America's active seniors: why politicians have a longer shelf life in the US

As a presidential contest looms between two candidates with a combined age of 160, how does Britain regard silver-haired politicians, and are we missing out?

A small item on the BBC News website reported that John Kerry, the former US secretary of state, is stepping down from his current position as special presidential envoy, having served for three years. That seemed perfectly reasonable, I thought at first as I read it, as Kerry turned 80 last month and has spent almost all of the past 40 years in senior executive or legislative positions; most famously, of course, and perhaps gruellingly, he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, losing narrowly (by 35 in the Electoral College and three million votes) to George W. Bush. Then I read on. Kerry is leaving his current job not for a life of watching Jeopardy! in his five-storey townhouse in Boston’s über-refined Louisburg Square, but “to work on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign”. He will be involved in “promoting Mr Biden’s work on combatting global warming”, but, lest you worry for him, he will still be attending and speaking at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos next week.

That election, of course, is potentially the most aged contest in US history. Assuming that Biden remains the Democratic candidate, which seems overwhelmingly likely, and that Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination, which is looking probable, it will be a race between an incumbent who will turn 82 a fortnight after polling day and a 78-year-old challenger. Bear in mind that, before Trump came along, the oldest man ever to assume the presidency for the first time was Ronald Reagan, who was 69 at his inauguration in 1981; and he was the oldest to begin a second term—as either Biden or Trump would be doing—at 73.

Reagan’s age was a constant factor in the political atmosphere of his presidency, although he brilliantly defused it at the second debate of the 1984 election, against former vice-president Walter Mondale (56), when he declared, with the brilliance of the B-movie actor he had once been, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Of course, age is very much a factor in the current debate. Biden’s age and acuity are weapons used against him on a daily basis; Trump is a crude and vulgar campaigner but coining the nickname “Sleepy Joe” for his opponent as early as April 2019 was act of genius. (I wrote about political nicknames in The Spectator last month, and made the point that they are only effective if they sum up something characteristic and true or true-seeming about the target.) A poll conducted last August by AP/NORC showed that 77 per cent of those surveyed thought Biden’s age made him “too old to effectively serve another 4-year term as president”, and that only fell to 69 per cent among Democrats. By contrast, only half of those surveyed thought Trump was too old, though there the partisan divide was much sharper: 71 per cent of Democrats responded that he was too old, but only 28 per cent of Republicans did so.

It is true that voters have concerns about Trump’s capacity, ability and temperament which are not strictly or principally age-related. Although he exhibits many worrying signs of instability and erratic behaviour, Trump is clearly if superficially more vigorous and lively than the president. It was revealing that the same poll showed that the first attribute respondents associated with Biden was age and infirmity, but with Trump it was criminality.

However, let us step back for a moment from the presidential contest in November. I think it is fair to say that American politics is much more forgiving, if that is the right word, of leaders who have reached a more mature age than British politics is. Biden’s cabinet contains four members in their 70s, as are the permanent representative to the United Nations and the US ambassadors to the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil and New Zealand, among others. (I am fairly sure no UK ambassador is over 70; I would be surprised if any is over 65. Edit: the excellent Twitter account Mr Memory reports that the current ambassador to Lithuania, Brian Olley, is 66.)

In Congress, five senators are 80 or over, while 35 are 70 or over. Fourteen members of the House of Representatives are in their 80s; 10 state governors are over 70. The Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer, is 73, while his deputy, the majority whip, Dick Durbin, is 79. The minority leader, Mitch McConnell, will soon be 82. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, until recently a powerful and high-profile speaker of the House, will soon be 84.

The greater tolerance of age in American political culture means that senior executive positions as well as elected ones can often be filled by people with heavyweight experience. The current secretary of defense, for example, Lloyd Austin, is 70 and was a four-star US Army general, his last position being as head of United States Central Command from 2013 to 2016. A previous secretary of defense from 2017 to 2019 was James Mattis, aged 66 on appointment, who was also a former four-star general, though from the US Marine Corps, and had been Austin’s immediate predecessor at US Central Command. Former secretaries of state include Rex Tillerson (2017-18), 64 on appointment and former chairman and CEO of oil and gas giant ExxonMobil; Colin Powell (2001-05), 63, a four-star army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and John Foster Dulles (1953-59), 65, who had been legal adviser at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a long-serving partner at New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell where he was an architect of the Dawes Plan which restructured Germany’s reparations payments after the First World War, and a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, 1947 and 1950.

