Spectator competition winners: famous authors’ prime-ministerial ambitions

In 1959 Ian Fleming wrote a fascinating essay for The Spectator under the headline ‘If I were Prime Minister’. In it he proposed, among much else, a combination of ‘benevolent Stakhanovism’ in the workplace and the conversion of Isle of Wight into ‘one vast pleasuredome …where the frustrated citizen of every class could give full rein to those basic instinct for sex and gambling which have been crushed through the ages’. The invitation to supply a similar article written by the author of your choice produced some equally arresting proposals and Bill Greenwell’s Nevil Shute, Hugh King, C.J. Gleed and Barry Baldwin’s Samuel Johnson, and G.M. Southgate’s Virginia Woolf were extremely unlucky to miss out on a spot in the winning line-up. The entries printed below earn their authors £30 each. Top dog this week is W.J. Webster, who takes £35.

W.J. Webster/Jeffrey Archer Had fate not intervened I might actually have attained the highest office in the land.