Some Prime Ministers did not have degrees?!

As far as I know, Chruchill and Major are the only two post-war Prime Ministers not to have gone to University (though Churchill did go to Harrow and could most likely have easily gone on to Oxbridge considering his father was Chancellor at one point).

In fact, if you add in Brown (who attended Edinburgh (though he had an offer from Oxford)), all other post-war PMs went to Oxford.

I think you'll find most MPs went to Oxbridge because they were independently educated and/or it was 'easier' to get in at that time (i.e. it wasn't quite as competitive considering the lack of grade inflation etc.).

Perhaps i'm strange but from what i've read he actually did his best politicial stuff while in the Liberal, rather than Conservative Party. Hard to say if i could have voted for him in the 50's as well, if memory serves the country was taking the first steps in abandoning the empire and relegating us to a second tier power.

That's an odd thing to be in favour of, do you mean you feel that your kind of person would have been a Queen and Empire man in the 50s, or do you mean with hindsight it would have been better not to lose the Empire?

Anyway, the loss of Empire was well underway before the 50s, even as early as WW1 and certainly by the 30s with high degrees of resistance in India and elsewhere. Let's not forget the fall of Singapore and then Stafford Cripps with his remarkably modern-sounding arguments in cabinet with WSC in the middle of the war, to accept the inevitable and dump the Empire. Eventually Cripps walked away, but his plan lived on.

Churchill was part of a huge gravy train - the gravy train of aristocracy. His family were amongst the highest and (in the past) richest in the country and his road to political career was assured from birth, should he choose it, which he did. He became an MP almost without personal effort and a minister later with only moderate talent.

Arguably he was basically an upper class idiot (he showed a lot of that in his youth, but I suppose that's forgivable up to a point) who was for a long time overpromoted. However, he gradually learned some basic skills and his judgement improved and when you combine that with massive background, the deviousness and bluster of the British ruling classes of the day, the Harrovian education and some solid skills in the area of cunning strategy and rhetoric, he did a good job during the war. He also made many very serious mistakes and we only won the war because the Americans over-ruled many of them and determinedly followed more intelligent policies against Churchill's imperialistic obsessions.

I agree about Lloyd George and MacDonald and of course Bonar Law, who was rural, Canadian and an Irish Home Ruler.

Churchill I think was part of the establishment, indeed at the heart of it. He was very much part of elite circles throughout his pre-WWII years and whilst he was sometimes identified as a maverick politically because he was against Baldwin and then Appeasement, he was nonetheless absolutely at the centre of the London ruling class.

I don't think it's accurate to describe Baldwin as an outsider in any real sense. Another Harrovian, he was related to Rudyard Kipling, he went to Trinity, he inherited a fortune and he moved in upper-crust circles.

The main factor would be that vastly fewer people went to university - nothing to do with grade inflation.

I liked John Major. He ran away from the circus to work at a bank.

Funny, isn't it?

Ok, David Cameron is a proper part of the aristocracy, but since 1964 the PMs from "actual" working class backgrounds have all been Tories except for Callaghan. All the Labour ones have generally been middle class professionals of some kind. It was only prior to Wilson that the Tory PMs were landed gentry types.

Mrs T - father was a greengrocer.
Mr Major - father was a circus performer
Ted Heath - father was a carpenter

Blair - father was a barrister
Brown - father was a church minister
Callaghan - father in the Navy
Wilson - father was a scientist

What? Churchill was in the military for a ridiculous amount of time, funded the first tanks and did all sorts of stuff that was not 'without personal effort' you sound like a left wing nutjob.

Baldwin was the first PM in trade.

Apart from the periods 1924-1929 and after September 1940, it is very difficult to see Churchill's position on anything coinciding with the establishment view.

No to naval expansion (when a Tory), Imperial Preference (Tory) the House of Lords veto (Liberal), force feeding suffragettes (Liberal) and the abdication (Tory) amongst many others.

That is tendentious.

If you were ranking these in order of social class, it would be:

Cameron
Blair
Brown
Heath
Thatcher
Wilson
Major (Major's family when prosperous gnome-makers would come ahead of Heath but the three respectable lower middle class churchgoing families would have looked down on Major for being from a rather rackety unstable background)
Callaghan

Churchill served for reasons of self-promotion but it's not plausible to say he never put his life at risk or that he got other people killed. He had no command position in the army before WWI, but took part in a cavalry charge and was captured by the Boers, escaping from a PoW camp and escaped back to South Africa at a time when the Boer government intended to have him executed if he were recaptured.

For a clear, impartial rendering of this chapter in his life, can I recommend reading Roy Jenkins' biography? I think if you do, you will question the relevance and nobility of the escapade, to say the least.

Churchill was part of a huge gravy train - the gravy train of aristocracy. His family were amongst the highest and (in the past) richest in the country and his road to political career was assured from birth, should he choose it, which he did. He became an MP almost without personal effort and a minister later with only moderate talent.

idk what you mean by "relevance" but I can't see how one can possibly frame these actions as personally safe for Churchill.

What's interesting about all this is not that a highly connected (albeit not particularly wealthy) man managed to get ahead of others, but that he was so successful on arrival. If university teaches people valuable skills with general application then Churchill is hard to rationalise. The most likely explanation is that university doesn't teach people valuable skills with general application.

Those weren't (the other quote referred to WWI and he was a younger man in S. Africa) but that doesn't mean they were part of a sustained 'military experience' or 'service' which was the original point I was responding to. They were examples of rich kid adventure journalism in a temporary uniform.

Churchill wasn't in the military in the way that you think. He resigned as a Minister and 'accepted' a commission in WWI almost as an act of noblesse-oblige and whilst he did serve in the trenches, he avoided main action. To quote the excellent Wikipedia article on the topic:

"Correspondence with his wife shows that his intent in taking up active service was to rehabilitate his reputation, but this was balanced by the serious risk of being killed. During his period of command, Ploegsteert was a "quiet sector," and the battalion did not take part in any set battle"

WSC's pre-war 'military experience' was essentially a series of personal boys-own-story set piece adventures designed to write articles as a journalist, not serious military experience. He was regarded as a dangerous adventurist and borderline lunatic by many who met him during those years. The Boer War is a particular example of his upper class tomfoolery putting other people's lives at risk. He didn't 'serve' with anything like distinction.