As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.

Not all prime ministers are equal. Not remotely – which is why books taking one prime minister after the other can only ever tell a partial story. In this chapter, we consider the other seven (after Walpole and Pitt the Younger) who defined the office as ‘agenda changers’. They are the creators of the (still evolving) office of prime minister. All nine – two in the eighteenth century, three in the nineteenth, and four in the twentieth – carved out what the office of prime minister means, and shaped the office in their own image. After these ‘agenda changers’ ceased to be prime minister, their successors over the years that followed either tried to be like them, or tried deliberately to distance themselves from them: but none could escape their long shadow. They took advantage of wide-ranging historical or consensus change and moulded the office and country to their will.