An official lays out a swathe of papers on the desk. It’s a document that speaks of evacuations, plebiscites and the Sudetenland, and requires four signatures. Mussolini, Daladier and Hitler ink their names. But when Prime Minister Charles Spencer Chaplin is offered a pen, he takes two, sticks them into a pair of bread rolls he has saved from dinner, and uses them, like a little pair of feet, to kick the Munich Agreement on to the carpet.

It’s a dream, of course. An easy one to have if you’ve seen The Great Dictator (1940) in which Charlie Chaplin plays two of his greatest roles — Adenoid Hynkel, the hare-eyed and preposterous dictator of the fictional totalitarian state of Tomania, and his lookalike, a barber from the Jewish ghetto, who puts on an identical uniform to denounce his tyrannical double from the podium at a Nuremberg-style rally. Hitler might have had the same dream. Chaplin’s films were banned in Nazi Germany, where it was widely believed he was Jewish. (“I do not have that honour,” said Chaplin, when journalists asked him if this was true.)

The fantasy of the Little Tramp in Downing Street first entered my thoughts ten years ago on a visit to the Chaplin archive, a secure and temperature-controlled vault beneath Montreux, where the star’s press-books, manuscripts, photographs and letters were then stored on 75 metres of rolling shelving. Working through a stack of newspaper cuttings relating to Chaplin’s trip to Britain in 1931, I was surprised to discover that their emphasis was not on cinema, but politics.

Chaplin’s views on unemployment, economic reform, industrial automation, the banking system and American and European politics were all recorded by the British press. Reynolds’s Newspaper described his ideology as “left-wing Labour”. The Sphere declared him a “radical millionaire”. The Weekly Dispatch, reporting on Chaplin’s meeting with Ramsay MacDonald, then leader of a minority Labour government, wrote it up as a summit between two heads of state, with Chaplin as “the film premier of mirth”. In the photograph, both men looked serious, as if discussing whether Britain should come off the Gold Standard. Perhaps they were. When Chaplin met Albert Einstein a few weeks later, he bent his ear about price controls and quantitative easing. “You’re not a comedian,” said Einstein. “You’re an economist.”

1931 was a cold rough year in British politics. Ramsay MacDonald spent it in government and in crisis. The summer brought the May Report (which urged urgent action on a £120m budget deficit), MacDonald’s resignation and instant return in coalition with the Tories. The October General Election split the Labour Party and left its leader as head of a Conservative-dominated National Government committed to a £70 million reduction in state spending. Labour would not be alone and united in power until 1945.

The newspaper columnist Henry Hamilton Fyfe — a Fabian Socialist and unsuccessful Labour candidate — wondered if Chaplin might be the man to secure the party’s future. He published his thoughts on the day after Oswald Mosley, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, resigned from government to found the New Party, which offered an economic rescue plan on Keynesian principles. (Mosley’s journey to Tomania was, at this point, far from complete.) Fyfe predicted, correctly, that Mosley’s resignation would hand seats to the Tories. “Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have done that,” he declared. Had the star of City Lights and The Gold Rush been in Mosley’s position, he would have argued the same case, passionately and successfully, from inside Labour. “He would have known that it isn’t enough to have a good story to work with,” wrote Fyfe. “You must be able to catch the fancy of the public. You must grip their interest. You must keep on repeating what you want them to remember. Somehow or other, Mr Charles Spencer Chaplin MP would have managed to get his proposals before the nation in an understandable, attractive form.”

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But what proposals? The answer lies in the cuttings. “I think,” said Chaplin, “there is something wrong with our methods of production and systems of credit.” Like Mosley, he was a fan of Keynes. He was also an enthusiast for Major CH Douglas, a former Stockport Grammar School teacher whose Social Credit system envisioned economic regeneration through the payment of a “national dividend” — an early version of Universal Basic Income. (Douglas’s theories about the relationship between unemployment and profit led Chaplin to convert his stock portfolio into liquid capital in 1928, saving him from the effects of the Wall Street Crash.)

Asked by journalists about rising unemployment and stuttering economies, Chaplin proposed “shorter hours for the working man and a minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labour which will guarantee every man over the age of twenty-one a salary that will enable him to live decently.” The alternative he considered too dangerous to contemplate: “If we continue to view the present conditions as inevitable the whole structure of our civilisation may crumble.” His views were not changed when he travelled on to Berlin, and found Nazi agitators demonstrating outside his hotel. For this, too, he had an answer — one informed by Keynes’s Economic Consequence of the Peace (1919). The issue of $35 billion of a new currency linked to the price of gold, which Germany could use to settle its war debts to the Allies.

