Welcome to Prime Factors where we review each UK Prime Minister from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. We discuss their biography, highs and lows, and then rate them on a scale designed by a 10-year old before awarding the ultimate prize: Are they ”Known” or an ”Ice Cream Cone”?
Trans-Atlantic Special (Part 1)
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Trans-Atlantic Special (Part 1)
Episode Transcript
Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, uh, what do we call this episode?
Joe: Welcome to this very special episode of Prime Time and Prime Factors.
Rob: We are Prime Time and Prime Factors in the same city.
Abram: Prime Time Factors.
Rob: Prime Time Factors. Prime squared time factors.
Abram: I'm Abram, and I'm here with my dad.
Rob: I'm Rob, and I'm here with Mike.
John: We are unfortunately lacking the third member of our group, Kess, because she is on the continent, but she is here in spirit because she's written some questions for us.
Rob: We are currently in the same city, as Jo and Abram have come across the Atlantic, and we are in London together. To do— well, we did a tour of Parliament this afternoon, and now we are recording this special episode.
John: I want to say thank you very much for coming to visit us. You've come a very long way. You also arranged for the tour, which was very kind of you. And to be honest, we've done very little other than say hello.
Joe: We had a lovely tour and we're so glad to come. But of course, we have a tradition of visiting places in our podcast.
John: Very true. We have a tradition of going nowhere. Yes, that is true.
John: In terms of the format of this episode, this is actually going to be two episodes. We're gonna briefly talk about each of the prime ministers, perhaps give a brief explanation as to what they did, compare our scores, in particular whether or not they got the coveted known or ice cream cone, or right on or right off.
John: This might be a good time for me to ask you a quiz question. Okay. So the way it's going to work is, I have a set of incorrect statements about British political history. If you can buzz in and call out the error in a statement, you will get a point. You must say, "Um, historically," or I will not give you the point. And I would feel very bad about doing so.
Joe: So, um, historically, okay.
John: You can interrupt at any moment, and you just buzz in by saying "buzz." So whoever says it first, I will then stop talking, and you have to tell me what's wrong. Okay?
Rob: Okay.
John: So the first statement is: One ancestor to Parliament is Witans or Witenagemots. Saxon councils where the leading men would gather to discuss issues, advise the monarch, and choose their next ruler.
Abram: Buzz. Historically, I don't remember what you just said.
John: One ancestor to Parliament is Witan or Witenagemot, Saxon councils where the leading men would gather to discuss issues, advise the monarch, and choose their next ruler.
Abram: Buzz. Historically, it wasn't just men, I assume.
John: There were women, yes.
Rob: Oh, abbesses.
John: There were abbesses and queens.
Joe: Oh, man, I did not know that. 'Cause the Witenagemot only chose the next king maybe once or twice.
John: We don't know that much about them. And a lot of what we know about them, it's difficult to know if they did something once or if they did it every time, that sort of thing. But we do definitely know that there were women there. So that one I can say.
John: And one fun thing that we're gonna have about this whole quiz is that quite often you can say, "Well, we don't know that for sure." So please don't challenge me on that. But shall we move into talking about prime ministers? Yes.
Joe: Yes.
John: So who was the first prime minister?
Rob: Buzz.
John: No, no, this is— We're not in the quiz anymore. This is going to be the discussion.
Rob: I thought that was a really easy one.
Joe: Archbishop Dunstan.
John: Ooh.
Rob: Are we going to say it's Robert Walpole?
John: I think canonically both of our podcasts start with Robert Walpole. Neither of us has done any prequel episodes about any individuals yet, so—
Joe: No. Not yet.
John: So Abram, what do you remember about Robert Walpole?
Abram: He lasted for a long time.
John: How long?
Abram: 20 years. He was corrupt.
John: Robin, what do you remember about Robert Walpole?
Rob: I think he's generally credited as sort of creating the office of Prime Minister, because he developed a system whereby all the king's ministers would be in a meeting room, and he would chair the meeting even if the king wasn't there. And it sort of created a sense that the government and the administration of the country was properly separated on a day-to-day basis from the monarch.
Rob: He also saved all the money during the South Sea Crash. There's a funny jokey history textbook that says that he invented the national debt and the Bank of England to put it in. And I think that's all I can remember.
Joe: Abram, which years was he Prime Minister?
Abram: 1721 to '42.
Rob: Very good.
John: Yeah, very good.
Abram: I could have just looked at this.
Joe: You could have, but I know you didn't need to.
John: I used to assume that you had a sheet in front of you with all of the kings' dates. Really? Yeah, because initially in your first episode, there were a lot of kings and you would always just produce the dates. And it was only about six episodes in that I realized that you must just know literally every date of anything that could ever be mentioned.
Joe: Abram, Edward IV.
Abram: Okay, this one's a confusing one. 1461 to '70, 1471 to '83.
Rob: And who was in the middle?
Abram: It was... Henry... the Sixth?
Rob: Maybe.
