Big beasts in the Westminster jungle: an endangered species?

Is it warm, fuzzy nostalgia or are our leading politicians in a modest phase?

Recently I was reading an article from The British Journal of Political Science, by the late and legendary Anthony King, doyen of the University of Essex’s Department of Government, and Nicholas Allen of Royal Holloway’s Democracy and Elections Centre. Published in 2010, it was entitled ‘Off With Their Heads’: British Prime Ministers and the Power to Dismiss, which is self-explanatory, but what lodged in my mind was its treatment of the idea of “big beasts” in politics.

The phrase “big beasts” denotes politicians of great importance, influence and sway in Westminster, generally yet to rise to party leadership (if they ever do). As King and Allen explain, the description of “big beasts of the jungle” began with Sir Michael Fraser, later Lord Fraser of Kilmorack, a long-time Conservative Party official who was deputy chairman from 1964 to 1975 and first director (1959-64) and then chairman (1970-74) of the Conservative Research Department, the party’s internal policy-making body. An exact definition is elusive, but they must be senior figures in their party, command some degree of support in their own right and have a level of authority which is not solely derived from the position they hold or from the party leader.

I suspect a lot of you will think instinctively, in recent times, of Kenneth Clarke. He was certainly one of the greatest beasts of the Conservative jungle. His greatness was founded on several elements: he held a number of senior positions in government, including home secretary (1992-93), chancellor of the Exchequer (1993-97) and lord chancellor and justice secretary (2010-12); he enjoyed exceptional longevity, first appointed as a government whip in 1972, serving on the front bench continuously through the Thatcher and Major governments from 1979 to 1997, and enjoying an Indian summer in David Cameron’s cabinet 2010-14; he was exceptionally able, becoming a Queen’s Counsel at the age of 40, showing a firm grasp of ministerial business combined with a vital sense of proportion, and enjoying an easy mastery of the House of Commons and well as a confident and persuasive media presence; and he was unusually popular with the electorate, to whom his obvious human-ness, his ability to recognise absurdity and his occasional deviation from the party line appealed.

King and Allen identified definite and proposed big beasts from the two major parties from the period 1957 to 2007. In the Conservative Party, they named five sure-fire candidates: R.A. Butler, Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling. I think I’d assent to all of those, although I’m not completely persuaded that Heath was a truly big beast before his 10-year leadership of the party (yes, I know, Alec Home let him abolish resale price maintenance because he didn’t feel he could be denied or moved to another post, but I think Alec overestimated Heath’s strength). I might also argue that the most extraordinary feature of Heath’s career after he was ousted in 1975—remember he continued to sit as an MP until 2001—is that he had virtually no real influence. He hoped to be made foreign secretary by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, though in retrospect the idea that they could have worked together is laughable, but she chose Lord Carrington instead and a half-hearted offer of the post of ambassador to the United States was rebuffed. Yet, while he was a constant, grumbling critic of Thatcher’s government, such “Heathite” opposition to her within the party as there was came from those who had served under him: Sir Ian Gilmour, Francis Pym, Jim Prior, Peter Walker.

King and Allen then identify seven possible big beasts: Kenneth Clarke, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Selwyn Lloyd, Enoch Powell, Peter Walker and William Whitelaw. I would promote Clarke to a definite big beast rather than an italicised maybe; Howe, Lawson and Whitelaw I agree were very weighty figures of their time. Lloyd I tend to think was not a big beast. Although he was foreign secretary (1955-60) and chancellor of the Exchequer (1960-62), it was precisely his lack of stature and independent standing that recommended him. Sir Anthony Eden sent him to the Foreign Office to replace Harold Macmillan after only eight months because Macmillan was too strong a figure, too forceful and too sure of himself, to run the department that Eden had dominated three times (1935-38, 1940-45, 1951-55). Lloyd, who had been Eden’s deputy at the Foreign Office in that last period, was much more compliant and the prime minister could effectively run his own foreign policy.

Of Peter Walker I am not sure. He is one of the great what-ifs of Conservative history, the golden boy of the Heath government who ran first one then the other of the “super-departments”, Environment, and Trade and Industry, which were Heath’s organisational legacy. He was considered for promotion to chancellor in 1972, and would surely have been in the absolute top rank of a non-Thatcherite Tory party (which I conjured up in December 2022), but, not quite 43 years old, he returned to the backbenches when Thatcher became leader. Although he was regarded as significant enough to be given a cabinet post in 1979, and stayed in the top team almost all the way through Thatcher’s tenure, he was minister of agriculture (1979-83), energy secretary (1983-87) and Welsh secretary (1987-90), barely even middle-ranking jobs. He had a brief spell in the limelight as energy secretary during the miners’ strike in 1984-85, but was otherwise far from the real decision-making, and certainly never had the inclination, and perhaps the standing, to be a threat to Thatcher, or even to demand a major cabinet position. If he was a big beast, it was for a very short time, perhaps from the summer of 1972 through to the first weeks of 1975.

Enoch Powell is a deeply enigmatic figure. In terms of ministerial office, his achievements were astonishingly slight: his most senior role was minister of health from 1960 to 1963, and he was only in cabinet for the last 15 months of that period. In 1964, after the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, he become shadow transport minister and was then shadow defence secretary from 1965 to 1968. While in retrospect his influence on the economic ideology which would become Thatcherism was substantial, his immediate big beast status derived from the address he gave in Birmingham in April 1968, the so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech. There was a real contradiction here: while both the heightened tone and the sensitive subject matter of the speech catapulted Powell to sudden, substantial and cross-party influence, it also all but guaranteed he would never hold office again.

That was not immediately obvious. A Gallup poll the month after the speech revealed that 74 per cent of respondents agreed with Powell’s views (or what they believed those views to be) on race relations, and 24 per cent wanted him to become leader of the Conservative Party if Heath were to retire. Another poll in February 1969 named Powell as the “most admired person” in public life. He enjoyed a very high profile in the 1970 general election campaign. His personal contribution to what was a surprising Conservative victory is contested: one study concluded Powell “won the 1970 election for the Tories… of all those who had switched their vote from one party to another, 50 per cent were working class Powellites”, while another suggested only that “Powell’s effect was likely to have fired up the Conservative vote in constituencies which would have voted Tory in any event”.

