The Greatest PMs we never had?

I see the BBC has another list ranking 20th century Prime Ministers, with Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher not surprsingly coming out on top, Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden at the bottom, and Tony Blair somewhere in the middle.

I reckon that's probably about right, although I would rate Churchill higher than Thatcher and both James Callaghan and John Major higher than Francis Beckett does - both were dealt an impossible hand by their small parliamentary majorities. I also think he rates Harold Macmillan far too highly - the man was essentially a poseur who allowed Britain to stagnate under his seven-year leadership.

Meanwhile, as my contribution to the debate, here's my list of the Top 10 20th century figures never to become Prime Minister. Or at least, in one case, not yet.

1. Denis Healey
2. R.A. Butler
3. Hugh Gaitskell
4. Joseph Chamberlain
5. Gordon Brown
6. Enoch Powell
7. Iain Macleod
8. Michael Heseltine
9. John Smith
10.Roy Jenkins

Not all of these men could realistically have become Prime Minister - three of them, Gaitskell, Macleod and Smith - died before they had a real opportunity. But some of them would have done a far better job than the men they were forced to give way to - notably Healey (Callaghan), Butler (Home), Brown (Blair) and Heseltine (Major.)

Enoch Powell is of course the great enigma in my list. Had he, rather than Heath, won the Tory leadership in 1965, would "Thatcherism" have arrived 15 years earlier? Probably the country wasn't ready for it then, and might never have been ready for Enoch. But a genuinely great man nonetheless.

Home Thoughts From Abroad....

...was of course the title of Roy Jenkins' 1979 Dimbleby Lecture in which he first floated the possibility of the breakaway party that eventually became the SDP. Well, staying at my wife's cousin's cottage in South Normandy over the past week or so, I've been having a few home thoughts of my own.

As anyone who has ever been to Northern France in August will surely know, the place is pretty well deserted at this time of year. Much of the population heads for the South at the height of summer, and over recent days we have driven through fairly sizeable villages where there is not a soul to be seen.

The autoroutes are much the same. We made the journey between Calais and Rouen - a distance of 205km - in just under 1hr 40 mins, the equivalent of driving from Sheffield to the M25 in a similar time. It just couldn't be done in Britain any more, but in France, you can do it without even breaking the speed limit.

The overwhelming impression - from driving anyplace or simply from looking across the fields from the garden of our cottage - is that this is a country with a lot of that precious commodity, space.

You can get Radio Four longwave over here too, so we have been listening in each morning to catch up on the news from home and to express mild disappointment if not surprise that neither Prescott nor Blair have resigned yet.

In fact all the stories in our first week over here were about something else entirely - the influx of Eastern European immigrants into the UK, and Ruth Kelly's big speech, echoing john Reid, echoing Michael Howard, confirming that it is no longer "racist" to want to have a debate about immigration.

Personally, I think the Government has been pretty shameless in reaching this position, giving its denigration of Howard over the immigration issue during last year's election campaign, but nevertheless, it is the right one.

The debate about how many more people we should allow into the UK is no longer about race. It is about infrastructure, about space.

We are an overcrowded island. I have, increasingly, come to the reluctant conclusion that continued large scale inward migration into Britain, which may be desirable for all sorts of social, cultural and economic reasons, can only be achieved at further massive cost to our environment, to those remnants of rural life that remain.

Doubtless in some eyes to express sentiments such as these will make me a reactionary old Tory, one of those misty-eyed Daily Telegraph readers who wish the country was still as it was during the 1950s.

But what you get when you come to France - with a similar population to the UK's, but about four times the area - is a glimpse of a rural idyll of a much older vintage, the lost England of Thomas Hardy, of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie before the coming of the roads.

Is it so very wrong to want to preserve at least some of that back home?

Tories go into conference season in by far the best shape

As I said in Friday's post on David Cameron's latest attempt to solve the West Lothian Question, last week's Tory aims and values statement was high on woffle and low on specifics.

Despite that, and the ongoing internal difficulties over candidate selection, however, it is clear that the Conservatives go into next month's party conference season in far better shape than their opponents.

Unlike both Sir Menzies Campbell and Tony Blair, Cameron can go to his conference knowing there is absolutely no threat to his leadership.

More on this theme in weekly podcast which is available HERE.