Fyfe was not the only person to imagine Chaplin in power. A few days before Mosley’s resignation, Winston Churchill invited the comedian to Chartwell, and, after a robust argument about Lenin and Gandhi, told him to stand for Parliament. Churchill and Chaplin had been friends since 1929, when they met in California by the heated swimming pool of Marion Davies, the actress, producer and mistress of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. They decided to collaborate on a film about Napoleon. Progress was minimal, but a script was developed by another figure from the British political wilderness — John Strachey, a former Labour MP who had supported Mosley’s ideas for a planned economy, and followed him, briefly, to the New Party. The Napoleon project was never concluded — partly because it evolved, under the influence of the rise of Hitler, into The Great Dictator.

With this in mind, let’s try the full counterfactual. Let’s imagine that when Mosley declines to contest his old seat in the 1931 election, Chaplin takes Hamilton Fyfe’s hint and stands for Labour in Smethwick. (There’s a pleasing resonance to this: when Chaplin died in 1977, his daughter Victoria discovered, locked in a bureau drawer, a letter from a man who claimed that Charlie was not born in London, but “in a caravan [that] belonged the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie … on the Black Patch in Smethwick.”)

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Chaplin’s presence in the Labour party stops it from splitting. He is one of the best-loved figures in the world. His art is founded on an intense personal knowledge of poverty. Working-class voters remember him eating his own boot in The Gold Rush and raising a baby in a garret in The Kid. But he is also admired in Conservative circles and curious about Tory politics. (In our 1931, he went on a boar-hunt with the Duke of Westminster, ballyhooed his friend Nancy Astor at a meeting in Plymouth, wore a disguise to hear the Conservative candidate for Woolwich West speak at Plumstead Baths, and even spent time in the company of Churchill’s ghastly son, Randolph.)

In a country administered by a National Government, he is a unifying figure. The Weekly Dispatch joke about two premiers has become a reality. The Chaplin/MacDonald administration rejects the Means Test and a £13 million cut to the dole, and, converted to Keynesianism, welcomes back Oswald Mosley, preventing the birth of British Fascism.

As for the Continental variety, Chaplin has seen its intolerance and brutality for himself. Nazi publications have been denouncing him for years as a “disgusting Jewish acrobat”. When MacDonald dies in 1937, Chaplin, now the Prime Minister of a Labour-dominated National Government, is ready for Hitler. A draft script for the final speech of The Great Dictator, held in the Chaplin archive, offers a whisper of a possible opening gambit: “Let us right the wrongs done to nations. But as a price let us all disarm — totally — till every instrument of death is destroyed.” It’s not an argument that Hitler would ever have accepted. But Chaplin is also close to Churchill, who has already formed an anti-Fascist network with like-minded figures within British intelligence and the British film business. So the Munich Agreement goes unsigned, and after Chaplin has performed the Dance of the Bread Rolls at Number 12, Arcisstrasse, the Second World War is sooner, swifter and shorter.

At which point we wake up — back in the real world, where The Great Dictator was made, despite the Chamberlain’s government’s active discouragement. (Richard Carr’s 2017 biography of Chaplin unearths this story, which includes a government threat to ban the film’s release in Britain.) Thankfully, its star ignored this pressure, and kept the cameras rolling. Churchill saw the film on 14 December 1940. It was screened for him at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he stayed on moonlit nights that made Chequers too visible to the Luftwaffe. He laughed heartily, particularly at a scene in which a totalitarian buffet descends into a food fight. He watched Chaplin’s Jewish barber make his speech against tyranny: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls — has barricaded the world with hate — has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.” Then, after sending a secret cable to Washington, the Prime Minister retired to bed.

Iain Macleod was the last Chancellor to die in office. He lasted 30 days, 17 of which were spent in recovery from a stomach operation. When he had his fatal heart attack, at 23:35 on July 20, 1970, it cast a dark omen over the already fragile Edward Heath government.

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Today, we are led by safetyists on both sides of the House, who refuse to choose between equality justice and equity justice — between corona and the economy, between house prices and housing — a maddening mobius strip of directly contradictory promises. We could do with a mind that has mapped the sharpest edges of its own political compass.