This was the last, maybe the only, moment at which Powell was a big beast. He had a standing in the party which not only did not rely on the leader but in fact was built partly on their mutual antipathy; he enjoyed a popularity among the electorate which, for that brief period, probably no other politician could match; and he was a formidable, penetrating intellect and a mesmerising public speaker. But there was no position for him when Heath formed his cabinet in 1970. Some felt that to have brought Powell back into the fold just over two years after sacking him so swiftly would have made the new prime minister look inconsistent, though many leaders have changed course more dramatically. It is probably true that some other senior Conservatives, including his one-time close friend Iain Macleod, would have refused to serve in the same cabinet as Powell.

Principally, though, Heath felt strong enough after pulling off a shock victory to leave him out, and Powell had never been very good at building up a parliamentary coterie. Within four years, Powell would stand down from the House of Commons he revered and advise the electorate to vote Labour; six months after that he would return, quixotically, as an Ulster Unionist MP. But his days as a big beast were gone.

Turning to the Labour Party, King and Allen select seven definite big beasts: Tony Benn, George Brown, Gordon Brown, James Callaghan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and John Prescott. Those are all strong nominations. I hesitate slightly over Prescott. The received wisdom is, of course, that he was the perfect, almost archetypal, foil for Blair: blunt and plain-speaking where Blair was smooth and assured, rooted in the working class while Blair was from a professional background, a veteran of the union movement where Blair was a product of public school, Oxford and the English Bar. But this seems too neat.

It is likely that Prescott’s passionate speech at the Labour Party conference in 1993 helped John Smith, then leader, introduce one-member-one-vote for parliamentary candidates, a key modernising measure. His impeccable trades union credentials meant he was perhaps the only senior figure who could have won the unions round. He was also supposedly a key mediator in the tense relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But to regard him as absolutely essential to the 1997 election victory I think underestimates quite how transformative Blair had been in his three years as leader. Prescott’s ministerial career as deputy prime minister under Blair (environment, transport and the regions secretary 1997-2001, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for local and regional government, housing and communities 2001-07) left little in terms of a legacy.

Prescott did enjoy a certain following among the electorate, for much the same reasons I ascribed to Clarke earlier: he seemed human, did not drape his (often garbled) words in carefully calculated political spin and he was gaffe-prone. Within the Parliamentary Labour Party, I suspect he is remembered more fondly than he was regarded at the time, as he could be abrasive and quarrelsome, and his occasional mishaps exasperated colleagues who worked harder to toe the party line. Most significantly, however, there was never a moment, however grim things seemed for Blair, when Prescott was even considered as a possible premier. Even the most committed opponents of Gordon Brown, who was the natural heir, sized up John Reid or David Miliband or Alan Johnson rather than the bulky figure of the deputy prime minister.

Two additional names are proposed by King and Allen: Barbara Castle and Anthony Crosland. The former I think must be counted as a big beast, if for a relatively short period of time; although she was an MP from 1945 to 1979 and then a member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1989, she was a central figure in the Labour Party probably only for two or three years, from 1967 or 1968 to the end of the first Wilson government in 1970. For that time, however, she was a formidable presence in cabinet, able to go toe-to-toe with the prime minister and came astonishingly close to transforming British industrial relations as employment and productivity secretary with the White Paper In Place of Strife, published in 1969.

Castle was by no means the first female cabinet minister: Labour had appointed Margaret Bondfield (minister of labour 1929-31) and Ellen Wilkinson (minister of education 1945-47), while Churchill’s last government had included Florence Horsbrugh (minister of education 1951-54). But Castle was the most prominent, and the first to hold more than one cabinet position, as minister of overseas development (1964-65), minister of transport (1965-68) and employment and productivity secretary (1968-70). In addition to that last office, Wilson recognised her heft in the cabinet by giving the title of first secretary of state.

But it would be a stretch to say she was ever a credible candidate for the premiership. Although Wilson would come to refer to Castle as “the best man in the cabinet”, when he first appointed her in 1964, he gave her the discouraging warning “You and I must keep together. I am the only friend you have, and you are the only friend I have.” And there was truth in it. Castle was regarded as a something of a plotter, and her self-belief alienated many colleagues. Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor, had disliked and belittled her, once telling a journalist “I could strangle her with my own hands”, and habitually dismissing her as a “Third Class mind”. (It was an Oxford slight: both had read philosophy, politics and economics, but Gaitskell, a New College man, had been awarded a first, while Castle, an undergraduate at St Hugh’s, had only managed a third.)

Anthony Crosland is the great lost hope for a generation of Labour Party members. Like John Smith, Iain Macleod and Noel Skelton, he died unexpectedly young, suffering a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 58. He had finally been promoted to one of the great offices of state, foreign secretary, only 10 months before. Like his patron Hugh Dalton, his mentor Hugh Gaitskell, and his friend (and perhaps one-time lover) Roy Jenkins, Crosland was an intellectual, having gained a first in PPE immediately after the Second World War and then becoming a lecturer in economics at Trinity College, Oxford. Elected to the House of Commons in 1950, he then lost his seat in 1955, and, while he returned in 1959, it was during his interregnum that he wrote The Future of Socialism (1956), the sacred text of Labour revisionism. It was in many ways the birth of the modernising tendency which would become New Labour, and, had Crosland done nothing else, he would have been a major influence in his party’s thinking in the second half of the 20th century,

That, however, would not have made him a big beast. Crosland was able and ambitious, and when Labour returned to power in 1964, he became minister of state at George Brown’s new, achingly 1960s Department of Economic Affairs, designed to undertake long-term planning of the economy and industry and be a counterweight to the Treasury. But after only three months, Wilson was forced to reshuffle his cabinet: Patrick Gordon Walker, his first choice for foreign secretary, had lost his seat at the general election and then failed to win at a specially engineered by-election, so had to resign. In the ensuing churn, Crosland became education and science secretary. His ally Jenkins, who had pulled ahead of him by becoming minister of aviation, outside the cabinet, was offered the Department of Education and Science, but gambled on refusing and waiting for a better offer, which soon came along when Sir Frank Soskice moved to a sinecure and Jenkins became home secretary.

Crosland would hold three cabinet positions in the first Wilson government: education secretary (1965-67), president of the Board of Trade (1967-69) and local government and regional planning secretary (1969-70). But he was still just outside the first rank of ministers. When Callaghan left the Treasury in 1967 after the devaluation of the pound, Crosland, already holding an economic portfolio, hoped to replace him, but it was Jenkins again who jumped ahead and became chancellor of the Exchequer.