John: Yeah. I don't think any of us can validate that, so we're gonna take your word as the truth. Yeah, sounds cool. Anything you'd like to add about Robert Walpole, Jo?
Joe: You know, I have to admit, when I did our first episode about Robert Walpole, I wasn't sure how corrupt the later prime ministers were gonna be. And so I'm like, okay, if I play up the corruption now, am I going to regret it later? Because they're all terrible.
Joe: But he is on such a different pillar of corruption and sort of that very early crony capitalism that put him on the top of that particular pyramid.
John: Amazing.
Rob: A lot of it, but just so talented at it. And that's really how he clung on to this position for so long.
John: I also find it very interesting because there are some things that he did that we look now and we think, oh, that was great. I mean, for example, he was very against war. We can look back and say, he basically said, you know, we don't have to spend money if we're not at war. It's not as bad, you know, and that was really good for us.
Joe: War is bad for business.
John: Exactly. And yet he was entirely motivated by the business side of it. And we look back at him as the first prime minister. At the time, the standards of corruption were very different from what we would consider today. But even 250 years ago, he was so incredibly corrupt that everybody around him was just shocked that he got away with everything he did. The screen master general.
Rob: The screen master general.
John: General, exactly. Ah.
Rob: What did you do in the UK?
Abram: We started off the first day really tired. The second day, we explored most of the landmarks. We went along the Thames. We got to ride a double-decker bus.
Rob: Nice.
Abram: And then at the very end, I got to see Trafalgar Square. The next day— well, the next day I can remember, we went to the Tower of London.
Rob: As visitors or inmates?
Abram: Visitors.
John: Yeah, okay. Just visitors.
Abram: We didn't stay in prison like Rob Goldin.
John: Don't worry, no one's been an inmate there for I think about 70 years now since the Kray twins, I believe.
Rob: Yeah, I think you might be right.
Abram: Who are those?
John: Notorious gangsters who are also sort of celebrities in a very weird way. And at the time when they were imprisoned, it was just convenient to throw them in the nearest place, which happened to be the Tower of London. So they now are the last people to have been imprisoned in the Tower of London. So far.
John: And today we have all been on a tour together of Parliament, which was very fun, arranged by Jo.
Rob: Yeah, fantastic.
John: What was your favourite room?
Rob: Yeah, that's a good question.
John: Two of my favourite rooms are Westminster Hall, because it's really old and has lots of nice features like the hammer beam roof, in which they found tennis balls that were left there probably by Henry VIII, because he used to play tennis in there. You know, one of the oldest buildings in the country, and it was a tennis court for him, at least briefly.
John: And also Members' Lobby, which is a sort of really important part of the sort of beating heart of Westminster. It's possibly where the term lobbying comes from, as in stopping someone in the lobby and saying, "Hey, you there, I want you to support my bill," that sort of thing.
Abram: Or like where lobbies are in hotels, for like—
John: Yes, because—
Abram: The front room where you check in, and it isn't like the sleeping room, it's the lobby.
John: But exactly, so this is where the sleeping room is the chamber.
Abram: Oh, it's the US, because you spell armour like it's arm-our, and a bunch of others.
Rob: That's true. We also have lots of fun colours in the Houses of Parliament as well.
Abram: And fla-vour.
John: But the Members' Lobby is also, as you say, it's the sort of entry place where you come in. And Parliament is a little bit of a maze. You may have noticed that it's a very complicated building. You're kind of walking around in all directions.
John: And that's partly because it's a Victorian fantasy palace. But it's also partly because there actually is a very straight-line route. It's just that we're not allowed to take it. And it takes you straight to Members' Lobby.
Abram: Why are we not allowed to take it?
John: Because it's reserved for Members of Parliament only. It goes through the cloakroom and then up a very nice staircase that we are not allowed to walk on. And then it arrives in Members' Lobby.
Joe: We're just strangers here, Abram.
John: We're just strangers. That's it.
Rob: Yeah.
Joe: I gotta tell you, my big takeaway here is House of Lords, very gold, little gaudy. I don't know if you've seen pictures of the White House under the current president.
Rob: They have more gold than before, I've noticed.
Joe: He very much enjoys gold as like his colour. And so the White House is very much decked now in gold. And the House of Lords just has that same vibe.
Rob: Yeah, it really does.
Joe: Whereas the Commons just feels like a really fancy bank.
Rob: Yeah, it's a bit more demure.
John: Yeah.
Rob: Very mindful.
Joe: I want to know where the withdrawal slips are. And I will take it up to the teller.
Rob: Good idea.
John: So the slips you actually can get is when you walk into Members' Lobby or into the Lords' Lobby on a working day, you can get a slip to go up into the gallery. And it's still very much an old-fashioned process where you'll be handed a slip of paper and a pencil and you have to kind of write your name on it and then take it up and hand it in to someone who'll take your phone off you and then you get ushered into these seats. It's very fun.
Joe: That's hilarious.
Abram: They weird.
