But, rather like crime mysteries, the genre rests on certain conventions. The alternatives must be credible and reflect the known attributes and views of the main players. Of course, events could have turned out differently if some people had made it to the top rather than others, but their actions must be in character.
Unfortunately, too many of the essays in The Prime Ministers Who Never Were fail these tests. Not only are several of the outcomes implausible, but there is too much wishful thinking and score settling, mainly from a traditional left viewpoint, against Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Personalities matter, but so do underlying economic and political pressures. Of course, a John Smith administration would have been different from the Blair decade, but not that different. The prevailing public mood in the 1990s was in a free-market direction.
Of the 14 prime ministers who never were over the past century, only half could realistically have made it into 10 Downing Street. There were good reasons why Austen Chamberlain, Oswald Mosley, Herbert Morrison, George Brown, Norman Tebbit and Michael Foot never made it to No 10. In other cases, there are simple factual errors. The idea that Philip Snowden, an upholder of fiscal rectitude, was a friend and ally of John Maynard Keynes is the reverse of their true position of distance and criticism. And it is just plain silly to envisage Ken Livingstone as Smith’s successor in Downing Street. Livingstone was a loner and unpopular among fellow Labour MPs during his 14 years in the Commons, partly because many of his Scottish and northern colleagues blamed him and the excesses of the London Labour left for the party’s poor results in 1983 and 1987. He has always been much more at home as a dominant figure in London politics than at Westminster.
It is fun to speculate on what might have been, but too many of these ‘what ifs’ cross the line from counterfactual to fantasy. Thatcher and Blair can rest secure on their records, however controversial.
The Prime Ministers Who Never Were
Francis Beckett (Ed)| Biteback Publishing, 256pp, £14.99