For the first two centuries of the British premiership, the Prime Minister tended to emerge from a privileged background.
Some level of privilege was necessary for a political career. Politicians did not receive a salary during this era, and independent wealth, and/or a powerful patron, were necessary prerequisites to involvement in political life. The aristocracy had a more natural route into politics. During the 18th Century, many parliamentary seats were ‘rotten’ or ‘pocket’ boroughs, allowing people like the Duke of Newcastle to wield considerable numbers of obedient MPs. They could also count on hereditary wealth to support their careers. Many inherited a peerage, granting them political status and Westminster access from a relatively early age. Consequently, the 18th and 19th Centuries would see many aristocrats become Prime Minister including the Duke of Newcastle, the Duke of Grafton, Lord Rosebery, and, the longest serving of the Victorian age, Lord Salisbury.
This did not prevent the emergence of some Prime Ministers from the middle class. Benjamin Disraeli was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London. His experience of London gave him a greater breadth of experience of social realities than many of his more privileged fellow backbenchers, informing his philosophy of ‘one nation’ Conservatism. Likewise, David Lloyd George grew up in relatively humble circumstances in rural Wales (he spoke Welsh as his first language), which helped to inform his early radical politics.
Britain would wait until the 20th Century before its first authentically working-class Prime Minister. Three changes made this possible. First, the 1911 Parliament Act introduced a salary for MPs for the first time, meaning that professional politicians could make a career of their work and need not rely on independent sources of wealth. Second, the 1918 Representation of the People Act introduced mass democracy, with all men over 21 receiving the vote and all propertied women over 30. Thirdly, the creation of the Labour Party in 1900 meant that a party genuinely representing the working class emerged for the first time, and, as such, was much more likely to promote people of working-class background to become MPs.
After the onset of universal suffrage, the first Prime Minister with a working-class background came in 1923 in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929-35). He was born in 1866, the son of Anne Ramsay, a Lossiemouth seamstress, and John MacDonald, a local farm labourer. But his parents did not marry, though they had planned to, and John MacDonald disappeared from both Ramsay’s life and history soon afterwards. The Victorian ‘stain’ of illegitimacy would haunt him throughout his life, and he later wrote that ‘As far back as I can remember I had a grudge against the world rankling in me’.
He grew up in a tiny two-roomed Scottish cottage, and the experience of deprivation shaped his politics. Even before he left Lossiemouth during the 1880s, he became involved in radical politics. He later said that ‘the whole of my part of Scotland was radical, and we seemed to have been born with the democratic spirit strongly developed in us’.
Though MacDonald did not reflect much on the circumstances of his early life in his later writings, it certainly influenced his outlook on the world. It instilled in him a sense of rugged independence. Decades later, he would cheerfully trespass on the property of local lairds, and he adamantly declared in 1921 that ‘in Scotland the feeling still remains common amongst the people that private property in land is on a totally different footing to private property in anything else, that trespass is no illegality, that poaching either for rabbit or trout, is no crime, and that access to mountains is a common right’.
While himself from a privileged background, experience of social conditions greatly influenced Clement Attlee. Thus far, his life had been conventional – privately schooled at Haileybury, followed by Oxford University, and legal education at Inner Temple. At this time, he described his politics as ‘conservative’. But, in 1906, he began volunteering with Haileybury House, a club for working class boys in the East End of London. But his experience of East London would greatly change his world view. He lived for fourteen years in the East End, seeing the social conditions first hand. He wrote that ‘I soon began to realise the curse of casual labour. I got to know what slum landlordism and sweating meant. I understood why the Poor Law was so hated. I learned also why there were rebels.’ This influenced his decision to join the Labour Party, and he would become one of the most successful Prime Ministers, founding the modern welfare state.
He later wrote that ‘the practical experience I got in those days of how poor people live was a great help to me in after-years’ remembering an example of how civil servants proposed a fuel-rationing scheme with an emphasis on encouraging householders to store coal, which Attlee rejected by observing that ‘many people had nowhere to store it’.
During the Post War era, political leadership was far more likely to be from a non-privileged background. Between 1964 and 1997, every Prime Minister had been educated at non-fee paying schools. All of the Prime Ministers of this era came from relatively humble backgrounds, as did Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Liz Truss in more recent times.
Jim Callaghan (1977-79) grew up in deprived circumstances during the early 1920s. His father had died when Callaghan was nine, and he subsequently grew up in coastal Brixham in Devon.
‘On Saturday mornings I was sent with a large sack to the shipyard where I was allowed to pick up the discarded pieces of wood from under the keels of the trawlers that were even then being built. This helped us out with fuel.’ (Callaghan, p. 33).
He wrote that on occasions, his midday meal was ‘no more than bread and dripping with a cup of cocoa made from hot water’. He wrote that while ‘I cannot say that I felt deprived at the time…I became, and shall always remain, an advocate of universal school dinners’. It was only the creation of the first Labour government in 1924 that introduced widow’s pensions, which helped his mother to rent rooms to live in.
John Major (1990-97) initially grew up in a relatively prosperous middle class household, but after his father’s business ventures took a turn for the worse during the 1950s his family moved to less auspicious circumstances. He lived in an apartment in Brixton, sharing a single lavatory with all of the tenants, with no bathroom. Fellow tenants included a middle aged cat-burglar, a Jamaican man later imprisoned for wounding a policeman, and three Irish tax dodgers.
He later recalled that ‘there was never much money in the household. Often the larder was bare…’ until his older brother Terry was paid. Later, as an adult, he had to cope with the ‘degrading’ experience of unemployment. When he was Prime Minister, during the 1992 election, the Conservatives ran one of their most famous election posters, asking ‘What does the Conservative Party offer a working class kid from Brixton? They made him Prime Minister’. In power, Major spoke frequently about his aspiration for a ‘classless society’, influenced by his upbringing.
Of course, it is not necessarily the case that more humble beginnings mean more success. MacDonald was a historic Prime Minister, as the first Labour one, but he was unsuccessful compared to his more privileged rival Stanley Baldwin. Jim Callaghan was well liked, and was one of the longest serving Cabinet ministers in recent history, but his premiership was a struggle, and ultimately went down to a heavy defeat in 1979.
The changing social backgrounds of Prime Ministers reflect changing Britain and the shift in power from a landowning aristocracy to a more democratic basis.