Joe: But it's great for us because, you know, Abram and I love history, and so we love the history of Parliament. But that's one thing that your podcast does tremendously better than ours, which is dealing with the—
John: We call it—
Joe: The practical bit of Parliament, like how it actually works and why this and why that and the buildings. Whereas we're more storytellers. We're a little bit more disconnected from what it is that those people actually did. And so seeing it today, I thought was fantastic.
Rob: Oh, well, it was really, really good to do it with you. Enjoyed it very much.
John: Thank you very much for having us along for the ride.
Joe: Well, and thank you for enjoying being bored with us, because you've heard it all before.
John: I mean, even our 1,000 Years of Politics in an hour and a half episode was significantly more thorough than the tour guide who skipped through the entire Barons' War in one sentence that essentially— where she said, Simon de Montfort suggested that we should have a parliament, and so they made one. For more details, listen to either of the first episodes. You mentioned Simon de Montfort in your first episode.
Joe: I did mention Simon de Montfort in my first episode.
Abram: Did you do a first episode like we did?
John: We did, yes.
Abram: Much before us.
Joe: Yes, quite a bit before.
John: I have another Um, Historically question.
Rob: Okay.
John: In 1688, the Eternal Eight wrote a letter to William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, inviting him and his wife Mary to invade England and claim the crown.
Rob: These always just sound correct. Can you say it again, but really give a hint as to what the wrong bit is?
John: In 1688, the Eternal Eight— Oh, buzz!
Rob: Um, historically, was it seven?
John: It was the Immortal Seven, not the Eternal Eight. And who gave them the name immortal? I don't know, because I would personally like to be part of the Immortal Seven. It sounds like some sort of pop group or something.
Abram: Yeah, just seven people who are just immortal. Because just because your band was formed in the '70s doesn't mean that you're some Immortal Seven at this point.
Rob: Absolutely true.
Abram: Like, you are gonna die eventually, and you know that. You're in your '70s.
Joe: We try not to think of those things. Yes, a real moment of worry.
John: Next up. Robert Walpole's rise to power was hastened in 1720 when the East India Company's stock collapsed, throwing the British economy into turmoil and potentially incriminating its directors, including— Buzz!
Abram: Historically, it was not 1720, it was 1721 when it happened.
John: Ooh. Correct. I believe the stock collapsed in October of 1720, but— The crisis did last—
Rob: Um, historically bad.
John: The crisis did last until 1721. So if no one else can figure out what's wrong with this, I'll give it to you.
Joe: Um, historically, it was the South Sea Company.
John: Yes, it was the South Sea Company. Not the East India Company.
Joe: Remember the South Sea Crisis?
John: So the South Sea Company was basically a copy of the East India Company, but it was supposed to be a Whig copy, because in those days, we didn't have national institutions. The Bank of England was a private company that just happened to have a monopoly on being the bank of the country. And so the South Sea Company was set up to be a Whig answer to the Tory East India Company. Oh, yeah.
Rob: With a—
Joe: I was gonna say a little bit more slavery, but I'm not actually sure that's true.
John: Yeah, I don't want to know, really. Yeah.
Abram: Are we gonna move on to the ratings now?
John: We are.
Joe: We are.
John: So, Robert Walpole. I don't know if we've adjusted our scores since we did this, 'cause I have adjusted one or two of them by tiny things. But our scores for Robert Walpole are almost identical.
Rob: Really?
John: Yeah, so— We gave Robert Walpole a total score of 58.7, and you gave him a total score of—
Abram: 58.8.
John: Yep.
Abram: 58.75 is the average score there.
Rob: That's incredible.
Joe: The impressive thing is both of us individually decided to have the scores end up being out of 100.
John: Yep.
Joe: So in terms of size, it's perhaps not a surprise that both of them would have ended up in the same place. But there is nothing similar in the way that we are calculating our scores.
John: That's true. Absolutely.
Rob: That's really interesting.
John: So, in terms of if you want to go into the individual categories, so we have Prime and Premiership, and you have Accomplishments and Disaccomplishments. What's this out of?
Abram: For us, we each should have 20, so it's out of 40.
John: Oh, I see, yes. Because you can get up to 40, but you can also get down to 0 if you get really bad. Correct.
Joe: So, for our rating system, the Disaccomplishments is—
Abram: Divided into two categories?
Joe: Right, so you have Bad Personality and—
Abram: Which is like if you had a bad— if you're a bad person. And how much you angered people are kind of in that.
Joe: Right, but— and Disaccomplishments are—
Abram: It's like what you undid that made the country worse.
John: So you guys gave 24 points for Accomplishments and Disaccomplishments, which I'm going to compare against our Prime and Premiership, for which we gave 21 points. Although we're out of, I think, 30, and you're out of 40. Listeners, if you feel like tracking this yourself, you're welcome to follow along in your copybooks.
Abram: Not math.
Rob: One thing that can make this more complicated is trying to combine our two incredibly complicated score systems.
