Cancelled Prime Minister

A long overdue re-evaluation of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald

Ramsay MacDonald was born and brought up in the county of Moray in north-east Scotland, the illegitimate son of a ploughman. When he left school at the age of fourteen he seemed bound to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead he would be Prime Minister of Great Britain, the first Labour Prime Minister, a friend of his sovereign, George V, a world star on the stage of international diplomacy.

How did he get there from his Highland bothy and why is he now forgotten, blanked out of political memory? The Cancelled Prime Minister answers that question. It also exonerates this man of the left from the charge that he went on to lead the Conservative-dominated National Government for reasons of treacherous ambition.

While MacDonald’s was a political life, it was also a personal and poignant odyssey, undertaken for half its span beneath the weight of undying grief over the loss of a wife who died young. Similarly, this biography is more than a political one. MacDonald’s was an elusive, Celtic personality and it has been easier to criticise him than to understand him. Making extensive use of MacDonald’s private diaries, Walter Reid reveals for the first time the full essence of a complex individual, a man not without faults, but able and honourable and with deep and widespread interests.

History has been unkind to MacDonald. It has been written in general from political standpoints hostile to him. Reid’s book is not uncritical but it reveals the true importance of this hugely significant figure, whose detractors have sought to eliminate him from the record of his century.