Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
Exactly a year ago, Liz Truss was elected Leader of the Conservative Party — and therefore Prime Minister. Given the extraordinary events of her first 50 days in power (which were also her last) it all seems rather unlikely now.
But is it? My theory is that the number of possible prime ministers is expanding — and that’s going to throw up some odd results.
Consider the first decade of the 21st century. It’s hard to think of a plausible scenario in which anyone except Tony Blair, followed by Gordon Brown, serves as PM. But since 2010, something weird has happened to British politics. It’s not just the number of actual prime ministers that has multiplied, but also the number of people who might have got the job.
By my count, there are nine of these nearly premiers. I’ve probably missed some, but here goes:
David Davis (2010)
The most obvious of our lost leaders came so close. In the summer of 2005, David Cameron’s campaign to become Tory leader was going nowhere. If he’d given up and allied with Ken Clarke, the latter would have moved forward to the final two with David Davis. As a Eurosceptic, the members would have chosen Davis by a landslide.
At the 2010 general election, Davis would have beaten Gordon Brown too. Brown’s “no time for a novice” jibe wouldn’t have worked; there’d have been no “agreeing with Nick“; and no possibility of that baffling “big society” manifesto.
What sort of Prime Minister would Davis have made? He’d have been better equipped to face down Nigel Farage — or do a deal with him. We might also have ended up with a functioning immigration system.
For Tory Right-wingers, the Davis premiership remains a tantalising what if.
Alan Johnson (2010)
Of course, 2010 could have been worse.
Today, we forget just how close the result was. Together, Labour and the Liberal Democrats won 315 Seats — almost enough for a Lib-Lab majority, but not quite. With a few more seats (and a little bit of help from the minor parties) we could have had a Lib-Lab government.
Gordon Brown would have had to go, but a quick coronation could have been arranged for a successor. That would have favoured a compromise candidate — i.e. not Ed Balls or either of the Miliband brothers. Rather, Alan Johnson, with his broad appeal, would have been the obvious choice.
Thus we’d have had a Left-leaning coalition implementing austerity. There’d have been fewer spending cuts and more tax rises, but it would have been austerity nonetheless. Alan Johnson’s popularity would have lasted for about as long as the warm glow of the Rose Garden moment.
David Miliband (2015)
Moving on to the mid-2010s, is there any plausible scenario in which Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister? For instance, what if he’d not eaten that bacon sandwich?
It was a bizarre and anvoidable PR disaster, but a manifestation of his essential unelectability, not the cause of it. In a multiverse of infinite realities, he fails in all of them.
His brother, though, is a different matter. If David had won the 2010 leadership contest (which he very nearly did) then the 2015 general election could have gone the other way. In such a scenario, the Lib Dems still get hammered — and the SNP capture Scotland, but there’s enough votes for the fabled “coalition of chaos“.
Among other things, it would have meant no In/Out referendum — and the chance for Brexit could have been lost forever.
Boris Johnson (2016)
Of course, in our timeline, Cameron won his unexpected majority in 2015 — thereby paving the way for the Leave victory and his own exit in 2016.
Boris Johnson was expected to win the ensuing leadership race, but at the very last moment his campaign imploded. The memoirs haven’t been written yet so we still don’t know what happened. But, surely, it was something that could have been fixed? Evidently, it wasn’t so permanent as to stop Michael Gove and Dominic Raab from joining his 2019 government.
So, what if the rift had been fixed at the time, thereby allowing Johnson to become Prime Minister in 2016 not 2019? Would the early start have made a difference?
Absolutely, it would. The Vote Leave team could have transferred directly into government — and Dominic Cummings would have had a much tighter grip on Downing Street. The pandemic was still years away and there’d have been no rival centre of influence around Carrie Symonds.
How all of that might have collided with a Remainery parliament is anyone’s guess, but mine is that we’d have got the “Get Brexit Done” election done in 2017 or 2018.
Andrea Leadsom (2016)
There’s a second alternative outcome to the 2016 leadership contest. The Johnson campaign still blows up, but Andrea Leadsom’s campaign doesn’t.
She and her team could have avoided the unforced errors they made — like the toe-curling March for Leadsom or the unfortunate comments about motherhood. Thus instead of withdrawing on the 11th July, she could have gone forward with Theresa May to the members’ ballot stage.
This would have exposed May’s limitations as a campaigner and, of the two candidates, it’s plausible that the rank-and-file would have chosen the Leaver.
Yet Leadsom would have been in an even weaker position than May was: her support among parliamentary colleagues was much lower; her Brexit deal would still have been obstructed by the Commons; and, as a less unifying figure, a snap election would have been less of an option.
Blocked every which way, Leadsom — like May — would have had to resign, but before 2019.
Jeremy Corbyn (2017)
One thing we can say for Andrea Leadsom is that she advised against reopening the fox-hunting issue — which was the first fatal mistake of the snap election.
It is tempting to think that everything that could have gone wrong with the 2017 Conservative campaign did go wrong. But that’s not quite true. Remember that May increased the Conservative vote share by five-and-a-half percentage points, so there was room to do worse.
If a few more seats had been lost (or not won by Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories), then the numbers for the DUP deal wouldn’t have worked.
Jeremy Corbyn could have become Prime Minister straight away, or there might have been fresh elections, coinciding with the height of his popularity. So imagine that: Corbyn in Number 10, John McDonnell at the Treasury and Diane Abbott in the Home Office. Oh, and don’t forget Keir Starmer and his plan for a second referendum.
A near miss…
George Osborne (2017)
Of course, the actual result of the snap election was plenty bad enough. The 2015 majority was carelessly lost — as was any hope of breaking the Brexit deadlock. In these circumstances it was astonishing that Theresa May wasn’t pushed out immediately. What saved her was an unusual lack of alternatives.
It could have been very different if George Osborne hadn’t quit the Commons just before the snap election. If he’d stayed, he’d have been in position just as the leadership void opened around Theresa May.
As the old saying goes, history is made by those who show up.
Dominic Raab (2020)
No British Prime Minister has died in office since Palmerston in 1865. But in the darkest days of the pandemic, Johnson fell gravely ill with Covid — and, by his own admission, came close to death.
If the worst had happened, he’d have been succeeded by the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, Dominic Raab. A leadership contest would have been unthinkable in the circumstances.
Not known for an excessively lax managerial style, it seems doubtful that Partygate would have happened on Raab’s watch. Indeed, he might still be in office to this day.
Penny Mordaunt (2022)
In the real world, Johnson succumbed to scandal not the grim reaper — thus triggering last summer’s leadership contest.
Could it have gone a different way? Well, there is one other outcome that wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility: a victory for Penny Mordaunt.
In the final MP’s ballot , Mordaunt got 105 votes to Truss’s 113 and Sunak’s 137. It would have taken a handful of votes to have got her through to the final — which, against Sunak, she might have won (according to the run-off polls, it could have gone either way).
Do I think she would have been a great Prime Minister? Well, it’s never been clear to me what she stands for — so I’m guessing no. On the other hand, we could have avoided the horrors of the mini-budget, which would have been good.
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And so there you have it — not necessarily the best prime ministers we never had, just the ones we could have had.
The number of possibilities teaches us three lessons about politics today. Firstly, never to underestimate the role played by mere chance. Secondly, that this is not an age of great leaders who make their own luck. And, thirdly, that we need to choose more carefully in future.