Sometimes the system throws up quirks: the youngest US secretary of defense, from 1975 to 1977, and the oldest, from 2001 to 2006, were the same man, Donald Rumsfeld: he was 43 when first appointed by President Gerald Ford, and 74 when he retired under President George W. Bush. It must also be admitted that the US system of appointments to executive office, approved by the Senate, makes is easier to bring in experienced outsiders that the British system whereby most ministerial positions are filled by members of the House of Commons who are expected to have developed a reputation and a track record as backbenchers and then junior ministers before achieving cabinet rank.

This doesn’t mean that there is never any discussion of advanced age in American politics. In July last year, Mitch McConnell had a strange episode in which he seemed to become unable to speak for about 20 seconds during a press conference, and a similar incident happened again in August. Dianne Feinstein, Democratic senator for California 1992-2023, came under increasing scrutiny because of her apparently declining health and cognitive functions in her last years, and there was considerable pressure on her to step down from the Senate. She steadfastly refused to do so, despite becoming embarrassingly frail and incapable by last year, and died in office in September 2023, at the age of 90.

Looking further back, Senator Strom Thurmond, who represented South Carolina from 1954 to 1956 and again, after a seven-month hiatus, from 1956 to 2003, stayed in the Senate too long, retiring only six months before his death at the age of 100. By the 1990s, serious questions were raised about his mental capacity, although he served as chairman of the Armed Services Committee between 1995 and 1999, aged 92 to 96. After his death, one Senate aide would remark “for his last ten years, Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback”. He was allegedly prominent on an informal list, passed among aides and staffers, of senators with whom women were advised not to share a lift, though Thurmond had long been notorious as a womaniser. Perhaps age took away some inhibitions.

In general, however, I think American political culture has a much higher threshold above which eyebrows are raised or questions asked about age as a factor. Putting aside any unusually early or prominent signs of physical or mental capability, it seems that politicians can expect to go about their business at least into the first half of their 70s before there is an issue at all.

In the United Kingdom, the culture is much less forgiving. If we put the House of Lords to one side, where the age profile still tends towards the elderly but is endlessly caricatured on that basis, only four Members of Parliament are over 80, and the oldest, Sir Bill Cash, is 83. Our recent prime ministers have taken office at 42 (Sunak), 47 (Truss), 55 (Johnson), 59 (May), 43 (Cameron), 56 (Brown), 43 (Blair), 47 (Major) and 53 (Thatcher). Think about that: since Thatcher, only one prime minister has celebrated a 60th birthday in Downing Street. All the others did so with the premierships merely memories.

(Judging purely from anecdotal data, people seem to underestimate how old Sir Keir Starmer is. If, as we expected, the Labour Party wins a general election in the autumn of this year, Starmer will become prime minister at the age of 62, the oldest person to come to the office since Jim Callaghan in 1976, and before that Harold Macmillan in 1957. He will also take over from someone a full generation younger than him; I can’t think of the last time the baton was handed so far upwards.)

Ministers in the British government now have quite a low upper limit, by and large. When former judge Sir Christopher Bellamy was nominated for a peerage and appointed a junior justice minister by Boris Johnson in June 2022, he was comfortably the oldest member of the government—but he was only 76. If we look at the current cabinet, three members are in their (late) 30s, five in their 40s (including the prime minister and deputy prime minister), 12 are in their 50s and just two in their 60s. The outlier, at 72, is the leader of the House of Lords, Lord True; and one could argue that he is merely a representative of the upper house, where the average age is 71.

