If you ranked every individual term of Britain’s post-war Prime Ministers, which single term would you place nearest to the top, and which do you think would be considered the worst, and why?
Top: most of the Labour ones
Bottom: Thatcher
Best - Attlee first term (NHS, Nationalisation, high employment post war, decolonisation)
Worst - Cameron second term (primarily responsible for the absolute binfire ever since, opened the door for the absolute worst of the tory right, pathetic slug of a human)
With little thought or knowledge applied. Purely vibes.
(if it was just the damage done in office it’d be Thatcher)
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I reckon Thatcher’s damage to society, and one’s sense of self-worth relative to job/money/assets is pretty unbeatable long-term. Seems like she was responsible for the pressing the flush, even if not PM during the entire bowl (sic)-evacuation?
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Yeah I guess. Probably the difference between being born post-Thatcher and seeing the impacts of Cameron unfurl in real time
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I honestly think that Johnson’s stint as PM will go down in history as absolute bottom-rung territory, especially once we have a full perspective on the impact of his mishandling the pandemic.
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Assuming by post war you mean post Iraq war, so best is Truss, worst is Johnson
Yeah I don’t know enough about specific terms to comment on those but it seems pretty clear that Thatcher (and Reagan) pretty fundamentally broke the psychology of a lot of people and enabled a shitload of behaviour that we still haven’t recovered from (and has escalated even further since).
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I mean WW2, obviously.
Unacceptable
Not really answering the question but in my lived experience:
Best - Blair first term (I was working for a local authority at the time and I’d never known such riches)
Worst - Cameron second term for unleashing the shit show. Thatcherism was devastating but I think that there were some green shoots during New Labour whereas now we’re just plain doomed whatever happens.
This is a great shout. I’d extend it backwards into the first term too - the lost promise of Lib Dem’s moderating influence on the Tories, the sweeping round of austerity we’re really feeling the impact of today, the weird positioning of the Big Society as a way to transfer responsibility from the state to local volunteers - that then dominoed into the neglect of rural communities and the frustration that caused Brexit…
Just the worst.
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Difficult to argue against Thatcher as the worst. You can argue that someone like her was inevitable, given the UK’s inability to separate itself from the US’s sphere of influence, and indeed the slow crushing logic of capitalism that no-one in the West can ultimately escape. However the particular spite and zeal she brought to the task of dismantling the post-war settlement, the cruelty of little England given license to fully express itself, has inflected our politics ever since. Every stupidity, atrocity and humiliation this country has suffered in the 21st century can ultimately be laid at her door.
I’d go Truss >>>>> Attlee > Wilson > Blair - Brown > Callaghan >> Macmillan - Heath - Douglas-Home > Major > Churchill > May > Eden - Sunak - Cameron - Johnson >>>>> Thatcher.
> the prime minister of limbs
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Who’s the lad with the tache? He was the only alright Tory PM wasn’t he? Forget his name.
Macmillan? Yeah, easily the best of them.
John Major
Some weirdos still love Thatcher for some reason
Extraordinary that Thatcher isn’t just an automatic worst.
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