His main achievement of the Labour government was to begin the widespread conversion of schools from the old tripartite system of grammar, secondary technical and secondary modern schools to comprehensives; famously, he told his wife Susan “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.” He also presaged the creation of polytechnics alongside universities in a speech of April 1965. His time at the Board of Trade was less successful; he confided to a cabinet colleague, Richard Crossman, that he had always dreaded being appointed to “this ghastly ministry which was nobody’s business”, but he accepted the role because it was seen as move into the mainstream of economic policy, at a time when the Department of Economic Affairs was being sidelined (it was abolished in 1969). It was, he acknowledged, “‘a ragbag of things that didn’t relate to one another”, and he achieved little: he announced a commission on a third airport for London, stopping for a time plans to develop Stansted, and (although he personally did not approve) oversaw the extension of a loan to the Cunard Line shipping company to allow them to complete the construction of the Queen Elizabeth 2.

By 1969 he was an aspirant big beast but beginning to look becalmed and frustrated. Crossman noted in his diary that Crosland was “a macro-economist, interested in the budget, a natural Chancellor, in fact, a disappointed Chancellor”, but Harold Wilson gave him a new post at the Department of Local Government and Regional Planning, which took in housing, local government, transport and regional plans. Although he held the office for only eight months, he shadowed its successor Department of the Environment all through the Heath government and became environment secretary himself in March 1974. Although it was initially derided by Tony Benn as “Secretary of State for England”, it was an enormous empire which controlled a variety of functions with real-life effects and was supposed to bring together economic and physical planning at the interface of national and local government.

One clear achievement was his publication in February 1970 of a White Paper entitled The Protection of the Environment: the Fight against Pollution, one of the first major acts by a British government to recognise growing environmental concerns. Although Crosland left office a few months later, the White Paper led to the establishment of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution to advise on environmental issues; it was less of a public inquiry than many royal commissions but evolved into a standing body of expert advisers, and had an extraordinarily long life, only being wound up in 2011 after 41 years and 29 major reports. Heath’s elevation of the Department of the Environment and its stewardship by the Heathite crown prince Peter Walker from 1970 to 1972 was a rising tide which lifted the boat of Crosland, as Walker’s shadow, and it allowed him to anchor himself in some of the core areas of socialist ideology: housing, homelessness, overcrowding, squalor and deprivation in general.

When Harold Wilson resigned unexpectedly in March 1976, Crosland was a big enough beast to be a credible contender in the succession. Jim Callghan, then foreign secretary, was regarded as the favourite, and Geoffrey Parkhouse in The Herald posited that Crosland would stand simply to “keep his iron in the fire” but would be aware that he might flourish under Callaghan’s leadership. It did not go well. The first ballot—the system was that only Members of Parliament had a vote—saw Crosland finish sixth and last, with Callaghan in fact marginally headed by Michael Foot. Callaghan did, however, eventually win as predicted, and appointed Crosland to replace him as foreign secretary.

This, perhaps, was his apogee as a big beast. The “obvious” choice for the Foreign Office was Crosland’s friend/rival/ex-lover Jenkins, who had already been home secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer and was now two years into a dismal second tour of the Home Office. But Jenkins was too ardently pro-European for a Labour Party then still divided on the EEC, and Callaghan was also aware that Crosland, who had supported him for the party leadership against Harold Wilson in 1963, was able, intellectually first-rate and on the centre-right of the party. There were criticisms: Nicholas Henderson, then ambassador to France and perhaps not coincidentally a friend of Jenkins, noted the hostile press and remarked with all the grandeur and hauteur of the Diplomatic Service, “I have been impressed by Crosland’s capacity for rudeness coupled with his complicated character, his unpredictability and his manifest charm”.

I have dwelt too long on Tony Crosland, because he is a fascinating figure and a striking absence from the Labour Party of the late 1970s and 1980s. The Foreign Office gave him official status as a big beast, and everyone was aware that the new prime minister was 64 years old, thinking of the maxim of young cardinals electing an old pope. There was a feeling that Crosland had unlocked a new level of his career. He was 57, an experienced cabinet minister, respected, if not perhaps loved, by many in the Labour Party, and the intellectual equal of any of his colleagues, even in a cabinet which encompassed Jenkins, Healey, Foot, Peter Shore, Shirley Williams and Harold Lever.

He faced a challenging portfolio. The referendum of June 1975 had settled the UK’s membership of the EEC for the time being, but the two pressing issues were the ongoing fishing dispute with Iceland, known as the “Third Cod War”, and the decade-old crisis over Rhodesia, where the white minority government under Ian Smith had declared independence from the crown unilaterally in 1965. Crosland quipped to his wife, “when I pop off and they cut open my heart, on it will be engraved ‘fish’ and ‘Rhodesia’”. His special adviser, David Lipsey, advised him, with one eye on his future career, to keep the United Nations and Africa as his personal responsibilities, as these were “glamorous jobs”, and suggested he limit his involvement in the UK’s presidency of the European Council of Ministers due to begin in January 1977.

It didn’t matter. At home in Oxfordshire on 13 February 1977, Crosland was working on a paper on Rhodesia, where he was determined to achieve a resolution “before I go to the Treasury” (Callaghan planned at some point that he and Healey would swap jobs). He said “Something has happened” as he suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage, fell into a coma and died six weeks later. There is now a strong mythology that the Labour right lost not only a prophet—which Crosland had already proved himself to be through his writing—but also a great leader. Is this true? The New York Times, reporting on Crosland’s death, referred to him quite casually as “a potential prime minister”. Certainly he was a major figure in the government, and the liberal Tory John Grigg remarked in The Spectator that “to listen to him was to realise how formidable he could still be, morally as well as intellectually”.

Perhaps as chancellor of the Exchequer, if the job swap with Healey had gone ahead, he would have come into his full greatness. He was probably the most able economist in the senior ranks of the Labour Party, certainly after Wilson’s retirement. But Crosland could be argumentative, abrasive and patronising, and he found dealing with the press a bore. The obvious hypothetical scenario is the 1980 Labour Party leadership election after Callaghan retired: how would Crosland have fared? In the end, it was a four-way contest among Michael Foot, Denis Healey, John Silkin and Peter Shore. Silkin had been minister of agriculture and Shore had succeeded Crosland at the Department of the Environment. It seems possible he would have headed them, but the battle was between Healey and Foot, and although Healey led 112-83 on the first ballot, it was the left-wing Foot who prevailed 139-129 on the second. Would Crosland have been able to outperform Healey? I would think it was unlikely. Although the former chancellor had lost some support by his tough management of the economy, he was a formidable debater, well known to the electorate and possessed of a cavalier warmth which Crosland, in his public persona, lacked.