John: I think basically you gave 32 points for Accomplishments, minus 8 points for Disaccomplishments, minus 16 points for Bad Personality, and 19 points for Interesting. So broadly, you said that Robert Walpole was interesting but also a very bad person.
Joe: Yeah, I think that's accurate.
John: Whereas we gave 21 points for Prime and Premiership, 6.7 points— this is out of 20— for Life and Legacy, and 5 points for Sin and Sincerity, which is also out of 20.
John: So I think we broadly agree with you, but I actually don't understand. I feel like we could have been harsher on Sin and Sincerity, which is our judging how corrupt they were and that sort of thing. I feel like in retrospect, in fact, Robert Walpole should have gotten very little for Sin and Sincerity. I don't think he was ever sincere.
Joe: I mean, he was personally corrupt with his relationships. And he was politically corrupt, yes.
Rob: Yeah, that's true.
John: But ultimately, I think we all agreed pretty much that we agreed with James. And his final score, or his most important result—
Abram: No!
John: And he got—
Rob: Right on.
John: So I think we're agreed on that one.
Abram: So that means for our combined thing, I think— It would be best to just do yes or no.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely.
Joe: Yeah.
Abram: So that— So, like—
Rob: How do I write on Chrome?
Abram: So, like, this—
Joe: So they are yes on both. Congratulations, Walpole, you are jacked.
Abram: Okay, I'm just gonna write the yes.
Rob: Well, yeah, congratulations, Robert Walpole, you are both known and a right on. You're interesting, but you're quite bad. But we both think you're important, so— Absolutely.
Rob: To be fair, I think he's the kind of guy who just wants to be important. And he is.
Joe: At the risk of talking too much about Walpole, we have so many others to talk about. I just want to say, as an American, you know, our first president, right, is very much on a pedestal, right? He's the model which all future presidents should aspire to be. How much of that is true? He knows he was a slave owner and all these other things. But Walpole is like, don't be that.
Rob: Yeah, well, he's sort of half remembered and mostly in a bad way. It's—
Joe: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I mean, I think there are things about, you know, as you said, George Washington wasn't a perfect character, but he demonstrated some really wonderful things. We get a lot from him. You know, things like the fact that he didn't turn it into a dictatorship are wonderful things that everybody in the world could admire.
John: Robert Walpole certainly did not have that, in that he would quite happily have turned it into a dictatorship if he could have. But on the other hand, I think we did get some elements from him that are still really important today, like ruling from the Commons, which although not particularly democratic in his time, is ultimately something that has become an important part of our democracy.
John: I think with Walpole, it's important that we don't necessarily credit him with everything that happens today, but we do acknowledge that we made a lot out of what he left us, whether or not he intended it to be this way.
Rob: And if you're talking about very important first editions, I mean, pontiffs have St. Peter, so I mean, that's even higher.
John: That's true, yeah.
Joe: No Prime Minister ever is going to be at St. Peter's level, I think.
Rob: No, probably not.
John: I mean, I would say that George Washington could have tried that if it weren't for the fact that he started the French and Indian War, and we will never let him forget that.
Joe: Okay, so Abram has pre-populated our table.
Rob: Oh, yes.
Abram: I might have gotten the order wrong, and you can see for some— You can see if they have multiple names, they did, like—
Joe: This is another difference between our podcast and yours, which is you're always very good about using their titles, and we're a little bit more mixed bag.
John: And we're about to get to that with Lord Wilmington. Yes.
Abram: Which we did Compton.
John: Yes. So, another, um, historically.
Joe: Um, historically, okay.
Rob: Okay.
John: Lord Wilmington was a founding member of the Order of the Garter in 1725, alongside the Duke of Cumberland, Robert Walpole, and Lords Clinton and Delaware, among others.
Abram: Buzz, um, historically, Lords Clinton and Delaware were not one of the founders.
John: They actually were. Genuinely, they were. They were in the founding club alongside Lord Wilmington and the Duke of Cumberland at the age of four.
Rob: I'm gonna say buzz.
John: Yep.
Rob: And I'm gonna say that the Order of the Garter was not founded by Lord Wilmington. It was founded hundreds of years earlier.
John: Yes, it was the Order of the Bath that was founded in 1725. The Order of the Undies, as you've described it, Abram, is the one that was founded by— what is it, Edward III?
Rob: Yes, I think it was.
Joe: Edward III was a chivalry nerd.
Abram: Begin the Hundred Years' War!
John: In 1348, he did it, the Order of the Garter was founded. Whereas, yes, the Order of the Bath was rather later. Although the concept of Knights of the Bath did exist at the time, but it's just a bit— I don't know, somehow there are people who were Knights of the Bath who were before that point, and I don't know how.
Abram: Now we have to discuss Compton/Wilmington.
John: You know, it won't confuse our listeners at all if you refer to him as Spencer Compton and we refer to him as Lord Wilmington.
Abram: So that's why you wrote on there Compton/Wilmington.
Joe: We'll work it out.
John: So we gave Lord Wilmington 46.2 points, which in retrospect seems very generous.