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Many of the world’s leaders employ this greeting but along the same plane as a handshake; Boris Johnson offers his elbow with a sudden and even feral twist of his torso, as though it’s the first step in an elaborate South Sea courtship ritual he has still to learn the rest of. Above his mask, his eyes are smiling like those of a child who knows he has been bad but hopes he will be loved for it.

I recall seeing him do this on television — perhaps for the first time — just before the national lockdown in March 2020. He was about to shake hands with someone — something tells me it was Matt Hancock — then remembered that shaking hands wasn’t allowed, swivelled, stuck out a hip, and did his elbow jive. From the expression on Matt Hancock’s face you’d guess he thought he was being given the elbow in the being-dumped-by-a-lover sense. A look of impending catastrophe he’s carried ever since.

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Most of us had been elbowing one another for weeks by the time Boris Johnson got going, and had progressed to more sedate, and safer, forms of salutation. My preferred method was to maintain a distance of three elephants with extended trunks and throw my arms wide in cosmological bafflement, much as Moses must have done when he came down from meeting God on the mountain and found the Israelities dancing round a cow. Otherwise it seemed both prudent and befitting the solemnity of events simply to wave or incline one’s head. There is a limit — is all I’m saying — to how long you can go on finding bumping elbows entertaining.

But not for Boris Johnson. Thirteen months down the line he is as delighted by it as ever, his capacity to be amused by himself inexhaustible. One has to be churlish indeed not to find this beguiling. The boy in the man will always charm and the boy in the holder of a serious office of state will charm still more. I speak for many who were never little boys even when they were little boys when I say I marvel at the resilience. How, when all around is stress and sorrow, is it possible to find so much fun in so little?

There is, I accept, no point longing for the days when Prime Ministers and Emperors were philosophers and men of letters. They seem like relics of another humanity — Benjamin Disraeli who wrote more than a dozen novels before he became Prime Minister;  Vaclac Havel who wrote plays and essays prior to assuming the Presidency of the Czech Republic; the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who said “Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.” Voters today would rather elect a clown than a serious writer or a thinker. As witness the clowns and comedians who have taken to the political stage in Ukraine, Guatemala, Slovenia, Italy, America — if you allow that a clown can still be a clown even if he isn’t funny — and now here.

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Boris Johnson’s clowning has been in evidence for decades. He can do slapstick without trying, whether trapped on a zip-wire above the Olympic Park, or just climbing onto a bicycle in shorts that ride up in a way that no man should ever want them to.  He can be little-boy-lost to his female constituents and suggest an erotic incorrigibility beneath the bumbling that his male admirers find comfort in. For the sake of a laugh he will dump his dignity. He is the fool that gets the girls and the buffoon that wins high office. Is it, after all, too much to expect him to be Prime Minister as well?

Given that his clowning has always felt opportunistic — as calculated as the precisely tousled hair or the bungled notes — are we to think of Johnson as a clown who prat-fell his way backwards up the ladder into politics or a politician who tripped himself down the snake into comedy? I suspect the uncertainty partly explains why he see-saws violently in the opinion polls. He catches us on the way up and on the way down. For a week or two after he contracted the Virus it looked as though the experience might have made a philosopher of him. “He has lines in his face he didn’t have before,” I told my wife. “I believe I detect something in his bearing that could be gravitas.”

“That’s the medication,” she said. And she turned out to be right. Soon the elbows came out again and the eyes resumed their roguish twinkle.

For the ethos by which he lives is not after all that of the Athens of Pericles or Octavian but the circus where White-faces and Augustes exchange insults, fall over buckets and bump elbows. If he is guided by a single motto it is that the show must go on.

Admirable words, were this a show and Prime Ministership a comic interval between the acrobats and trapeze artists. But the pandemic is and always was of a seriousness that mirth might on occasions have alleviated, but should never have been allowed near at the outset. For mirth, in those early days, stood in the way of serious fears and sensible precautions. It is true that Johnson did not play the hooligan and capsize the ship of state as Trump did, but he told us not to worry, showed us how he’d shaken the hands of nurses and doctors in hospitals and, as chief of the “Jumblies,” escorted us to the shore line and put us to sea in a sieve.

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Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments, and levity, when it is not moderated by circumstances, is lethal. A good Prime Minister would have moderated his extravagances to these circumstances. Cometh the hour, cometh the leader; but cometh this hour, cometh the Clown. “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage,” proclaims Fortinbras in the final speech of the play. “For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royally.” It is a sad realisation of wasted gifts.