If I can justify spending so long on Crosland, I think he illustrates a sub-set of the Westminster jungle which is the retrospective big beast, the if-only king across the water. This is the sort of politician who could have been a major force, perhaps even prime minister or leader of the opposition, if events had been different. In some ways, Peter Walker fits into this category: if Heath had remained Conservative leader beyond 1975, had somehow fended off the challenge from Thatcher, perhaps by indicating a timetable for stepping down, Walker would have been a leading contender to replace him. He was younger, more classless and flashier than Whitelaw, more technocratic and modern than Pym, had a headstart in cabinet experience on Heseltine. But Heath was unseated, and Walker faded into obscurity, his rehabilitation under Thatcher being only to the second rank. Likewise, if Crosland had been made chancellor ahead of Jenkins in 1967, or if he’d been given a more senior position than environment secretary in 1974, or if he hadn’t suffered that fatal stroke in 1977, perhaps he would have come closer to the very top. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. Ultimately, politics is about legacy.

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King and Allen, writing in 2010 in the last months of Gordon Brown’s government, drew a line at 2007 for their selection of big beasts. If we apply their rigorous criteria, 15 years later, would there be many additions to the list? Are big beasts becoming rarer? I will suggest a few modern beasts, and then offer some thoughts on their increasing rarity.

On the Conservative benches, the names which spring to mind are George Osborne, Boris Johnson and William Hague, with Michael Gove as a challenger. On the Labour side, one would probably choose Alistair Darling, Alan Johnson and Yvette Cooper, with a walk-on appearance by Peter Mandelson. Candidates on the cusp, who maybe still have another act, would be David Miliband and Douglas Alexander. But all of those must be qualified.

Osborne was undoubtedly a big Tory beast from 2005, when Michael Howard dramatically made him shadow chancellor weeks before his 34th birthday, to his dismissal by Theresa May in 2016, when she advised him to “go and learn some emotional intelligence”. At the Treasury for six years, he dominated the economic landscape, but he was umbilically tied to David Cameron, five years his senior. Had Cameron won the Brexit referendum in 2016 and been able to step down at a time of his own choosing, Osborne would have been an immensely strong candidate to replace him as a continuation of their project, and after William Hague’s retirement in 2015 he was the unquestioned second man in the government; he was given Hague’s honorific as first secretary of state. He had, however, no real existence independent of Cameron. When he decided not to contest the Conservative leadership in 2005, explicitly because Cameron had decided he would stand and seemed more enthusiastic, Osborne was binding himself to the older man almost completely. He effectively declared that he would only ever become an autonomous force in a post-Cameron world.

(Sidebar: Osborne stepped down from Parliament at the 2017 election and became editor of The Evening Standard. He was already a well-paid part-time adviser to financial giant BlackRock, and held research or teaching positions at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and the Hoover Institution and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. In 2021, he became a partner at boutique investment bank Robey Warshaw LLP, and was appointed chairman of the British Museum. He was mooted as a candidate for mayor of London in 2018, managing director of the International Monetary Fund in 2019 and chairman of the BBC in 2020. He now hosts the podcast Political Currency with his former Labour sparring partner Ed Balls. I thought for many years he was not yet finished in politics and might hanker for a return; he is only 52 and still ambitious. He must surely have been damaged in reputational terms by an explosive email about his private life which circulated before his wedding last summer, and I now think a resurrection is unlikely, politics having moved on. But it would not flabbergast me.)

Boris Johnson was and is sui generis. A rare bird in being a celebrity before he became a front-rank politician, he was utterly unpredictable but ambitious to the core as editor of The Spectator (1999-2005), mayor of London (2008-16) and foreign secretary (2016-18), and his following was always greater outside Parliament than among Conservative MPs. He would have been a big beast even if the stars had not aligned to allow him to become prime minister in 2019, but he was unfocused and a source of more heat than light. Johnson never had a fixed ideological agenda—even his commitment to leaving the European Union was decided absolutely at the last minute—and his motive force was his own advancement. Before his premiership began to unravel in 2022 and the Conservatives were still riding high in the polls, he had talked of a decade in Downing Street, but there was only even a hazy sense of what a Johnson-shaped Britain would look like. He described himself to colleagues as “basically a Brexity Hezza”, with Michael Heseltine’s taste for grands prôjets and state intervention, but had socially liberal views except, it came to seem, on immigration. His legacy will be hotly contested for many years to come, but I will make two predictions: however much Lord Frost, Nadine Dorries and others may wish it, Johnson will not return to front-line politics; and in the end his premiership will be judged largely negatively, at least as a wasted opportunity.

William Hague is singular in another way, in that he was not necessarily a big beast even after he had been leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001. He had come to the leadership only after an electoral disaster which had swept away many potential rivals—mostly obviously Michael Portillo but also Malcolm Rifkind and perhaps Ian Lang—while Michael Heseltine had suffered an angina attack two days after the election, having a stent inserted, and declined to consider a leadership bid on medical advice. Hague was clever, articulate and an excellent speaker, but youth and inexperience limited his ability to make any headway against Tony Blair at the height of his power. When Cameron became party leader, however, he agreed to serve as shadow foreign secretary and “senior member of the shadow cabinet”, and in 2010 took over the Foreign Office and acted as deputy prime minister in all but name.

Knowing that he had already been leader and having seen the worst of front-line politics gave Hague a freedom and a lightness of touch to allow him to thrive in a way he never had before, and I would argue it was only in the late 2000s that he genuinely attained big beast status. In January 2008, he gave an exceptional performance in the House of Commons, twitting Gordon Brown about the prospect of Tony Blair holding the office of permanent president of the European Council, and it was a demonstration of a politician who was completely relaxed, having absolute mastery of his brief, able to cloak very sharp barbs in a veil of light-hearted humour and, most importantly, free from the chest-tightening, choking bands of ambition. He was a dominant foreign secretary from 2010 to 2014 and then a capable leader of the House of Commons (2014-15), leaving the Commons aged only 54 and becoming a youthful grandee and media sage. He has never looked like a man who has regretted his decisions.

