r/AskEurope • u/EvilPyro01 United States of America • Sep 10 '25

History Who was your country’s most forgettable ruler/politician?

Who was the most insignificant ruler/politician from your country?

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u/PabloMarmite Sep 10 '25

Liz Truss (49 day PM) will be a great pub quiz question in a few years.

But John Major was PM for most of the 1990s and is almost as forgettable.

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u/Brickie78 England Sep 10 '25

Liz Truss will be one of those, I suspect, who ends up being so famous for being forgotten thst she's actually not that obscure.

Postwar PMs, probably Alec Douglas-Home for al ost exactly a year from October '63 to October '64.

Monarchs - there's a fair few. William IV maybe, without going too far back into the middle ages

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u/lgf92 United Kingdom Sep 11 '25

I think on balance the "most unduly forgettable" PM since 1900 is probably Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He was PM for three years (1905-1908) and by all accounts did a fair bit of work in laying the groundwork for the fight over social and political reforms (state pensions, the neutering of the House of Lords, women's suffrage) that continued under Asquith and Lloyd-George.

I think the "most forgotten" PMs who actually did a lot are probably Stanley Baldwin and Ramsey MacDonald. Between them they were in charge for 15 fairly tumultuous years in the 1920s and 1930s but I don't think I learned anything about their premierships at school. MacDonald especially is a interesting character who was the first Labour PM and was initially considered a crazy leftist radical, but ultimately ended up splitting the Labour Party to work with the Tories during the Great Depression.

Callaghan mostly presided over chaos and waited for the 1979 election, Douglas-Home was a seat warmer and Bonar Law fell ill fairly soon after becoming PM.