Rob: That's incredibly generous.
John: I think you were a lot harsher.
Joe: Abram, what did we give Spencer Compton?
Abram: For Wilmington, we gave him 22 points. So what did you give him?
John: Uh, 46.2.
Joe: Can I ask you this nicely?
John: Please.
Joe: What were you thinking?
Abram: So that means, that means 12.1, I think is— that means it should be 34.1, I think.
John: Uh, I can tell you. Yes, that is absolutely correct.
Rob: Really?
John: So our scoring system is supposed to stretch between bad at the bottom and good at the top. And our problem with Spencer Compton, or Lord Wilmington, as I used to call him, is that he's so boring. Yes, nothing happened.
John: And you can't say that he was bad. You can just say, sorry, who? And that's about all you've got there.
Abram: Yeah, well, we judge based off of what they accomplished and how good or bad they were.
John: Yes.
Abram: And therefore, if you accomplish nothing, you get towards the bottom.
John: And you gave him 8 points for Accomplishments, no points for Disaccomplishments. Which absolutely demonstrates what we didn't do, which is that you were really saying, look, this guy did nothing.
John: You gave him minus 2 points for Bad Personality, 4 points for Interesting, which is the lowest of anybody that you've done, 4 points for Looks, 7 for Lifespan, and 1 for Turn.
John: Whereas we gave Lord Wilmington 14.5 points for Prime and Premiership, which is almost half. Yeah, 8.3 for Life and Legacy, 9.3 for Sin and Sincerity. And to be honest, we probably don't need to go into all of the other scores yet.
John: So yeah, so I think he ended up scoring in the middle of ours, but at the bottom of yours. And in retrospect—
Rob: But for the same reason.
John: This is the point where I have to say that I think your scoring system does outshine ours in that Lord Wilmington does not deserve to be up there.
Joe: You know, the thing is, if we were to summarize his term, right, or his time in office, I think it would be— Okay.
Abram: What did he do?
Joe: Yeah, well, I mean, he got sick.
Rob: Yeah.
Joe: And then Carteret went to Germany.
Rob: Yeah.
Joe: And then he died.
John: And I think it's very important to remember that we actually pretty much skipped the section where we're talking about what do you remember from his time as Prime Minister.
John: Yeah, I mean, he did very little. We gave him a right off. And you gave him an ice cream cone. And therefore, I think we're in agreement if we say that we're going to give this person a no.
John: Although I have just noticed that the scoreboard currently has yes and no. And I would like to propose that instead of yes and no, we go with either content and not content, or aye and no, as those are the ones that are used in Parliament.
Joe: Let's not ask Abram to rewrite it. Alright, yes or no it is.
Rob: I think yes or no is fine.
Joe: We can have yes or no, we can say something else.
Abram: Maybe next time we do this.
Rob: I think we should keep it as yes and no because that makes it the one thing in either of our scoring systems that makes sense.
John: So that's fair. Alright. Next up we have—
Abram: Henry Pelham!
John: Yes, absolutely.
Abram: Does he have a peerage or whatever?
Joe: No, he does not.
John: He does not.
Abram: Okay, oh.
John: Unlike his brother, whom we will get to in a bit. We will. Are you ready for an Um, Historically?
Abram: Okay.
John: Henry Pelham was First Lord of the Treasury from 1742 to 1754, except for a brief interlude for Lord Bath's taxicab ministry in 1746.
Abram: Buzz, historically, he started in 1743.
John: Absolutely. It was Lord Wilmington in 1742.
Abram: Prime Factors got a point.
John: So what do you remember about Henry Pelham?
Abram: He was the only one that either of us— that we feel like he was actually, like, very good.
John: Yeah, I definitely agree. He's the one person that I got a good feeling from in that he seemed to be trying to change things for the better.
Abram: Well, Walpole's like second best. He was only good because he was a founder, so he kind of had to be good. Except he wasn't really a founder. And all the others either didn't do anything, were corrupt, or let Pitt do all the work. In Pelham-Holles' case.
John: Henry Pelham also worked very hard to try and create a cross-collaborative group. He had his Broad Bottomed Ministry, which in retrospect is a complete missed opportunity to do a Queen homage with "Fat Bottomed Girls," but unfortunately it's too late for us to do that now. But if you look, I've got sheet music for you.
Joe: No, we'll pass.
John: But no, Henry Pelham genuinely seems to be trying to make things better, which I find very strange given that he was Walpole's protégé, and yet he was so different. He wasn't trying to make everything corrupt. He was—
Abram: Walpole's trying to make everything corrupt, I agree.
Rob: Yes, there were some social reforms under him. He changed the calendar, which I remember you enjoying a lot.
John: Yes, that made a big difference to the research. It really did.
Joe: Yes, that is true. The thing with Pelham for me is just, if I would have wanted a first prime minister, it would have been better for him.
Joe: Yeah, but in a way he set the pattern of later prime ministers, given that we're obviously going to have a bit of a gap in terms of leading from the Commons from here.