I nominate Michael Gove as a possible big beast because he has spent all but 13 months since 2010 in cabinet, holding six separate offices. He was a radical and transformative education secretary (2010-14), a surprisingly effective and popular justice secretary (2015-16) and threw himself into the job of secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs (2017-19) with unpredicted enthusiasm. Having destroyed Boris Johnson’s leadership chances in 2016, he ran for the job himself in 2019, only missing out to a place on the final ballot to Jeremy Hunt by two votes. He has never been less than fascinating to watch, and I argued last summer that “he will be seen as one of the most important figures of the Conservative period in government”.

Gove is fiercely intellectual and restlessly curious, and has name is mentioned almost every time there is a cabinet vacancy or an impending reshuffle: he was mooted as a replacement for Suella Braverman as home secretary only last November, as he had been rumoured as a successor to Priti Patel in August 2021 and to Amber Rudd in April 2018. In June 2016, Sebastian Payne in The Financial Times proposed him as foreign secretary, and he was touted for the same post when Johnson resigned in July 2018. He supposedly sought to replace Philip Hammond as chancellor of the Exchequer in November 2017, and the bookmakers regarded him as the favourite for a while. Liz Truss even offered to appoint him ambassador to Israel. That he was a plausible candidate for all of these roles suggests at least elements of the big beast.

My Labour nominees are similarly hedged with qualifications. Alistair Darling, who died recently, was a workhorse of the Blair administration: chief secretary to the Treasury (1997-98), work and pensions secretary (1998-2002), transport secretary (2002-06) and trade and industry secretary (2006-07). He was never likely to challenge Gordon Brown, a close colleague, for the premiership, but was his almost automatic choice as chancellor in 2007, remarking that the economic landscape was “extraordinarily tranquil”. How quickly things change. At the Treasury throughout the global financial crisis, he was a calm, careful but decisive minister, a vital buttress to Brown’s economic policy, and Chris Giles recently judged in The Financial Times that he will be remembered as “one of the most consequential postwar chancellors in modern British history”.

Darling left the front bench in the wake of Labour’s defeat at the 2010 general election. He initially indicated that he might only “take a year out”, and from 2012 to 2014 he chaired the Better Together campaign which opposed Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum, an indication not only of his stature at Westminster and in Scotland but also of his ability to appeal across traditional party lines. But the comeback never came, and he left the House of Commons in 2015. Like George Osborne but a generation older, he existed in the shadow of Gordon Brown. Perhaps he could have cemented his big beast status by seeking to serve under Ed Miliband after 2010, but he turned 57 a few months after Labour’s defeat, and, as his FT obituary noted, his “greatest love was not politics, but his family and friends”. There were rumours of a comeback in 2012 which proved to be groundless. Asked about a return to the front line in 2013, he was cautious: once the Scottish referendum was over, he said, “I will decide what I am going to do, which will include whether I stand again and, if I stand again, whether I want to come back to the front bench”.

He never did. When Darling announced in November 2014 that he would leave the Commons, it was amid rumours that he might replace Ed Balls as shadow chancellor. He confessed that he was “sad in many ways” to be stepping down, but he added that he was “still relatively young” (he was just about to turn 61) and wanted the opportunity to pursue other interests. In any event, he successor as Labour candidate in Edinburgh South West, Edinburgh City Council veteran Ricky Henderson, was defeated by Joanna Cherry of the SNP as Labour was almost wiped out in Scotland, retaining only one seat (Edinburgh South, held by current shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray). Darling would have found little opportunity or cheer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. So he remained a half-realised big beast, a formidable operator but enjoying his best days at a time when the leadership was not an option.

Alan Johnson had a brief time in the sun. General secretary of the Union of Communication Workers (1992-95) and then jointly of its successor, the Communication Workers Union (1995-97), he was elected as MP for Hull West and Hessle in the Labour landslide of 1997 and was a junior trade and industry minister two years later. A likeable, relaxed Londoner who had worked as a postman and had a good rapport with voters, he was promoted to cabinet as work and pensions secretary after only seven years in Parliament, moving to the Department of Trade and Industry in 2005. As was common in the latter stages of the Blair/Brown government, he was shuffled frequently, serving as education secretary from 2006 to 2007 and health secretary from 2007 to 2009, but he laid some claim to big beast status when he stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party on the retirement of John Prescott in 2007. He gained 73 nominations, more than any of the other five candidates, and topped the second, third and fourth rounds of voting, but he lost by a tiny margin (50.4 per cent to 49.6 per cent) to Harriet Harman in the final round.

He cemented his place as a big beast when he replaced Jacqui Smith as home secretary in June 2009. Johnson had proven his standing in the party during the election for deputy leader, polling especially strongly among MPs and MEPs, and his charm and air of solid competence gave him a formidable reputation. He had dismissed the idea of his replacing Brown after Labour lost the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in May 2008—his loyalty was repaid with his promotion to the Home Office—but he remained a popular choice when alternatives to the prime minister were discussed in the declining months and years of the Brown government.

Johnson’s time came in 2010. When the general election resulted in a hung parliament, Brown initially refused to resign as prime minister—he was not constitutionally obliged to do so unless it was clear there was a plausible alternative government or he was defeated in the House of Commons—but it quickly became obvious that, however the three main parties combined to form an administration which would command a majority, Brown’s departure was a sine qua non. Talking to The Guardian almost three years later, Johnson revealed that talks between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had broken down on Sunday 9 May over changing the electoral system for the House of Commons, so that evening the Liberal Democrats had approached Labour. A deal had been sketched out whereby Brown would resign, and Johnson seemed the obvious successor because he would pledge “just to hold things together for three years and then hand over to the younger generation”.

Leading a coalition would be “a shit job to be done for a period of time”, and, as home secretary, he felt it would inevitably fall to someone in one of the great offices of state. Darling as chancellor seemed to have no desire to do it, and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, would, it was assumed, wait until Johnson stepped down in 2013 or so. On Monday 10 May, “we really felt there was a deal there” and he went to bed that night having decided to stand for the leadership. “I think I would have been OK for those circumstances, yeah; to get the party through that period.” Labour was, however, outflanked on Tuesday when David Cameron offered a “proper and full coalition”, and the following day the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats concluded a coalition agreement for the whole parliament. Brown resigned and Cameron became prime minister with Nick Clegg as deputy prime minister.

