Upon walking into Number Ten Downing Street on the 20th July of this year, Andy Burnham may well already have found himself in reluctant agreement with Margaret Thatcher’s glum assertion that ‘being prime minister is a lonely job.’(1) Though lonely, however, Mr Burnham may console himself with the thought that he is in by no means a unique position. He is the twelfth prime minister of the twenty-eight since 1900 to have taken power following the resignation of a leader from his own party, rather than following a general election, and not – as he has indicated – planning on facing the electorate for a further few years.(2) Bearing this in mind, he might consider turning to the wisdom of those former PMs for aid in his attempt to escape Britain’s present economic and political quagmire.
Wisdom, alas, is not to be found everywhere amongst those eleven erstwhile premiers. In fact, their ranks contain some of the previous and present centuries’ less illustrious, and even occasionally ignominious, occupants of Number Ten. Arthur Balfour took office in 1902, succeeding his uncle, Lord Salisbury. He resigned in 1905, hoping that the resulting Liberal minority government would fracture, ultimately positioning his own party to win at the next election. However, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, called an immediate general election and battered Balfour’s Conservatives in a historic victory.(3) The legacy of Neville Chamberlain, another of the eleven, will forever be tied to the policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, most famously at Munich in 1938. Sir Anthony Eden’s reputation was permanently damaged by the Suez Crisis, his handling of which has led him to the bottom of historians’ rankings of twentieth-century PMs.(4) The less said about Liz Truss, the better.
Others among the eleven former prime ministers are simply unsuited to providing Andy Burnham with the wisdom of history. Unlike John Major or Gordon Brown, he is not the successor to a titanic figure, such as Margaret Thatcher, or the perhaps less titanic Tony Blair. Nor is he a Rishi Sunak: a technocratic, slightly boring, safe pair of hands brought in to steady the ship after the chaos of the Johnson-Truss years. In fact, being a dull technocrat is exactly the approach that failed Mr Burnham’s predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer.
However, a look elsewhere among the eleven, at H.H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Jim Callaghan, could teach Mr Burnham a valuable lesson, particularly as he looks to reform social care, the constitution, and the economy, and as he seeks to devolve power and money from Westminster to ‘every postcode.’(5)
Like Andy Burnham, H.H. Asquith took over an enormous majority in 1908. He too was faced with a multifarious House of Commons, as well as a growing threat on his left flank; the Green Party are to Mr Burnham what the Labour Party was to Asquith. Moreover, Asquith, like Burnham, sought to introduce both economic and constitutional reforms. Between 1909 and 1910, Asquith alienated many in the House of Lords, and even the King, as his government pushed through the People’s Budget, a ‘revolutionary concept’ that was the first expressly redistributive budget.(6) The political furore over the Budget created a constitutional crisis that led to the Parliament Act of 1911, which greatly reduced the veto power of the House of Lords.
However, in the two elections of 1910 that were essential to passing these bills, Asquith lost the great majority that he had inherited. His government then relied on the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party to continue to function. Andy Burnham must learn from this: when you have a large majority and are trying to pass immense constitutional and economic reforms, you must be willing to alienate people, to accept that the size of your majority may shrink as a result and that you may then have to rely on the support of other parties. Mr Burnham should hope to emulate, in doing this, Asquith’s ‘masterly display of political nerve and patient determination.’(7)
Asquith’s successor, David Lloyd George, also saw the merit of this. In the 1918 ‘Coupon Election,’ two years into his time in office, Lloyd George ran in coalition with Bonar Law’s Conservatives and Unionists. This allowed him to stay in power for a further four years.
Jim Callaghan, although in many ways a very different prime minister from those aforementioned, also relied on the support of other parties. Callaghan’s ‘Lib-Lab’ pact with David Steel’s Liberal Party lasted for 16 months and enabled the Labour prime minister to weather the storm of the IMF bailout in 1976. This bailout was immensely significant. It signified the end of the post-war Keynesian consensus, and it was the first awakening of monetarism in British government, foreshadowing the neoliberal consensus ushered in by Margaret Thatcher soon after, which has dominated Britain’s politics since then.(8) Callaghan’s willingness to rely on other parties to enact enormously divisive, yet hugely transformative, policies is yet another lesson to Andy Burnham.
Unlike Jim Callaghan, however, Andy Burnham wields an enormous majority. He must learn from the failure of his immediate predecessor’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy, and from his earlier predecessors’ boldness in their willingness to expend political capital and rely on other parties in order to enact transformative constitutional and economic change. Mr Burnham has already invited the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leadership for cross-party talks on his agenda to reform social care.(9) I don’t know whether it was Asquith and Callaghan that inspired him, but I certainly hope so.
1 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
2James Gregory, ‘Burnham rules out calling early election as PM,’ BBC News (3 July, 2026), available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c982r5z7v0no
3 Lawrence Goldman, ‘The general election of 1906’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/95348 4‘Rating British Prime Ministers’, Ipsos, available at: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/rating-british-prime ministers
5 Pippa Crerar, ‘Andy Burnham to pledge “good growth in every postcode” in devolution plan,’ The Guardian, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/28/andy-burnham-to-pledge-good-growth-in-every postcode-in-devolution-plan
6 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory 1874–1932 (1983), pp. 408– 409.
7 Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London: Collins, 1964), 231.
8 The Rest is History, Britain in the 70s: The Bailout from Hell (Part 4), (Goalhanger Podcasts, 2026).
9Jessica Elgot, ‘Andy Burnham seeks cross-party agreement on future of social care,’ The Guardian, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/27/andy-burnham-cross-party-agreement-social-care