Last August, after Keir Mather was elected MP for Selby and Ainsty aged 25, I wrote an essay examining the cult of youth in politics. I argued that unusually young people rising quickly up the ladder was, from time to time, no bad thing. I did say that “we are often dazzled by prodigious youth”, citing figures like David Steel, Charles Kennedy and David Lammy, and pointed out that being young makes politicians stand out from their peers, which is always an advantage they seek. I also used the example of Mather to suggest that younger politicians were sometimes more gently treated by the media, and could appeal beyond the normal range of Westminster scribes.

His achievement in overturning Nigel Adams’s majority of 20,000 in Selby and Ainsty is certainly remarkable and speaks to formidable campaigning and communications skills, but would he have been sympathetically profiled in a weekend supplement by a journalist who was from outside the political commentariat (though the son of a Labour MEP) and who had grown up in the same part of the country (and in a similar Labour tradition) if he had been 45 rather than 25? Would they have provided, if they had run a feature at all, a ready-made ally? It seems unlikely to me. Before he even takes his seat, Mather has achieved a degree of what the advertising industry calls “cut through” and a significant level of sympathetic coverage which derives, if we are honest, from his youth.

Celebrating and idolising youth, of course, is a human tendency probably as old as our existence as a species. Certainly, the Greek hero Achilles, around whom much of Homer’s Iliad revolves, was in his 20s or perhaps very early 30s when he was killed towards the end of the 10-year Trojan War; while much of Jehanne d’Arc’s strange mystical power lay in her youth—she was 17 when she first appeared in front of the French king, Charles VII, and probably 19 when she was burned to death in 1431.

This phenomenon has become prominent again with President Emmanuel Macron’s appointment of Gabriel Attal as his new prime minister. Attal is 34, the youngest premier in the Fifth Republic’s history, and was first elected to the Assemblée nationale in 2017. As Guy Walters points out in The Independent, he is the same age as Taylor Swift. The new cabinet also includes Attal’s former civil partner Stéphane Séjourné, 38 years old and now minister for Europe and foreign affairs (his predecessor, Catherine Colonna, is 67). But then Macron himself has played the youth card: when he was elected as president of the French Republic in May 2017, he was only 39, the youngest president in France’s history (and its youngest head of state since Napoleon). His whole image was crafted around youthful vigour and dynamism, a break from the tired past, and the party he founded, En Marche!, captured that: colloquially, “Let’s go!” (It also handily used his initials.)

One side effect of our embrace of younger politicians has been the problem of underemployed former prime ministers, which I explored during Liz Truss’s fleeting premiership. It’s true that we’re in an exceptional situation at the moment: because of the convulsions of the Conservative Party in 2022, there are now seven living former prime ministers, of whom the oldest, Sir John Major, is only 80. At the same time, there is a tendency—almost a tradition—for prime ministers to leave the House of Commons either as soon as they leave Downing Street or very shortly afterwards, and none except Cameron has taken a seat in the Lords, so we are largely denied the experience of former heads of government in our legislature. (Two ex-PMs, Theresa May and Liz Truss, are still in the Commons.)

If you have been prime minister for however short a time (even 49 days) and you give up that office in your mid-50s at the latest, as most have recently, you can hardly be expected simply to retire from any kind of active life. You may want to earn money, which is perfectly reasonable, and you might find you are able to earn a lot of money; I know it sounds incredible, but in 2020 Theresa May earned £115,000 each for three speeches in America, at the Structured Finance Association’s annual conference, at Brown University and at Trinity University in Texas. But you are also likely to miss the interest, adrenaline and satisfaction which comes from having a big job. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton has ploughed an old-fashioned furrow by returning to cabinet as foreign secretary, but the truth is there are few posts outside the UK government which are weighty enough to be tempting and to which a former British prime minister might be appointed. There was speculation for a while in 2011 that Gordon Brown might become managing director of the International Monetary Fund when Dominique Strauss-Kahn retired, and I speculated in The Daily Express last month on rumours that Cameron might become the next secretary general of NATO. But these opportunities are few and far between.