John: Yep.
Joe: But the model that we consider to be prime minister is really Pelham's model, not Newcastle's model.
Abram: And Newcastle— why would it be Newcastle?
Joe: Because he came next, right? And was he longer? I don't remember now.
Abram: He was shorter, but he had two non-consecutive.
John: Yes, that's true.
Abram: Even if he didn't, he would've been slightly shorter.
John: Henry Pelham also had two non-consecutive terms. There was a brief ministry in the middle.
Abram: Kind of. He kind of had two. He didn't technically, but he kind of did.
John: You're absolutely right though, because Robert Walpole had ruled sort of absolutely from the Commons, whereas Henry Pelham had support in the Lords. But still without the corruption that Walpole had used, still maintained that the Commons was on top. And then for a long time after that, the Lords who tried to be prime ministers would all struggle, but they needed someone in the Commons to support them.
Joe: So a bit of trivia that didn't come from our episode, but I'll tell you anyway. When I did the intelligence speech research, some of the books that I found referred to the Pelhams as joint prime minister during that period, with Newcastle in the Lords and Henry Pelham in the Commons, ruling jointly until Henry Pelham's death.
Joe: So striking the way we view things today is not the way they were viewed contemporaneously.
Rob: That's very true. I think we have a very— because we've now come up with the idea of the office of Prime Minister, it's very much someone is that or they are not that, whereas back then power was a bit more diffused.
Rob: Prime Minister was a sort of informal term that wasn't really being used, but there was someone who was broadly in charge, but it was much less precise than it is now. So you could have basically two people sort of being Prime Minister at the same time, but not really.
John: In terms of scores, we gave Henry Pelham 71 points.
Abram: And you gave Henry Pelham... We gave him 72.4.
Rob: Another incredibly close result.
Joe: How did we do this?
Abram: I think it's 71.7.
Joe: Have I mentioned that he's good at math?
John: Certainly at least as good as Google Sheets is.
Abram: Okay, so what about yes or no?
John: You gave him—
Abram: No!
Rob: We gave him a— Right on.
John: I think we're in agreement here. Brilliant.
Abram: So he got a yes.
Rob: He got a yes.
John: Although something that I did find interesting was that when looking at the Duke of Cumberland recently, we paid rather more attention to the Jacobite Rebellion of '45, which would have been under Pelham, if I've got my years correct.
Rob: Who was Prime Minister in 1745?
Abram: I think, yeah, that was Pelham.
John: Yeah. And we, at the time, slightly glossed over it, but actually there were some really quite horrible things that happened during the Jacobite Rebellion of '45, especially that were done against the Scots. And in retrospect, I feel like we could have assigned some of that to Pelham and not just said, "Oh, and things moved on." You know, I think we could have looked into that a bit more.
Joe: Not remembering what I put in my script, I'm pretty sure that we talked about more of that, but I don't think even I realized at the time, like, how brutal.
John: Yeah.
Joe: Like, what I have found— And one thing that I'm personally becoming more cautious on as I go is that the sources can whitewash a bit. So I am spending more time trying to just make sure I'm being fair. But it's hard.
John: It is.
Joe: There's not a lot of sources here. Making sure that I'm double-checking, like, what actually went on there—
John: Yes.
Joe: —is important.
John: I think the first place I discovered that was with Robert Walpole and the South Sea Company. Because I saw different things saying whether or not he approved or didn't approve, and lots of things about whether or not he owned shares, when he sold them, how much they were worth.
John: And everybody's own narrative seemed to be different from one another. And it was very hard to work out what had actually happened or to produce a coherent story from it.
John: But there are other things that they just never spoke about. Did any of these prime ministers own other shares in other slaveholding companies? You know, many of them did, I'm sure.
John: I think we're agreed that Henry Pelham is a good egg. Is it yes? Yes.
Abram: Though he did do something that I think should have been included in the ranking, which is on the bad stuff we're talking about.
Rob: Absolutely.
John: Next up is—
Joe: Who's next, Abram?
John: Pulteney. Absolutely, William Pulteney, Lord Bath.
Abram: So yeah, I write Pulteney/Bath.
John: You ready for an Um, Historically?
Rob: Oh yes.
John: You'll have to forgive the language here, but it is historically appropriate. Lord Bath was briefly First Lord of the Treasury in 1746, despite previously having said words about the King and his fat-ass son. Buzz.
Rob: Historically, I believe he was referring to the king's wife, not son. Absolutely. But those are the words that he used.
Joe: There might be a reason why I didn't cover this in our podcast.
John: I'm sorry, I hope that wasn't too strong language under the circumstances.
Joe: I think we're okay.
Rob: Yes, I think William Pulteney had a certain viperous pen, didn't he? He was quite rude about a lot of people and quite angry all the time, I think is what we discovered.
Joe: I came to appreciate Pulteney more as we've done Grenville more recently, right? And just looking at the stuff with the Craftsman as very much presaging the later stuff that's gonna come with the Monitor and the North Briton.