Given his talents as an entertainer, Boris Johnson might have proved most Prime Ministerial had he been tested in another sort of production. But then again he might not. If any further proof were needed that he would sacrifice the whole world to please a roomful of his auditors, it came when he told a meeting of the faithful the other night that the undoubted success of the vaccine production and roll-out was due to “greed, my friends”, thereby demeaning the achievement and good-will of thousands of scientists and volunteers, and showing that he is stone deaf to the national mood. No Prime Minister thinking like a Prime Minister would ever make a mistake of that magnitude or assume that an elbow-jig could redeem it. Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister we do not have.

At the time, few people could have predicted where Walpole’s appointment would lead. Yet three centuries later, 52 men and two women have followed in his footsteps: charmers and charlatans, moralists and mountebanks, pragmatists and prophets. Today, as Boris Johnson ascends the staircase at 10 Downing Street, their portraits gaze down at him. The calculating stare of William Pitt the Younger; the grim glower of William Gladstone; the bulldog features of Winston Churchill; the icy blue eyes of Margaret Thatcher. A handful of great names, and a host of forgotten ones: the Earl of Bute, Viscount Goderich, the Earl of Derby. Outside the academy, who now recalls Arthur Balfour, Andrew Bonar Law or Sir Alec Douglas-Home? Who still cares about Harold Wilson? Who, realistically, will remember Gordon Brown?

Today, when the premiership seems an indelible feature of the British constitution, it is easy to forget how messily it began. Kings and queens had relied on chief ministers for centuries, and at first there was no sign that Walpole would be any different. Like many later prime ministers, he took the reins at a moment of intense uncertainty. The new Hanoverian dynasty was haunted by the spectre of a French-backed Jacobite rebellion, while the nation’s financial stability was threatened by the fallout from the South Sea Bubble. Europe and the economy: nothing changes.

Since Walpole was the first Prime Minister, and served for almost 21 years, why isn’t he better remembered? One banal reason, I suppose, is that it was such a long time ago. To people not very interested in history, Walpole’s Britain seems impossibly distant. Our first premier was born in 1676, when his oldest neighbours could still remember the last days of Elizabeth I. He lived at a time when Europe’s major ideological division pitted Protestants and Catholics, and when people moved around London in carriages and sedan chairs.

And even much of his own country was a mystery to him. As Anthony Seldon writes in his new history of the British premiership, Walpole never visited Manchester or Bristol, let alone Wales or Scotland. To travel from London to his Norfolk house, Houghton Hall, took at least two days on largely unpaved roads. As MP for King’s Lynn he never faced serious opposition and had little reason to fear the electorate. The only person he really needed to care about was the king — and George could barely speak English. When Walpole visited the palace to discuss affairs of state, they talked in French, and sometimes even in Latin.

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Yet is Walpole really so remote? Despite his calculating intelligence and financial know-how, he cuts an endearingly earthy, flesh-and-blood figure. Another prime ministerial biographer, the journalist Andrew Gimson, notes that Walpole played the part of the country squire to perfection, ostentatiously opening his gamekeeper’s letters before turning to his political paperwork. His mistress, Molly Skerrett, was fully 25 years his junior. Perhaps above all, he was famously, flagrantly corrupt. In his own words, he was “no saint, no spartan, no reformer”. Remind you of anyone?

For those of us who enjoy prime ministerial history, it’s a glorious coincidence that the 300th anniversary of Walpole’s appointment comes with another roistering Old Etonian installed in Number 10. For Gimson, the parallels with Boris Johnson suggest that “we still live in an 18th-century country, a mixture of elegant civilisation and extreme rudeness; earthy, passionate, drunken, reckless, and certainly not in thrall to Victorian values”. Seldon even imagines Walpole and Johnson at a candlelit Downing Street dinner, the two men swapping anecdotes about the frustrations of power, the ghastliness of the French and the pleasures of fine wines, women and money.

All this hints at the fundamental continuity of prime ministerial history. Everything changes, yet the job remains largely the same. The nature of the economy, the structure of international relations, the expectations of the voters, the management of colleagues, the day-to-day business of government, the very warp and weft of political life have been utterly transformed since Walpole’s day. But human nature hasn’t changed. Nor have the arts of making friends and influencing people, of stitching up enemies and rivals, of playing to an audience, of making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s easy to imagine Boris Johnson crashing around the political salons of eighteenth century London, his wig askew over his blond mop, his buttons bursting from all that roast beef. Would he have risen to the top back then? Why not?

