Oliver Letwin (Conservative): 2011 – 2013
Nobody had ever expected Oliver Letwin to end up as Prime Minister, - as he admitted in his memoirs later on least of all himself – but the results of the 2011 general election had been uncertain to say the least. The Conservatives were the largest party but were still twenty seats short of a majority. Even with Ulster Unionist support they couldn’t quite make the numbers. A confidence and supply deal was forged with the Liberal Democrats, but a new leader was needed to replace Michael Howard.
The problem was nobody wanted a job that was A: Going to be horribly unpopular and B: would probably last three years at best. With more well-known candidates such as Phillip Hammond and Chancellor Theresa May deciding to keep their powder dry, the 1922 eventually contacted President of the Board of Trade and Tory blue sky guru Letwin and asked him to make the ultimate sacrifice for the party and for the country. Reluctantly Letwin agreed and travelled to the palace.
Letwin’s government was largely concerned with attempting to solve the financial crisis and involved itself little in international affairs, though he did do his bit to try and help other EU countries that had been hard hit by the recession.
The Letwin government decided that austerity was the name of the game when it came to restoring economic stability and in their vein cut subsidies and funding to public services across the board including to the MOD. Local government found its funding cut by almost 40% and benefits were also cut heavily leading to an increase in food bank usage. Letwin came under attack from the newly revived Opposition who pointed out that the government had increased taxes on almost everything but big business. The government’s response was that this was necessary to restore consumer confidence, though Andrew Marr was quick to point out in an interview with the Chancellor that as people had no money to spend in the shops, this seemed rather pointless.
Letwin was always in a rather precarious position and when papers he had written during his time in Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit – including a paper which some took as suggesting the NHS should be privatised – his numbers began falling into single digits. With the markets still looking precarious, Letwin’s position looked more and more tenuous every day.
To this day no-one is quite sure who decided to table the Graduate Tax increase, a Lib Dem red line which they had made clear they would resign over. With the bill defeated by a wide margin, Letwin surprised many by calling for a vote of confidence in his own government. Predictably the government lost and Labour was swept back to Number 10 under a much more charismatic leader.