In the ensuing labour leadership contest, however, despite having come close to the premiership, Johnson, while calling for “the broadest possible contest”, ruled himself out and threw his supported behind David Miliband, whom he described as “a remarkable politician and his talent is to put very complex ideas into clear language”. There were initially six candidates, with left-wing Hayes and Harlington MP John McDonnell withdrawing before the campaign, and the result surprised Westminster: David Miliband, easily at the top of the pack with 81 nominations, headed his younger brother Ed, latterly energy and climate change secretary, in the first three rounds of voting but was narrowly defeated in the final round as Ed’s strong support from the trades unions saw him take 50.7 per cent of the vote to David’s 49.3 per cent.

Although it was not immediately apparent, Johnson’s chance had gone. Ed Miliband made him shadow chancellor but he was not a success. Lacking any real experience in an economic portfolio, and facing a fresh and confident George Osborne, he failed to make an impression, in one interview appearing not to know what the National Insurance rate was. In January 2011, after barely three months in the role, he announced he was leaving front-line politics. He cited “difficult” issues in his private life, and it transpired that his wife had been having an affair with his personal protection officer (home secretaries are given police protection). Johnson had been a big beast for perhaps four years, but in that short time his potential had been genuine, and it is easy to imagine he might have beaten both Milibands to the party leadership if he had stood in 2010. But, like William Hague, he took himself out of the running and out of the political jungle, and seems content with his afterlife.

I will pass over Yvette Cooper briefly, as she is still very much a big beast, and can reasonably expect to become home secretary in a Labour government later this year. Although she is only 54—the age at which Hague left the House of Commons—she has enormous experience. She was elected as MP for Pontefract and Castleford in 1997, soon married to Ed Balls who was then Gordon Brown’s economic adviser at the Treasury. Like Johnson, she was promoted to government in 1999, serving as a junior health minister (1999-2002), parliamentary secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department (2002-03), minister for regeneration in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2003-05) and then housing and planning minister (2005-08). Attending cabinet for her final year in that last post, she then became a full member as chief secretary to the Treasury (2008-09), and in June 2009 she was promoted to work and pensions secretary. Cooper could perfectly reasonably have offered herself as a candidate in the 2010 leadership election but instead backed her husband. Balls performed creditably but not outstandingly, a distant third to the Miliband brothers, and husband and wife were both appointed to Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet that October.

Cooper topped the ballot for the shadow cabinet, the last time elections were held for the party’s top team, and was initially named shadow foreign secretary: formidably clever, with a first in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard and an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics, she seemed slightly miscast in an international role, the half-serious joke at Westminster being that Miliband had not named her shadow chancellor because her husband, shadow home secretary, coveted the job. Jack Straw, who had been foreign secretary from 2001 to 2005, damned her with faint praise when he said “she’ll be able to hack this job, she is intelligent and warm and has a decent personality”. She admitted she had only made “two or three” foreign trips in her 11-year ministerial career, but she was willing to think creatively and from a blank slate on Labour foreign policy. When Johnson resigned, however, Balls eventually became shadow chancellor and she moved to a perhaps more comfortable portfolio as shadow home secretary.

Cooper was shadow home secretary for the rest of the parliament, a formidable opponent for Theresa May and a strong Commons performer. After the general election of 2015, in which Balls was defeated in his Morley and Outwood constituency, she stood for the leadership when Ed Miliband stood down. Jeremy Corbyn, to widespread astonishment, won convincingly, and Cooper came in third, two per cent behind Andy Burnham and well ahead of Liz Kendall. Having been on the front bench for 16 years, and deeply out of sympathy with the new régime, she declined to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. In 2016, when the egregious Keith Vaz was forced to resign as chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee after being accused of paying male prostitutes for unprotected sex and offering to buy them Class A drugs, Cooper stood to succeed him and won convincingly over three other candidates.

The chairmanship of a select committee proved a good platform to maintain a public profile, and Cooper did it well. She was a calm but incisive inquisitor and restored much-needed propriety to the committee’s work after the long, grim Vaz years. In 2021, Sir Keir Starmer, seeking to strengthen his front-bench team, invited her to return to the shadow cabinet in her previous role as shadow home secretary. She has been an effective performer and is among the best of Starmer’s prospective ministers. By now I think she has a very strong claim to big beast status: but when did she first attain it? Certainly after the 2010 election, I would say, when she topped the shadow cabinet elections, but perhaps not until that changing of the Labour Party’s guard with the departure of Gordon Brown. But as she is only in her mid-50s and has yet to hold a great office of state, her career is still a work in progress.

I mention Peter Mandelson out of a slight sense of mischief. I will admit freely that, for all I am a Tory and he was the great enemy in the 1990s, relishing his reputation as the “Prince of Darkness”, I have a strange affection for Mandelson. He is considerably nicer than his (carefully cultivated) reputation suggests, and is enormously able and thoughtful. When the BBC screened its brilliant five-part documentary Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution in October 2021, it confirmed me in my existing view, that the only two people who genuinely understood the task facing the Labour Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had the imagination to grasp what had to be done were Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. He was also, in my view, an extremely good Northern Ireland secretary. Deeply moved by the experience of the families of victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing, he personally donated £10,000 to their campaign to bring a civil suit against the alleged bombers. In 2009, four members of the Real IRA were eventually found liable for the attack which killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins.

Before he left the House of Commons in 2004 to become one of the UK’s European commissioners, where he was responsible for trade, Mandelson was not a big beast. Positively unpopular in many sections of his own party, he was prized for his organisational and strategic skills, and his attempts to forge an independent cabinet career was hampered by having to resign twice, from the Department of Trdae and Industry in 1998 and the Northern Ireland Office in 2001. However, in 2008, Gordon. Brown, seeking to shore up his troubled government, nominated Mandelson for a peerage and appointed him secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform (a recast version of his old job at the DTI). Sauntering into Downing Street in a vivid raspberry sweater under his suit, he seemed to bring back a whisper of New Labour’s golden days, and his experience both in Westminster and in Brussels brought real weight to the cabinet. He quickly proved an effective secretary of state and became regarded as the unofficial deputy prime minister.