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What are the lessons from the last 300 years? Perhaps the most obvious, as Walpole and Johnson would be delighted to agree, is that few successful Prime Minsters have been paragons of virtue. There’s always Gladstone, of course — never happier than when hewing logs, redeeming prostitutes or writing a commentary on Homer. But he was the exception, not the rule. And even in his High Victorian heyday, there were plenty of people who thought him a humbug and a hypocrite.

The truth is that Johnson fits perfectly well into the general run of British Prime Ministers. His critics accuse him of being lazy and dilettantish, as if all his predecessors had been martyrs to their paperwork. Yet one of our most underrated premiers, Herbert Henry Asquith, spent long afternoons playing bridge with pretty girls and was outraged that the advent of the First World War forced him to miss a country house weekend with his adored Venetia Stanley — again, a quarter of a century his junior. Another criminally underestimated Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was flogged at Harrow for writing amateur pornography, scraped a Third at Cambridge, took legendarily long summer holidays in Aix-les-Bains and was regarded by some of his contemporaries as one of the laziest men they had ever met. Yet Asquith ran the country for almost nine years, Baldwin for seven. Would they have been more popular if they had worked harder? Perhaps we should ask Gordon Brown.

Johnson is also typical in being a natural performer, who loves showing off and playing to the gallery. Bien-pensant intellectuals shudder at this sort of thing, because they think politicians should be like university lecturers, dropping abstract nouns into the dead silence of the seminar room. Yet in reality, successful politicians are almost always entertainers. This was true even in the pre-democratic age, when they needed to perform to the court and the monarch. And most successful modern Prime Ministers have been shameless actors, gleefully pandering to the expectations of their audiences.

Think of Tony Blair, formerly the lead singer of Ugly Rumours. Think of Harold Wilson, hamming it up with a pipe he never smoked offstage. Think of Margaret Thatcher, rarely happier than when donning her overalls to tour a Cadbury’s Creme Egg factory. Or read Christopher Hibbert’s portrait of the ultimate Victorian populist, Benjamin Disraeli, strolling down Regent Street in blue trousers and red-striped stockings, the dyed “black curls carefully arranged in the centre of his forehead, one of his eyelids drooping now, his tired, pale face gently rouged, rings worn over the fingers of his white and lavender gloves”. How Disraeli would have enjoyed appearing on Have I Got News for You!

Disraeli is an excellent example of that supremely British political species, the mountebank. He was a chancer, a trickster, an opportunist, a conman. His only principle was his own self-interest. When he was a young man, Lord Melbourne asked him what he wanted from life. “I want to be Prime Minister,” Disraeli said. Melbourne let out a long sigh, but Disraeli was deadly serious. “If I become half as famous as I intend to be,” he said on another occasion, “I must have riches and power.”

For Lord Salisbury, Disraeli was a “mere political gangster”, without “principles or honesty”. That description applies equally well to other great Downing Street mountebanks, such as the Liberal charlatan, crook and sex pest David Lloyd George. “My supreme idea is to get on,” LG told his wife Margaret. “To this idea I shall sacrifice everything … even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” He meant every word. Not content with lining his pockets in the Marconi scandal, he stabbed his own patron, Asquith, in the back, betrayed his party and flogged peerages for cash. Some biographers think LG even slept with his own son’s wife. By those standards, Boris looks positively saintly.

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Any other patterns? Well, here’s one we don’t often talk about. When Prime Ministers arrive in Downing Street, they usually make pious noises about bringing the country together. Even Johnson, after the general election of December 2019, told the cameras that it was “time to unite” and “let the healing begin”. But this is nonsense. You don’t become Prime Minister by uniting and healing; that’s what the Queen is for. To govern is to choose; to choose is to divide. And to divide, by and large, is to win.

Of the handful of truly great Prime Ministers, most were instinctive dividers. Few politicians in our history have been more adored than Gladstone, but few have been so hated, either. Disraeli thought him an “unprincipled maniac … an extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition”. Clement Attlee called him a “frightful old prig” and a “dreadful person”. Yet Gladstone served four terms as Prime Minister, more than Disraeli and Attlee put together. And what about Margaret Thatcher — another much-loathed divider, but also another record-breaking winner? Would she have done better to search for a middle course, to seek consensus, to duck the difficult decisions? Well, just ask Theresa May.

What’s it all for, though? That’s a more difficult question. Few Prime Ministers make an indelible mark on history; most end up largely forgotten. As Johnson must now realise, you sacrifice your best years, your family, your friends, even your health — and for what? A portrait on the stairs? The opportunity to spend the rest of your life with your bodyguards? The rare privilege of having people shout abuse at you wherever you go?

