The Prime Minister: a man you’d shoot tigers with?

In  1953 the Labour MP Maurice Edelman wrote the political novel Who Goes Home in which a revered Parliamentary commentator states:

On the whole, British Prime Ministers have to be the sort of man you can trust with your eldest daughter or your sister or your wife or mother – a sort of father-figure. A man you’d shoot tigers with. … A Prime Minister’s rather like a Lord Mayor. He’s made by the job. He’s moulded into its chains. That’s why we get small business-men, big business-men, little solicitors and great aristocrats all following each other like ball-bearings. Of course the British public like to know their Prime Minister. But what they know is myth. It’s the same with every politician.

Edelman meant this to be taken as a truism – I wonder how far it remains true?

Steven Fielding