When Brown shuffled his cabinet in June 2009, Mandelson’s empire absorbed the short-lived Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and he became secretary of state for business, innovation and skills. He was given the additional titles of first secretary of state and lord president of the Council and was a member of 35 of the cabinet’s 43 committees and sub-committees, more than the prime minister, the chancellor of the Exchequer or the foreign secretary. This was his zenith as a big beast, and I think there is a partial parallel with William Hague’s second front-bench incarnation. Mandelson was relaxed. As a peer he had not even the faintest chance of challenging Brown’s position as prime minister directly—though that would have been an unlikely prospect under any circumstances—but he had a lightness of touch and a humour which seemed to make him more influential and weighty. An interview with The Financial Times in June 2009 showed him as a minister formidably familiar with every part of his brief, fluent when talking of the government’s wider strategy and with an impressive grasp of politics both domestically and internationally. It was no surprise that Brown put him in charge of the party’s general election campaign in 2010.

I qualify Mandelson’s status as a big beast because in terms of active government service it was very short, less than two years, and as a peer he was slightly detached from everyday politics. But he was, for a time, probably more influential than even Brown himself in some ways, able to reach into any policy area he wanted, and massively influential both strategically and presentationally. And he remains a huge figure: after leaving cabinet in 2010, he founded Global Counsel, an international consultancy which now has around 150 employees, and has personal and business links which extend around the world. He is a close confidant of Sir Keir Starmer, so who knows…?

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This has been a rather longer journey than I’d expected, but I will conclude with some thoughts on the status of big beasts in recent years. We should start with the caveat that it is the nature of politics and political commentary that the idea of a big beast is sometimes not apparent at the time, or, conversely, can be applied by contemporaries but fail to stand the test of time. To take one example, in the darkest days of Thatcher’s early premiership in 1980-81, when it was not at all clear that her economic policies would ever pay dividends, she seemed obdurate and isolated and the parliamentary Conservative Party was filled with MPs who had never supported her or had done so without wholehearted conviction, there was a real sense that she might fall and be replaced. Real and self-appointed grandees with long faces and agonising doubts were not in short supply, and some of them would have been considered towards the bigger end of the bestial spectrum. Today, however, they survive as footnotes: honourable men, mostly—and they were all men—patriots and public servants, in whom ambition was rarely a ravening or overpowering motivation. But Francis Pym, Ian Gilmour, Jim Prior and others have faded because they lacked something, whether it was brilliance, influence, longevity or support.

Alternatively, to be bipartisan without labouring the point, look at the cabinet Tony Blair assembled in 2005. He had already been prime minister for eight years, and, as Francis Urquhart remarked, “Nothing lasts forever. Even the longest, the most glittering reign must come to an end someday.” Looking at his ministers, there were people of ability and heft, but many of them would be nothing more than memories within five or six years: Charles Clarke, John Reid, David Blunkett, Ruth Kelly, Patricia Hewitt. Dame Margaret Beckett soldiers on as a Member of Parliament and chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy but is more on the dignified than the efficient side of the constitution.

But there is an issue of nostalgia, of “fings ain’t what they used to be”, which can lead us both to inflate the reputations of those who have gone and diminish those who are currently serving. I was struck particularly by an article in The Spectator from 2021 by Patrick O’Flynn, admittedly a man who enjoys cynicism like a drunkard enjoys booze. It was entitled Labour’s lightweight shadow cabinet, and its main point, with which I largely agree, was that Sir Keir Starmer’s top team is a collection of young but untested politicians and those who may have a little more experience but lack gravitas, fame or the power to excite the public consciousness. Where I think I part company with O’Flynn is in his harking back to the Blair era as a kind of golden era, or in his words “a veritable march of the big beasts”. Some of those he named met the criteria, like Gordon Brown and, up to a point, John Prescott, but when he goes on to identify Robin Cook, Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Mo Mowlam, I worry that we are devaluing the currency.

Cook was a large figure in his time, devastatingly sharp at the despatch box and with a real sense of mission, but he was not as popular as we now imagine: his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has given him the mark of a secular saint, aided by his untimely death two years later from a heart attack. In any case, the uncomfortable truth, in my view, is that he was not a success as foreign secretary, and when he was moved to become leader of the House of Commons, where he was a success, in 2001, it was part of a process of marginalisation. His resignation speech was eloquent, but the day after he delivered it, the House approved military action by an overwhelming majority of 412 to 149.

There are similar qualifications to be made about the others. Blunkett was ambitious and forceful, but had to resign from cabinet twice, as home secretary in 2004 and as work and pensions secretary in 2005, and was never really an influential figure from the backbenches. Jack Straw was a reliable and competent minister who knew how closely he needed to cleave to Blair without becoming a puppet, and, like Cook, was a good leader of the House of Commons in 2006-07, but for some reason was never quite able to break free of the jostling pack of second-rank ministers and had no independent following in the party. Mo Mowlam, another secular saint partly because of her honest, straightforward humanity and partly because of her illness and early death, and was an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, even if her precise share of credit is a matter of debate. But for whatever reason, and her health may have played a major role, she was not able to get on top of her subsequent job as Cabinet Office minister and, as she described it, “minister for the Today programme”. She was undoubtedly intelligent and charismatic, though she could make poor judgements and was not liked by everyone, but she was never a contender for a senior post in government nor able to call on the support of an ideological or personal faction.

O’Flynn does point out two factors which then and now affected the top of the Labour Party: firstly the departure, for various reasons, of some of its “better media performers” (into which category he puts Chuka Umunna, Caroline Flint, Luciana Berger, Ian Austin, Jenny Chapman and Tom Watson, which is I think a mixed bag); secondly, the decision by other potential big beasts to step away from the shadow cabinet, and he points to Yvette Cooper (see above), then chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and Dan Jarvis, the MP for Barnsley Central who double-hatted as mayor of South Yorkshire between 2018 and 2022.

It is also true that Brexit, as one of the deepest fissures in politics for decades, certainly since appeasement in the 1930s, forced some heavyweight figures out of the front line. This has been particularly true in the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson’s withdrawal of the whip from 21 of his own MPs in September 2019 curtailed several parliamentary careers and created some substantial exiles; Kenneth Clarke, discussed above, was in any case coming to the end of his Commons career (he was then Father of the House, having been elected in 1970), while some, like Guto Bebb, Anne Milton and Alistair Burt, were never candidates for the Tory Mount Olympus, but the idiosyncratic Rory Stewart walked away from the Commons and the party, Greg Clark, despite a very brief cabinet revival in the dying days of the Johnson premiership, is now chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Justine Greening left Parliament and David Gauke and Dominic Grieve both stood as independent candidates in the 2019 general election and were defeated. These were not big beasts at the time, and may never have been, but they were able, dedicated ministers whose careers were curtailed.