This, I think, is the unacknowledged truth about the life of a Prime Minister. By and large, it’s awful. Contrary to our adolescent fantasies, fame and success are no defence against the tragedies of the human condition. Asquith lost his eldest son Raymond at the Somme, and arguably never really recovered. His Tory rival Andrew Bonar Law lost two sons in the First World War, too, and spent his final days “despondently gazing into vacancy … obliterating light and happiness”.

And on top of the ordinary miseries of human existence, politics piles troubles of its own. Nobody ever thanks you, nothing you do is right and everything ends in tears. Baldwin, who left office in 1937 with applause ringing in his ears, ended his life as a pariah, the gates of his house spitefully ripped down for wartime scrap. Thatcher was kicked out despite never losing an election. Blair, another serial winner, can barely show his face without people screaming at him about Iraq.

Even Walpole, the man who invented the job, and perhaps the most underestimated Prime Minister in our history, was denied the pleasure of a long and happy retirement. For 20 years he had kept Britain safe, stable and, above all, rich. But in 1742 Parliament turned against him, eager for a leader who would embrace war with Spain. So that was that: out he went.

Walpole lived for just two more years, his days blighted by agonising bladder stones. He died, wrote his son Horace, “very poor”, his estates heavily mortgaged. “His Name will not be recorded in History among the best men, or the best Ministers,” wrote his contemporary Lord Chesterfield. There’s gratitude for you.

Sorry, Boris. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

The ‘No’ campaign was obviously heading for defeat. But that didn’t stop Shore arguing with all the passion of someone who believed things to be on a knife-edge. Millions watched live on television as this Labour cabinet minister implored them to resist the prophecies of the doomsayers and have confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs.

“The message that comes out is fear, fear, fear,” he said, gesturing towards Heath, the ardent Europhile. “Fear because you won’t have any food. Fear of unemployment … A constant attrition of our morale … A constant attempt to tell us that what we have — and what we have is not only our own achievements, but what generations of Englishmen have helped us to achieve — is not worth a damn.” Now, asserted Shore, that the fraudulent arguments of the Marketeers were exposed, “What it’s about is basically the confidence and morale of our people. We can shape our future … We are 55 million people … I urge you to say ‘no’ to this motion.”

It is one thing to be a fine platform orator; it’s another to have the intellectual heft to back it up. Shore had both gifts. Born in 1924 to middle-class hoteliers, he spent his early years on the Norfolk coast. When the depression forced the sale of the family business, they relocated to Liverpool, with Shore’s father returning to his previous career in the Merchant Navy. After Cambridge, wartime service in India with the RAF and several years as a Labour Party staffer, Shore was elected in 1964 as the member of parliament for Stepney in East London. Within three years, he was inside the Cabinet.

Peter Shore was the kind of politician you rarely see today: an unashamed interventionist who believed that the proper role of government was to use all the levers at its disposal to manage the economy in the interests of the people. Shore saw government as a force for good and understood that, in its relationship with the market, it must act as master and not servant. This meant regulating markets and not allowing them to let rip. It meant speaking the language of competitiveness, exchange rates and industrial strategies. It meant, ultimately, the elevation of the needs of the real economy — where goods were produced and wealth created — over those of finance capitalism; the prioritisation of full employment, growth and living standards over monetary targets as macroeconomic policy goals.

It was this driving philosophy which ensured, during the IMF crisis of 1976, that Shore was not seduced by the arguments of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan or Chancellor Denis Healey — they, along with others in the Cabinet, suggested that if Britain couldn’t spend her way out of recession, she had no choice but to embrace the precepts of Friedman-style monetarism. And it was Shore’s deep-seated belief in the capacity of the state to improve people’s lives — and the duty of democratically-elected politicians to drive such improvements — that informed his opposition to Euro-federalism. Like many who stood in that rich tradition of Left-wing Euroscepticism, Shore’s antipathy was not to Europe, the continent; he simply objected to an arrangement that served the interests of bankers and the multinationals over ordinary working people.

He thought it wrong to give primacy to the views of technocrats over those of elected representatives. Shore saw the objectives of those driving political and economic integration across Europe as antithetical to not only the aims of the British labour movement but the concept of democracy itself.

