A History of the English-Speaking Peoples out and then when Churchill was appointed Prime Minister. After the war ended in 1945, Churchill was busy, first writing his history of that conflict and then as Prime Minister again between 1951 and 1955, and so it was not until the late 1950s, when Churchill was in his early eighties, that he was able to finish the work. The later volumes were completed when Churchill was over eighty. A full one-third of the last volume was devoted to the military minutiae of the American Civil War. Social history, the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution hardly get a mention.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom decision-making. Former ministers such as Clare Short and Chris Smith have criticised the lack of decision-making power in Cabinet. When she resigned, Short denounced "the centralisation of power into the hands of the Prime Minister and an increasingly small number of advisers". Graham Allen (a Government Whip during Tony Blair's first government) made the case in "The Last Prime Minister: Being Honest About the UK Presidency" (2003) that in fact the office of prime minister has presidential powers. However, the presidentialisation thesis has been extensively criticised as well. Keith Dowding, for example, argues that British Prime Ministers are already more