debacle. He was the worst Prime Minister since the war, and a disastrous party leader.

The Liberal Party - the Liberal Democrats since its acquisition of the SDP - has been led by some spectacular deadbeats. Its current leader – a man who has never had a job, and who presents as his claim to be taken seriously that he was once a guest presenter on a television quiz show – is a standing affront to the quality of British political life. Its leader but three, Jeremy Thorpe, may have been found not guilty of incitement to murder, but what came out at his trial demonstrated nonetheless an appalling man who debased the very notion of public service. He is moreover one of the few figures in modern politics capable of making Charles Kennedy appear an intellectual titan.

But, on grounds of obvious historical opportunity, the most fertile period for wretched leadership was the 1930s. For me the right choice for Worst Leader is not, however, the most obvious (good choice though he would make nonetheless). For sanctimonious, hypocritical, obtuse and ignorant isolationism the Liberal leader from 1931-35, Herbert Samuel, poses a difficult record to beat. Yet beaten it is.

The Worst Leader of Any Political Party in the past century is ... George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. Lansbury became leader in a fit of collective absentmindedness after Ramsay MacDonald (a much-underrated Prime Minister whose name even now is stupidly reviled within the Labour Party) went into coalition with the Conservatives. His foreign policy in the age of the dictators was – literally - the Sermon on the Mount. He was an absolute pacifist whose contribution to political debate was utterly ineffectual, attracting much condescending tribute to his sincerity when what was actually required was brutal dismissal. It was a long time coming, but when it did come – in the form of Ernest Bevin of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, later an outstanding Foreign Secretary under Clement Attlee – it was effective. At the 1935 Party Conference Bevin, surveying the absurdity of Lansbury’s devotion to diplomacy in preference to rearmament, denounced his leader for ‘hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it’. It was a mark of how pathetically unsuited to political office Lansbury was that he gave up the leadership without protest, and apparently without realising the extent of his humiliation.

Lansbury continued his efforts to resolve political tension by peaceful means, and thereby gave a valuable illustration of the intellectual and moral reprehensibility of pursuing diplomacy without the slightest awareness of its limits. In 1937 he travelled to the European capitals to propose a world congress to decide on the just distribution of world resources and thereby supposedly remove the cause of war (that ‘root cause’ fallacy has a long and undistinguished pedigree). He pronounced Hitler, who understandably gave him a sympathetic hearing, ‘one of the great men of our time’, and declared (Lansbury, My Quest for Peace, 1938; quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, 1993):

[T]o live, Germany needs peace as much as any nation in the world. No one understands this better than Herr Hitler… When I came away [from meeting him] it was my sincere belief that if negotiations could be started at once accommodation might be found. The threat of war was only a silly illusion which would soon dissipate if I could arrange a meeting between Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini with somebody as chairman with a sense of humour… I feel that a pleasant day’s conversation in a villa on the Riviera might bring these three statesmen to realise that they have … a world of peace and security to gain.

A foolish and fatuous elder statesman of the Labour Party, held in entirely unjustified affection by his comrades, prostrating himself shamefully and ignominiously while ‘interviewing’ a genocidal dictator. Thank goodness it would never happen now.

Hitchens is answered

Writing about Fallujah, Christopher Hitchens raises some pertinent questions in the Wall Street Journal (unfortunately link requires subscription):

I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. [Richard] Clarke's word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf War"? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?

Astonishingly enough, some of those questions that require a one-word answer have in fact been answered with an implicit – never an overt – ‘yes’ by the opponents of Iraq’s liberation. In his new blog, Noam Chomsky offers this, in a post entitled The Invasion of Iraq:

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue's gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out -- and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

The forum is new but the style is venerable: I am constantly surprised that an MIT Professor of Linguistics should produce such consistently execrable English prose. Redundant phrases, clichés and solecisms pile up, one damn thing on top of another. Witness the embarrassing attempt at dramatic elision with the single-word sentence. Embarrassing. So is the construction of sentences without verbs. Most extraordinary is his complaint about a ‘truism’ that is ‘systematically ignored’. Chomsky is plainly unaware that a truism by definition ought to be ignored: rather than being a posh synonym for ‘truth’, it in fact denotes something that is trivially true - not an axiom, but a banality. (Those whose reading matter is indiscriminate in quality will be unsurprised periodically to stumble across the same clueless and pretentious use of 'truism' in the writings of Chomsky's disciple John Pilger.)

Much has been made in the past couple of years about the divergence of political views between Hitchens and Chomsky, who were formerly (and perhaps still are) friends, but also significant is the difference – which is longstanding – in the quality of their writing. Chomsky is didactic, tedious, pretentious, hyperbolic and absurd; Hitchens is often regarded as hyperbolic also, but he is in reality deliberately understated and effectively ironic, owing in part at least to his deep appreciation of English literature.

