Many notable political figures have represented North East constituencies in the 20th century. Ramsay Macdonald (1866-1937), the first Labour prime minister sat for Seaham until defeated in 1935 by Emmanuel 'Manny' Shinwell (1884-1986), in one of the most bitterly-contested elections in modern history. Manny later represented Easington. Other prominent Labour politicians have included Hugh Dalton (1887-1962), who sat for Bishop Auckland and J. Chuter Ede (1882-1965) , who was MP for South Shields 1929-31 and 1934-65. As minister of education 1940-45, he helped to bring about the 1944 Education Act. Tony Blair is MP for Sedgefield and Peter Mandelson for Hartlepool.
Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), the Conservative prime minister, was MP for Stockton 1924-29 and again after 1931. In 1984, he took the title of Earl Stockton. On the same side of the house, the redoubtable Dame Irene Ward held Tynemouth for many years. For a prime minister actually born in the North East, however, we must turn elsewhere.
Anthony Eden was born at Windlestone Hall and recalled his father, Sir William, as a rather remote and frightening figure, whose visits to him at school he disliked. There is a story that Anthony's father was actually George Wyndham, one of the handsomest men in England. Whatever the truth of that, Anthony let the story persist as it was interesting and amusing. Yet it was from the unpredictable and mildly eccentric Sir William that Anthony developed his love of the arts - as well as an early acquaintance with foreign languages.
As Anthony was not the heir to Windlestone Hall, he did not feel possessive towards it. 'I loved its spaciousness and the knowledge that within it I could find beauty, reading and entertainment for any mood.' He describes the conventional pleasures of a large estate; the riding, the shooting, the servants. He also writes of books, paintings and the visits of 'Bombardier' Billy Wells, the boxer, in whom Sir William had taken an interest, as well as personalities from the world of literature and the theatre. Anthony's diary, which he began seriously in 1912, often shows his dislike of Eton and his yearning for 'Windles'. On 28 April, he writes at Windlestone: 'Time approaches shall soon have to go back to that Hell.' On 30 April, back at Eton, he laments:' Back again, alas! to thirteen weeks of pining, slavery and misery.'
Interspersed with such entries, we find a keen interest in the political scene. His first experience of politics had been attending the election count at Bishop Auckland in 1910, where he heard the defeated Labour candidate say that one day Labour would win. His own political career began with a heavy defeat in Spennymoor before being elected as a Conservative for Warwick and Leamington in 1923, a constituency he represented until his retirement in 1957. Eden was appointed foreign secretary in 1935, and became identified in the public mind with opposition to the 'appeasement' policy of the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments towards Nazi Germany. He served from 1940-45 as foreign secretary in Churchill's cabinet, doing much (too much, some said) to cement relations with the USSR and to include that country in the post-war settlement. His parliamentary speeches tended to lack substance, however. 'Nothing but clich, clich, clich,' murmured the forthright Ernest Bevin.
Eden was a lifelong Sunderland supporter and delighted in their 1930s successes in cup and league, and again in 1973.
Handsome, elegant and cultured, Eden was the ideal embodiment of a certain kind of Englishman. He was also a skilled negotiator and his greatest triumph was probably the Geneva Conference on South East Asia (1954) where the prevented the France-Viet Minh struggle in Vietnam from turning into a USA-China conflict. Eden became prime minister in 1955, but it was the Suez affair in the following year which brought about his downfall. It must have been easy for him to see President Nasser as a small-scale Hitler intent on twisting the toothless lion's tail. He committed Britain to joint military intervention with the French in the canal Zone, despite the opposition of the USA, most of the Commonwealth and most of his foreign policy advisers. In the event the failure of the action was a bitter blow, and has been described as the event which exposed to the world the vulnerability and powerlessness of Britain's post-war position. The intense strain of the Suez crisis and the divisions it aroused, led to his resignation in 1957.
Windlestone Hall had been sold in 1936, and the family had left their ancestral county. In his memoirs Another World, Eden (now the Earl of Avon) writes that in his seventies, he chanced to be driving on the Great North Road, south of Rushyford, when he decided to see his old home again, though it was now used for institutional purposes. Like most such visits, it was a mistake.

'There it was, apparently intact; the roof whole, the windows glazed. Yet what had been spacious and elegant was now gaunt and vacantly lonely. The curved and squat outlines of some Nissen huts crowded up against the north front windows, and the lake had lost its limpidity under a green mask.
My eyes travelled sadly along the avenue that led to the chapel. Here has frank ruin. The building lay open to the sky with the family memorial plaques removed from the walls and taken to my brother's new home in the heaths of Hampshire.'