Rob: Yeah, that angry pamphlets is a real theme that runs through all of this political era, isn't it?
John: Absolutely. And actually, the North Briton and the Briton that it was sort of parodying, or at least opposing, slightly remind me that, A, there is so much literature that you could read if you wanted, but also it's very difficult to read something and to say, what was the circulation of this? What, did people agree with it?
John: You know, just because somebody printed 1,000 copies of a pamphlet, does that mean that it was, you know, something the mob agreed with, or did the mob hate it? It's very difficult to get a read.
Rob: Or was it just a few well-to-dos in the coffee shop in the City of London?
Joe: So with Pulteney, for me, I saw him as being, okay, this is not going to work well for you, but he almost feels like a Bernie Sanders kind of take, which is, you know, he's perpetually on the outside. He's always sort of fighting, you know, against the corruption of the system, whatever that system is at the time, and never really being successful beyond potentially as a symbol.
Joe: Now, unlike Sanders, who never has gotten the chance to shine, Bath did get the chance for how many days, Abram?
Abram: Like, two.
Joe: And, well, we know how that worked.
Rob: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I mean, I feel that the slightly harsh thing is that he was set up to fail. That the Pelham brothers had very much made sure that no one was going to back whomever the king put in once they resigned. So there was— He never really had a chance.
John: But my respect for Lord Bath went out the window when, A, he accepted a peerage despite having previously decried the concept of peerages being handed out to people. And B, he had some really horrible things in his personal life that just made him seem like a really not very nice person. I think he essentially scammed a lady and her son out of all of their things they owned. And it was just—
Joe: Oh, I remember that now.
Rob: Yeah, he was, I think, very, very greedy for money was, I think, one of the things that was noted, and he went quite far in that ambition.
John: And so we judged him very harshly. We gave him 18 points.
Abram: We gave him 27.51 points.
Rob: Okay, so that means 22.755 is— again, it's not too bad. I mean, maybe we— what did we give him some positive points for?
John: To be honest, he didn't really get positive points for anything. We were quite dismissive about him entirely, whereas I think you folks didn't give him any Disaccomplishments, which was a little bit of a benefit to him.
Rob: Mm.
John: He did get a lot of Bad Personality from you though. Yeah. But you also thought that he was quite interesting. You got 11 points for Interesting.
Abram: Yeah.
Joe: Now that I'm remembering, one of my key challenges with him is that there were no biographies I had of him.
John: Yeah.
Joe: And I entirely wrote his episode based on him appearing in other people's biographies.
John: Yes.
Joe: And that may have been— tempering.
Abram: It got rid of the personal details.
Joe: Yeah, I think—
Rob: Yeah.
Joe: I think we had some challenge with that.
Rob: That's fair. I remember struggling through one very slight Wikipedia reference or something. It was the only thing I could find.
John: I remember being very glad that Rob did the research for that one. There's a section on the History of Parliament website where it says sort of "1D3DS" or something like that. And Rob explained to me something I had not realized before that point, which is that it is in fact a description of how many children they had and all that sort of thing written in code that was not legible to me prior to that.
Rob: There you go, that took a lot of Googling.
Rob: But yeah, I think maybe because you have a category that's purely for Interesting, that did give him a few more points, whereas theoretically ours could be awful and interesting but not get any points for it.
John: Yes. Yeah. So you gave him—
Abram: Ice cream cone.
Rob: Whereas we decided to break our scoring system and we gave him a Lord Bath Memorial Prize, which is one of the ways that we give people who are terrible but interesting. That is the sort of— That's how we do it.
John: We felt the right off didn't quite cover it.
Rob: Yeah, let's just count that as no.
Joe: I think it's a no.
John: Yeah, it's a no. Yeah, yes, I think we can agree on that.
Abram: Interesting, but that doesn't mean he's—
Rob: Yeah, that's fair. No asterisk.
John: And that brings us to—
Abram: According to this, it's Pelham-Holles.
John: So next up is the Duke of Newcastle. Yes, he was in fact Duke of both Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Abram: Yes.
Rob: There is also a Newcastle in Northern Ireland that he was not Duke of.
John: Oh really?
Rob: He could have got that one right.
Abram: So he was Duke of a Newcastle?
John: Of two Newcastles. Although new is perhaps overdoing it. Newcastle was founded, I think, by— if it wasn't William the Conqueror, it was certainly one of his immediate family.
Rob: The New Forest was planted by William II, wasn't it?
John: Yes, there you go. So if you're ready for an, um, historically. Okay.
John: The Duke of Newcastle was famously caught using the Queen's close stool during the coronation of George II.
Rob: Buzz!
John: Mm-hm?
Abram: Historically, he was caught using their bathroom, not—
John: The close stool is the bathroom. It's basically the same thing. It was the Queen's private bathroom, essentially. But it was a— the close stool was the sort of thing that he was sitting on.
Abram: Was it? That was someone else, I think.
