Bernard Ingham: Maybe I'm biased, but Mrs Thatcher is in prime position for best Premier

Leeds University's Professor Kevin Theakston and his friends (of whose political inclinations I know nothing) have indeed made Clem Attlee the best of the dozen ahead of Margaret Thatcher.

I happen to agree with them that they are the only two candidates for top spot. But, for me, our only woman PM takes the crown. You may reasonably say I am prejudiced, but hear me out.

Attlee takes some beating for his immense service as Winston

Churchill's wartime deputy and his purposeful 1945-50 government. He managed a country bankrupted by war with a clear vision of what needed to be done to put the 1930s behind us.

He set about socialising Britain and, 62 years on, the NHS remains a monument in the welfare state to his achievement. It may well be in dire need of refurbishment and better management, but not many want to get rid of it.

In retrospect, we may well think Attlee's brand of socialism was misguided. But the man ran a tight ship with a vastly experienced, able and awkward crew, stood no nonsense and established a post-war

political consensus that lasted for nearly 30 years until Thatcher came along.

She did not arrive with Attlee's landslide or goodwill. Her first majority of 43 seats reflected public doubts after the Winter of Discontent whether Britain was governable any more. Nobody expected her to sort out Britain, still less raise its standing in the world.

Yet she did all that with little Cabinet experience – a mere four years as Ted Heath's token woman at Education – and in an incomparably faster, shrunken and media-ridden world than Attlee could ever have imagined. Life in No 10 in 1945 was a more leisurely business than in 1979.

Both Attlee and Thatcher changed the nature of Britain. His remedy – a form of socialism – came to be exploited and decayed. Her antidote – capitalist freedom under the law with personal responsibility – has suffered in the hands of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But its decay has also made the case for a return to her disciplines.

As for the rest, I have bones to pick with the academics. They ranked our other PMs in this order – Blair, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, John Major, Edward Heath, Gordon Brown, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden.

They must be out of their tiny little minds giving Blair third place. In my book, he drops into the bottom three with Brown and Eden, all of whom in their way corrupted Britain. Eden lied about Suez, Blair about Iraq and Brown about most things if it was to his advantage. Between them, Blair and Brown squandered the only golden economic legacy since 1945. Brown's only saving grace – if that is the right word – is that he kept us out of the euro. A debauched 18th century rou would have blanched at his profligacy and debts.

Working upwards, I offer no disrespect in putting Churchill in ninth place. He was never a peacetime PM and had lost it before he returned to No 10 in 1951. It is then a toss up for seventh and eighth place between Heath, who deceitfully took us into the Common Market, and Callaghan, who dithered into the Winter of Discontent. I make Heath eighth for deluding himself to his death that he was a paragon among PMs.

Harold Wilson's chief claim to fame was holding his fissiparous party together and keeping us out of Vietnam. He just makes fifth place ahead of the very decent Douglas-Home who has been shabbily treated by the

academics. After all, the 14th earl very nearly denied the 14th Mr Wilson the crown in 1964 from a standing start.

I make Macmillan third if only for having the good fortune to combine charisma with a new prosperity and Major fourth because, while no leader, he did a brilliant repair job after Black Wednesday in 1992 and left Blair and Brown with the best functioning of Europe's larger economies. Major never gets the credit he deserves. Please discuss.