Knock-knocking on Evans' door?
The Prime Minister has a humdinger of an appointment to make: a professor of history at Cambridge
Tristram Hunt

As Gordon Brown is no doubt discovering, the day-to-day powers of a prime minister are limited. In contrast to HM Treasury, No10 is a small town house with neither a vast departmental budget nor a legion of civil servants. But what the denizen of Downing Street still controls is the power of patronage - and sitting in Mr Brown's in-tray is a humdinger of an appointment, the Regius Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

Much has been made of Gordon Brown's status as Britain's first with a history PhD. The recently launched History & Policy think-tank, composed of academics trying to interest politicians in studying the lessons of the past, has placed great hopes in a more reflective Brown Government after the Year Zero mentality of the Blair years.

And there is no doubt Mr Brown enjoys debating and studying the past: his book on Jimmy Maxton and “Red Clydeside” is regarded as a sophisticated if rather dry account of Scottish socialism; his speeches on Britishness and liberty are inflected with a historical tradition influenced by 17th-century civic republicanism; and he has developed a History Channel-like enthusiasm for the derring-do of the Second World War, with a planned new volume of his Profiles in Courage to be drawn from heroic wartime accounts. But Mr Brown now has a wonderful chance to send a powerful signal about the kind of history he thinks is important to 21st-century Britain. The Regius Professorship of History is a glorious post stretching back to the 18th century and its ranks have variously included the great chronicler of liberty Lord Acton, the social historian G.M.Trevelyan, and the Tudor expert Sir Geoffrey Elton. Its current holder, Quentin Skinner, a professor of political thought, retires later this year and discreet soundings are being taken at High Table for a replacement.

Favourite for the job is the brilliant if belligerent scholar of Nazi Germany, Richard Evans. Presently engaged in writing a massive, multi-volume account of the Reich, his other claim to fame is a comprehensive demolition of David Irving in his Holocaust-denier libel case. In a High Court tour de force, Professor Evans took him to task over mistranslated documents, the use of discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics. “Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians,” Evans concluded, “that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all.” His appointment would confirm Mr Brown's enthusiasm for the centrality of the Second World War to our national story.

Running him a close second is the imperial and naval historian Sir Christopher Bayly. A South Asian enthusiast and 18th-century expert, Sir Christopher has been a pioneer in the history of globalisation. As politicians grapple with all the problems of mass migration, multiculturalism and post-imperial identities, his work has sought to unpick the roots of these modern complexities in the mid-1700s. His is a fascinating chronicle of interdependence, cultural exchange and global networks, powerfully relevant for present day policymakers.

Then there is the outfield. We will know that the PM has fallen victim to the securocrats if Christopher Andrew is offered the job. The official chronicler of MI5, his studies have unearthed many dirty secrets of the former Soviet Union - including the exposure of Melita Norwood, the “great-granny spy”, as the longest-serving Russian agent in Britain. By contrast, Mr Brown could burnish his progressive credentials by promoting the radicals' choice, Gareth Stedman Jones, a former “new Left” guru and pioneer social historian, and now working on a definitive biography of Marx.

Mr Brown, however, could have his own ideas. Among the historians who have most influenced his thinking is the Princeton-based academic, Linda Colley. Her book, Britons: Forging the Nation, described how British national identity was moulded in the 18th century in the furnace of war, empire and Protestantism. While some concluded from her work that if Britishness was an artificial 1700s construct then it could just as easily be abandoned in an era of post-national ethnic affiliations, Mr Brown has used her history to argue for a new assertion of British identity for a modern age. Like few others, Professor Colley's work has informed his entire approach to Britishness and citizenship and she would be an impressive appointment.

Then there is the nuclear option: Gertrude Himmelfarb. Wife of the Trotskyist turned neoconservative guru Irving Kristol, this great doyenne of reactionary history has somehow inveigled the Prime Minister under her spell. Her specialism is Victorian attitudes to poverty and she herself has long adopted the lofty mien of a lady bountiful: for Professor Himmelfarb, the problems of the poor are always questions of morality and character, not class or condition. No doubt this appeals to Mr Brown's Puritan ethos just as her championing of the British enlightenment above the continental version tickles his Euroscepticism. Yet she is a New Yorker born and bred and, at her impressive age, will not be swapping Central Park for the Cambridge fens.

Whoever he chooses, Mr Brown should get stuck in. One of the more misguided reforms under consideration is removing Downing Street from public appointments. But when it comes to bishops and dons, a little bit of politics helps: it makes academia more relevant, and politicians more reflective. It does well for prime ministers to take an interest in their professors - for unless, like Churchill, they write their own histories, these will be the scribes handing down the judgment of posterity.

Tristram Hunt lectures in history at Queen Mary, University of London

* Have your say

Dr. Evans professionalism is suspect after hiring himself out to Lipstadt in the David Irving libel trial. It is one thing to say something; it is entirely different to say something for money. The career choice would seem to be between being an historian and paid witness. When he chose to be a paid witness, he should not be rewarded with an important appointment as an historian.

Tom Hartman, Washington, USA