I would also argue that the climate of modern politics, with its 24-hour news cycle and complete, often brutal, exposure of every facet of people’s characters, makes it more difficult to generate the kind of aura from which previous generations had in some ways benefited. Social media can highlight and punish the slightest awkward phrase, ill-considered thought or long-ago misjudgement. Moreover we are going through a period, which may or may not pass, of extreme cynicism and sourness about politics, politicians and political institutions. Only nine per cent of voters trust politicians to tell the truth, 12 per cent think Parliament has done a very or fairly good job in “debating issues of public concern in a sensible and considered way”, almost half think MPs are lazy and three-quarters think Members of Parliament are only in politics to help themselves.

In this climate it is, I think, harder than ever to be a big beast. There may also be some connection to the fact that membership of political parties is extremely low; while it was atypical that the Conservative Party could muster nearly three million members in the 1950s, the latest figures compiled by the House of Commons Library show the Labour Party, comfortably the biggest, having fewer than 450,000 members, even after a vast surge in membership in the mid-2010s, while the Conservatives have around 172,000 members and the Liberal Democrats around 75,000. Joining a political party is now a niche interest.

Are we blinding ourselves with cynicism? Are we failing to spot big beasts who would have been obvious 20 years ago, or whose stature we will see only in retrospect? On the Labour side, I’ve already dealt with Yvette Cooper: if she were to have a successful stint of four or five years at the Home Office and proved able to make lasting change in that most dysfunctional of departments, I think her claim would become stronger, perhaps unchallengeable. It is not impossible that Ed Miliband could have a Hague-style career of an unsuccessful tenure as party leader (2010-15) but then real policy success running the Labour government’s environment and climate agenda, but that is for him to achieve. He does not have Hague’s dominance of the Commons or lightness of touch, but the opportunity is there to build on the strange affection which is afforded to former leaders who are willing to serve under their successors for a common sense of purpose—Alec Home benefited from this, though his palpable and absolute decency and lack of what we used to call “side” were bonuses—and create a genuine legacy.

For any other potential big beasts in the Labour Party, I think it is simply to early to tell. Rachel Reeves has been talked up as a technocratic and economically literate chancellor-in-waiting, though I think some of the expectations on her are unreasonable. She was indeed an analyst at the Bank of England, but for four years at a junior level, and I can’t help but think it is telling that a fellow new recruit at Threadneedle Street in 2000 was one Matthew John David Hancock, who soared for a while in politics but will not be remembered as a big beast. Bridget Phillipson, shadow education secretary, and Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, are in line to take over enormous and important portfolios which offer career-defining opportunities, but both are still very young (Phillipson has only just turned 40, Streeting will be 41 later this month) so they have a long way to go but a long time to search for glory.

In the Conservative Party, Liz Truss clearly thinks of herself as a big beast and is largely unchastened by the dismal grind of her 49-day premiership. Last summer, I suggested that a project was underway to rehabilitate her and rewrite the narrative of her time in Downing Street. She cannot be accused of lacking determination or self-belief, but I still think her public image, outside a narrow sliver of the Tory Right, is too badly tarnished to resurrect much of a front-line career. Stranger things have happened, but, one must admit, not many. I also suggested that Jeremy Hunt’s surprising late revival as chancellor of the Exchequer has brought his stock up in some circles, but, again, unless something extraordinary happens, like a well-aimed budget combining with a sudden economic upswing to improve the government’s fortunes hugely, he will be recalled at best as towards the front of the second rank.

A recent poll for Conservative Home suggested that the three leading contenders to take over the party, with the tacit assumption that the government is defeated at the general election and Sunak quits rapidly, were all women: Kemi Badenoch (38 per cent), Penny Mordaunt (23 per cent) and Suella Braverman (15 per cent). I remain of the opinion that Braverman’s appeal is limited and diminishing, especially as others muscle in on the issue of immigration and nationality of which she made so much, and it would be a mistake to propel her to the leadership, for which I simply don’t think she is equipped, nor does she have the kind of public appeal to make a success of it.

I am, readers will know, a solid Mordaunt fan, and worked on her leadership campaign in 2022; she has an easy mastery of the Commons from the despatch box, is likeable and human, and has an expansive, inclusive and optimistic conception of the world which could be electorally potent and, for a while in the summer of 2022, seemed to appeal both to Conservative voters and to potential supporters.

Badenoch is a curious figure, generally regarded as socially conservative but committed to free-market economic liberalism. She has determination, directness and courage, and is unafraid to speak in philosophical and ideological terms, citing the late Tory sage Sir Roger Scruton and the eminent US economist Professor Thomas Sowell as influences. It is possible to imagine her creating a kind of political offering based on robust debate, clear ideological purpose and ironclad self-confidence which could, just perhaps, begin to change the political weather. But we are a long way from that at the moment.

James Cleverly enjoyed a generally calm and positive tenure as foreign secretary (2022-23) and had no wish to leave the department, but his new job as home secretary has led him into much more politically charged waters. He has had a recent spate of ill-judged outbursts, and their lasting impact cannot yet be judged, but he is good at “doing human”, a rarity at the moment, and he lacks the baggage of educational or socio-economic privilege which dogs some of his colleagues. It is harder to grasp, however, how he sees the world in broader terms, or how he would like it to be. Like the others I have mentioned, his is a career still in its middle stages, so we cannot rush to judgement yet.

To conclude, I think the prevailing political climate makes it more difficult to become a big beast. Perhaps politicians are inherently smaller; certainly we are more unforgiving towards them and know far more about them than was the case when King and Allen wrote their survey in 2010. Moreover, the additional insights we have now tend to be negative ones. We see minor stumbles and indiscretions, and are more suspicious of declarations of high purpose or idealism. It may simply be time to retire Michael Fraser’s epigrammatic description, or else pull it apart and rebuild it in radically different terms. It may even be that we no longer expect or even want or politicians to be big beasts, but regard them as less elevated, less powerful and less hedged about with mystique. It’s a discussion that political scientists should have, though a change of government, if it comes later this year, could alter once again the context of how we look at our leaders. But in the end, we need to be aware that we, as observers of politics, as voters and fundamentally as citizens are participants in the political process. We can demand a new type of leader if we want, a new type of big beast, but we have to accept and absorb that responsibility. In the end, we do get the politicians we deserve.