Oh, to have had Shore and other big beasts of the Eurosceptic labour movement — Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Hugh Gaitskell, Bob Crow and Barbara Castle — around in 2016, to articulate the entirely rational Left-wing case against the EU, and to act as an antidote to the cynicism and hysteria that infected so much of the Left during that period.

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Peter Shore stood for the Labour leadership twice: in 1980 and 1983. What might have been if he’d won, and then become Prime Minister? Labour would not have retreated from its historical economic radicalism. By the early 1990s — just as it had done for the second part of the 1970s — the party had come to broadly accept the argument that “There is no alternative” to market fundamentalism, and that elected governments must be no more than minor actors in the operation of the economy. A Labour Party — and country — led by Peter Shore would not have succumbed to such pessimism. Nor, most likely, would the party have developed the infatuation with the EU which has done so much to alienate millions of its once-loyal supporters over recent years.

The driving philosophy of this government would have been that democratic socialism was possible only if politicians of the Left were willing to step up to the plate and take control of the nation’s economic destiny rather than hive off responsibility to markets and technocrats.

As a Labour PM, Shore would have led from the front in opposing the Single European Act and Maastricht Treaty. Britain would not have entered the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the ignominy of Black Wednesday would have been avoided. Shore would have resisted, too, the drive towards the internationalisation of capital which has facilitated a global market where power and wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and multinationals have the whip hand over elected governments.

He would not have hesitated to prioritise the interests of the productive sector over the City. His Keynesian interventionism and his focus on competitiveness would have ensured Britain did not experience the decimation of her manufacturing base that came to pass under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. Hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs would not have been lost to overseas competitors.

Shore — like so many Labour heavyweights from yesteryear — was a patriot to his fingertips. A Labour Party shaped in his image and following his credo would not have lost touch with working-class communities, a drift that began three decades ago, around the time Shore stepped down from the front bench. And our nation as a whole would have been much the better for it.

It was his country’s loss. Trollope would have made a fine parliamentarian. Unimpressed by precedent or convention, he would have asked the right questions. Far-sighted and sympathetic, he would have supported the right motions. Human foibles amused him. Vice seemed to him pitiful. He would not have been a ranter or a self-righteous denouncer (he detested that type), but rather someone who tried to set things straight. He would have been very good at it. Perhaps, given the chance, he might have made it to the very top. He would have been an eminently well-qualified prime minister.

The sequence of books that he wrote after his disappointment at Beverley, set among the ruling classes and featuring the Palliser family and the ambitious young Irish MP Phineas Finn, are generally known as his ‘political’ novels. But he had already been writing about politics for years. The great novels of his Barchester series, dealing with goings-on among the clergy of an imagined rural diocese, are equally fascinated by influence and its workings, and by the way the would-be powerful manoeuvre themselves into positions of authority.

He was not a polemicist. When Phineas Finn takes up the cause of Irish tenants’ rights Trollope’s other characters act as though jeopardising your career for a matter of principle is eccentric, if not downright irresponsible. Plantagenet Palliser’s interest in currency reform is treated as a joke. But though Trollope didn’t get embroiled in debates about policy, he went deep into politics, and more especially into politicking.

He would have played the Westminster game adroitly. He writes brilliantly about the parasites it attracts: the toadies and the gossips; the schemers who fancy themselves as king-makers; the money-grubbers who make fortunes by promising access, or influence, or favourable press-coverage. He saw how his well-intentioned characters’ good manners and self-delusion made them easy to manipulate, and he was fascinated by the sharper-minded string-pullers who exploited them. I don’t think he would have made a visionary reforming prime minister — he was too alive to the absurdity of human aspiration for that. But I see him presiding at a cabinet meeting — jocular, unruffled, never confrontational — patiently nudging his ministers the way he wants them to go, rather as Mrs Grantly, wife of the Archdeacon of Barchester, defers cheerfully to her irascible husband while he blusters on, sure that he will come round to her way of thinking in the end.

A good proportion of those cabinet ministers — if Trollope could have had his way, and if 19^th century law had allowed it — would have been female. Trollope was the child of an ineffectual father and a formidably energetic mother. Thomas Trollope was a not very successful barrister and an even less successful farmer, who never got over the fact that his uncle had failed to leave him a fortune. Fanny Trollope, by contrast, after giving birth to six children, and spending four years living on an experimental commune in America, supported her family by writing over 40 books while travelling around Europe, enjoying the respect of the literary contacts (the Brownings, Dickens) her reputation brought her. In her son Anthony’s fiction Mrs Grantly is one of numerous women, (Lady Glencora Palliser is another) who are subtler-minded and sharper-witted than husbands hide-bound by conventionality and masculine pride. Trollope wasn’t one of those early feminists who believed all women were kindly, peaceable creatures: his Mrs Proudie, the Bishop of Barchester’s sabbatarian bigot of a wife, is a battler. But he certainly knew that men had no monopoly on cleverness.

