If I were prime minister, by Ian Fleming

This article was first published in The Spectator on 9 October, 1959.

I am a totally non-political animal. I prefer the name of the Liberal Party to the name of any other and I vote Conservative rather than Labour, mainly because the Conservatives have bigger bottoms and I believe that big bottoms make for better government than scrawny ones. I only once attended a debate in the House of Commons. It was, I think, towards the end of 1938 when we were unattractively trying to cajole Mussolini away from Hitler. I found the hollowness and futility of the speeches degrading and infantile and the well-fed, deep-throated ‘hear, hears’ for each mendacious platitude verging on the obscene. If this is politics, I reflected, I would much rather not see it happening and I swore never to re-enter the Chamber. I never have.

My own particular hero is Sir Alan Herbert, an independent-minded though admittedly think-shanked man, who swimming alone, stayed out of the muddy red and blue stream and more or less single-handed changed a section of our law for the benefit of the common man.