But I meander around an issue of moral import. Look at that enervating prose of Chomsky’s again, and see if you can make sense of the assertion that Iraq’s population should have been ‘given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant’. It makes you wonder if they ever receive modern communications media in Massachusetts. What does Chomsky suppose the Iraqi Kurds and Shi’ah Muslims were given the opportunity and encouragement to do after the supposed cease-fire agreement that concluded the first Gulf War? Saddam thoroughly bamboozled Coalition forces and the Bush administration, which was far too solicitous of the letter of UN Security Council Resolutions that authorised only the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, and put down rebellions both north and south with a brutality that defies the imagination. In a single month (March 1991) he killed an estimated 20,000 Kurds and 30-60,000 Shi’ah. Without the courage and skill of British and American pilots patrolling the no-fly zones for a dozen years he would have slaughtered far more.

Shortly after 9/11, when Chomsky’s sophistry outdid itself, Hitchens referred to such apologetics as being ‘soft on fascism’. As I said, he often understates.

Best and worst

After I gave nominations for the worst ministers in post-war British political history I received some additional suggestions and numerous protests, which I shall reply to properly in a separate post. In the case of one runner-up I’ve concluded I was probably too harsh and ought to replace him with another candidate.

I’ve now ranked post-war British prime ministers from best to worst. Note that for this survey Churchill’s service does not, of course, include his wartime premiership, which would otherwise put him at the top, it being no small matter to have saved western civilisation from barbarism.

1. Tony Blair
2. Margaret Thatcher
3. Clement Attlee
4. Harold Macmillan
5. James Callaghan
6. Alec Douglas Home
7. Winston Churchill
8. Harold Wilson
9. Edward Heath
10. John Major
11. Anthony Eden

For good measure, here are the post-war US Presidents ranked similarly. Note that Johnson’s relatively high ranking is determined by his domestic policy, principally passage of the Civil Rights Act. Conversely Truman's ranking is determined almost entirely by his courageous and historically vital foreign policy. On domestic policy he was far less impressive, excepting an important (though not unblemished) contribution to the cause of civil rights. He has the distinction of having proposed probably the worst set of economic policies of any post-war President; it's fortunate for his historical reputation that he found them impossible to navigate through Congress. Clinton – the worst human being ever to occupy the office of President - is as high as he is only because he was wise in his Treasury appointments. The choice for worst President is a difficult one, and I have gone for outstanding incompetence in preference to disastrous policy coupled with overt criminality.

1. Harry S. Truman
2. Dwight D. Eisenhower
3. Ronald Reagan
4. Lyndon Johnson
5. John F. Kennedy
6. George W. Bush
7. Bill Clinton
8. George H.W. Bush
9. Gerald Ford
10. Richard Nixon
11. Jimmy Carter

Here are the post-war leaders of the Labour Party, in order of best to worst:

1. Hugh Gaitskell
2. Tony Blair
3. Clement Attlee
4. James Callaghan
5. John Smith
6. Neil Kinnock
7. Harold Wilson
8. Michael Foot

Here are the post-war leaders of the Conservative Party ranked likewise, excluding Michael Howard on grounds of the shortness of his tenure:

1. Margaret Thatcher
2. Harold Macmillan
3. Alec Douglas Home
4. Winston Churchill
5. Edward Heath
6. William Hague
7. John Major
8. Anthony Eden
9. Iain Duncan Smith

This is obviously a personal judgement, but I find it interesting that only two post-war Tory leaders could reasonably be held to have been successful, whereas I would make that judgement about four Labour leaders. I take a minority view in holding James Callaghan to have been a good Prime Minister, while I am more critical of John Smith’s brief leadership than seems to be fashionable. I am highly critical of Neil Kinnock, ostensibly a reformer, for having maintained for six years the disgraceful policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament after it had proved, in the 1983 general election, to have been the biggest single net vote loser in post-war political history.

And here in order are the post-war leaders of the Liberal Party. (I have not included the three leaders of the Social Democratic Party, Roy Jenkins, David Owen and zzzzzzzzzz… excuse me, I nodded off for a second … Robert Maclennan.)

1. Jo Grimmond
2. Paddy Ashdown
3. Clement Davies
4. David Steel
5. Charles Kennedy
6. Jeremy Thorpe

I shall now open out the contest slightly. In the next day or so I shall post the identity of ‘Worst Party Leader of the 20th Century’. So many candidates - and it’s close.

Finally, here are the current party leaders ranked in order of best to worst:

1. Tony Blair
2. Michael Howard
3. Charles Kennedy.

I spent a lot of time on that one.