Suggested reading

What makes a great prime minister?

By Polly Mackenzie

He was a great communicator. He would have had a warm rapport with the electorate. In his novels he repeatedly drops the authorial mask to address the readers directly. He understood the press. The Warden tells the story of a self-righteous young journalist who takes it upon himself to expose what he sees as the misappropriation of charitable funds. The journalist has got it all wrong, and is sorry for it eventually, but his story allows Trollope to give a penetratingly satirical insider-view of the Victorian media, including a dig at ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, a thinly disguised caricature of Charles Dickens. Plantagenet Palliser, who is heir to a dukedom, doesn’t bother about comms, but Phineas Finn, making his way, has to repeatedly consider how things will play in the gentlemen’s clubs where reputations are chewed up, and in the scandal-sheets that snap up what the clubs spit out.

Trollope knew the value of money, and the misery of not having enough. His father had sent him to posh schools — Harrow and Winchester — but as a dayboy, which was cheaper. He was bullied and jeered at. Being the poorest boy among a group of rich ones is not the same thing as experiencing real poverty, but it has its own peculiar humiliations. Later, as an ill-paid civil servant, he couldn’t pay his tailor: the bill was bought by a money-lender and Trollope was mortified by duns who barged into his office, nearly losing him his job. His fiction is full of upper-class characters brought low by debt, and of middle-class ones kept down by the exhausting struggle to earn a living. His marriages are always — whatever else they may be —  financial arrangements. His great stand-alone novel The Way We Live Now transforms the grey mechanisms of economics into a dazzlingly colourful assemblage of interlocking plots all driven by financial greed or financial need. Had Trollope made it to Downing Street he would never have made the mistake of neglecting the fiscal side of government.

At the age of 19 he started work in the General Post Office, hating the tedium of his clerking duties (clerks were effectively human photocopiers) but seeing no likely escape. He stayed with the post office for 32 years. There are very few novelists who have given proper attention to the daily grind of work — so many, both in Trollope’s time and ours, preferring to focus on love or adventure. He writes mordantly about office hierarchies, about idle, pompous bosses and the frustration of answering to pettifogging bureaucrats. If he’d been running the country he would surely have brought in enlightened employment legislation. He would also have instigated an overhaul of the civil service that eventually lost his loyalty by insultingly passing him over for a promotion.

Suggested reading

Dickens lives on in the streets of London

By Helen Thompson

He was prodigiously industrious. He got up every morning to start writing at 5am, so as to get his daily target of 2,500 words done before he went to work. In his happier times, when he got free of the office and was travelling around Ireland or the west of England as a post office surveyor, he wrote on horseback or in trains. A prime minister’s packed schedule wouldn’t have daunted him. When he finished a novel he didn’t give himself time off. He didn’t even wait until the next day. He reached for a clean page and started the next one there and then.

Writing brought him money (very little to start with, but eventually a good income). He said that that was why he did it, although the exuberance of his fictional inventions suggests he enjoyed creating his novels as much as we love to read them. The autobiography in which he revealed his routine triggered a dip in his reputation. Victorian readers were repelled by Trollope’s self-discipline. Romantically, they wanted their great writers wandering lonely as a cloud, waiting for inspiration to strike. Snobbishly, they couldn’t value work done for pay. One can only deduce those ungrateful readers had large private incomes, and small imaginations.

Trollope’s imagination, by contrast, was capacious. Worldly-wise, phenomenally energetic, an innovator and an acutely perceptive observer of the society around him, he would have run the country with care and consideration. And best of all, he would have done it with kindness. There is a brief passage in The Last Chronicle of Barset that says more about the sadness and precarious dignity of old age than any other piece of writing I know. Mr Harding, a meek-mannered old clergyman whose story has been woven through six novels, is in his daughter’s house. She and her husband are away. Harding is dying. Precisely, without overt pathos, Trollope describes his state of mind. When he wrote that passage Trollope was in his prime. He had a wife and two sons, a full-time administrative job and a popular series of books on the go, but he had the imaginative power to put himself in the mind of a lonely old man facing death. He does it with a degree of empathy that demonstrates what a wise statesman he might have made.