Nick Robinson presents The Prime Ministers, a series exploring how prime ministers have used their power and responded to the great challenges of their time and how they made the job what it is today.
The series begins 24 February 2009 on Radio 4, Tuesdays at 9.30am. Repeated Sundays at 10.45pm
Featured prime ministers
- Sir Robert Walpole - 24 February 9.30am
- Sir Robert Walpole, the first and longest-serving prime minister.
- Lord North - 3 March 9.30am
- Lord North, remembered as the prime minister who lost America.
- Sir Robert Peel - 10 March 9.30am
- Sir Robert Peel, who put national interest before party interest.
- Lord Palmerston - 17 March 9.30am
- Lord Palmerston, notorious womaniser, who cultivated a cavalier image and dominated mid-Victorian politics.
- Benjamin Disraeli - 24 March 9.30am
- Benjamin Disraeli turned his skills as a novelist to politics and became Britain's first Jewish-born prime minister.
- David Lloyd George - 31 March 9.30am
- David Lloyd George, Welsh radical who set up the early welfare state, became a presidential PM in the First World War and split the Liberal party
- Stanley Baldwin - 7 April 9.30am
- Stanley Baldwin, the first prime minister to master radio broadcasting, his notion of Englishness shaped inter-war Britain
- Clement Attlee - 14 April 9.30am
- Clement Attlee, who lacked any charisma, but created modern welfare state and managed the big political beasts in his Cabinet.
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