John: He was famously caught using the Queen's close stool during the coronation of George II?
Abram: George III.
Rob: Ah, is that it?
Abram: Okay.
John: It was the coronation of George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Of Bridgerton fame. I don't know why I always say "of Bridgerton fame." Just that, you know.
Rob: Yeah, that's fair enough.
Joe: It's only so I can admit I've never seen Bridgerton.
John: I've seen one episode. It was fine.
John: So the Duke of Newcastle, I find a little bit of an oddity from a scoring perspective. So we gave him 45.8 points.
Abram: We gave him 30.
Rob: Ooh, yeah, big discrepancy.
John: So we were quite kind to him and you were not. And yet, when it comes to the known versus ice cream cone, what did you give him?
Abram: We gave him no.
John: Whereas we gave him right off. Oh, our first disagreement. So why were you so much nicer to him despite having scored him much more harshly?
Abram: Because he was one of the prime ministers we originally talked about as being the big ones. So we gave him no.
Joe: That, yes. But so we had two points that both involved Pitt. Okay, is the answer to both of your questions.
Joe: So first, he didn't get as many points because we divided all of his points by two, because we decided that most of what he did was simply the work of William Pitt, right? And that we would score it later.
John: Yep.
Joe: But we also determined, looking at the history of William Pitt, that Newcastle was the only person that was able to hold that guy in a government long enough for him to be accomplishing anything. And that we needed to give Newcastle points for being the Pitt wrangler during the critical time of the Seven Years' War, without which you could not have that miracle year.
John: Yeah, I mean, I can see that argument. I think we never really got over the fact that Newcastle seemed to be the kind of the lesser of the Pelhams, and that he, unlike Henry Pelham, who to be fair, always had the support of his much richer brother who was a lord—
John: But Newcastle really struggled without Pelham and needed to find someone to replace his brother and was always trying to do that. Whereas I think Henry Pelham was sort of the more successful of the two. Which seems a bit harsh in retrospect.
John: But I think we're about to have to work out how we resolve this impasse. Yeah.
Abram: How do we resolve this? We generally do a debate where we try and convince each other. What do you generally do if you disagree?
John: Well, you can't really because there's three of us. So it's easy. We do a vote. Yeah.
Joe: I think for the purposes of this grand unified episode, we simply must state that we are in disagreement.
Abram: Ooh.
Joe: And that there will be war.
Rob: That really escalated as a sentence. It did, didn't it? We'll agree to disagree, and then agree to declare war against them.
John: I mean, there will be war. The Seven Years' War will happen this time.
Joe: I will tell you that my recollection of your episode is that your episode had tremendously more potty humour than ours.
John: That is true. That is absolutely true.
Joe: And I have an 11-year-old co-host.
John: That is true. I will say that I really struggled to find interesting things about Newcastle. And since then, I've read a lot more about him in other books, and he still comes across as being very boring. So he just doesn't appeal to me very much.
Rob: That's fair. Yeah, I just didn't get a sort of likability factor around him.
John: Although I did enjoy that I think he was a bit of a germophobe and very terrified for his health. And so he— there was a famous story of him visiting Pitt, who was in bed at the time because he was recovering from gout.
John: And Newcastle got into another bed in the same room so that they could yell at each other, but both be in bed.
Abram: There! Solved it!
Joe: Good job.
Rob: Excellent.
Joe: What was his average score?
John: So we gave him 45.8, and you gave him— 30.
Abram: So that means 15.8, so that means 7.5 to 7.9. Is that the difference?
John: 37.9.
Abram: So, okay, 37.9 is his point tally. So he's slightly better than Compton, apparently. Okay, which means slightly better than barely anything.
John: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.
Joe: Yeah, yeah, that's good.
Abram: I take it from a maybe.
Rob: That's a great way of describing him, slightly better than a nobody, and that is why he gets a— So maybe.
Joe: You've reached the end of part one of our Prime Time Prime Factors special episode. We have even more fun coming up discussing all of our prime ministers to date and finally determining which podcast will win our trivia contest. To continue listening, please search in your podcast app of choice for Prime Time Prime Ministers or by going to primetimepod.com.
Rob: Never weary, never despair, and subscribe to both our podcasts.
John: I remember, for example, a message that you sent me a couple of months ago saying, um, I can't believe there was ever a time when I didn't immediately wonder what Horace Walpole thought of something.
Rob: It haunts your dreams, doesn't it?
Joe: I'm gonna miss him when he's gone.
Abram: Because he hates separate things.
Joe: He has an opinion about everybody and everything.
Rob: And it's always very cutting.
Abram: And it usually is a bad opinion.
Joe: And even when it's not bad, he has an insightful wit that just makes you say, um, makes you say something. Nothing I can say in front of you, I think.
John: Ah, you know that, Pete. It was certainly easier when you could write letters a week after the fact, and they would be recorded, rather than having to get something on Twitter within 10 minutes.
Rob: Horace Walpole would be an awful tweeter. He would—
Joe: Ugh.
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