There is a fundamental mismatch between our perception and reality. When we first made state provision for the elderly under the Old Age Pensions Act 1908, it was only given to those over 70, but the National Insurance Act 1946 set the pensionable age at 65 for men and 60 for women. It was equalised at 65 in 2018 and increased to 66 in 2020, after which it is planned to raise it to 67 in 2027. But that means that we have had generations into whom the idea has been drummed that you are, in working terms, more or less finished by your mid-60s. But when the 1946 act was introduced, the average life expectancy in the UK was slightly under 69; it is now 80, while children being born now can expect to live on average until their late 80s or 90.

In terms of longevity and health, Britons have more working years available to them then ever before. But in politics, we seem to have become less inclined to countenance senior figures who are beyond statutory retirement age. We wouldn’t put our trust in a potential prime minister as old and infirm as Winston Churchill was when he returned to office in 1951, aged 77 and having suffered a series of minor strokes; and it would simply be impossible to hide a serious illness in the way Churchill’s coterie did when he had a major stroke in June 1953. But Attlee, his predecessor, was rising 69 when he left Downing Street, and 62 when he became prime minister, yet was one of the most transformative leaders of the 20th century.

If we were able to normalise at least the option of being regarded as a active politician into your 70s, when you can still reasonably expect good health and a drive to do something, it would make it easier for people to come into political life after achievements outside. Success in “the real world” is a long-standing obsession in Westminster, and we tend to think, usually unfavourably, of those with impressive careers elsewhere, especially in business, being ‘parachuted’ in to high office right away: think of John Davies, former head of the CBI who floundered as a cabinet minister under Edward Heath, or Frank Cousins, general secretary of giant Transport and General Workers’ Union who was brought into cabinet by Harold Wilson but carried little weight and resigned after less than two years.

It can be done: most obviously, Sir Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions, a permanent secretary-level public service role, from 2008 to 2013, was elected to the House of Commons in 2015, joined the shadow cabinet in 2016 and was party leader by 2020. But he is unusual, as are the times in which he made his ascent. Alan Johnson is an example of a former trades union boss (Union of Communication Workers 1992-95, Communication Workers Union 1995-97) who held high office and was talked about as a potential prime minister and party leader.

In the current culture, however, being first elected to the House of Commons in your late 50s or 60s generally precludes a long career or an ascent of the ladder. Take Bob Stewart, Conservative MP for Beckenham since 2010. He had enjoyed an extremely successful and distinguished career in the British Army, leaving as a full colonel and a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order. He had been commanding officer of his regiment, 1st Battalion, The Cheshire Regiment, in 1991-92, before becoming famous as commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia in 1992-93. His last military role was chief of policy at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe from 1993 to 1996. But he was facing his 61st birthday when he took his seat in Parliament, which effectively meant that his name was never on the lips of Westminster gossips as a potential minister. He stood for the chairmanship of the House of Commons Defence Committee in 2014, when Rory Stewart was elected, but for a frontline role it is likely he would simply have been dismissed as too old.

Another MP whose prospects were probably affected by perception is Bob Stewart’s constituency neighbour, Sir Bob Neill. He had enjoyed a distinguished career in local government: on the Greater London Council for the last year of its existence, as leader of the London Fire and Civil Defence Authority, on Havering Borough Council and then in the London Assembly, where he was leader of the Conservative Group from 2004 to 2006. He also spent 25 years as a barrister specialising in criminal law. Neill came to the Commons relatively late: he was selected as the candidate for Bromley and Chislehurst in 2006 after the death of the flamboyant Glaswegian Thatcherite Eric Forth, and won the by-election less than a week after his 54th birthday.

With a long background in local government and a lawyer’s brisk and fluent manner at the despatch box, Neill was promoted to the communities and local government front bench team in 2008, responsible first for local government and then for planning. He made the transition to ministerial office in 2010 when some colleagues did not, as minister for London, local government and planning, but when David Cameron reshuffled his government in 2012, Neill, then 60, was dropped. He was clearly not ready to be put out to pasture, since he was given the consolation prize of vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, and in 2015 he was elected chair of the House of Commons Justice Committee. He has held the position for more than eight years, and remains an active and influential select committee chair, which makes it hard to think that his age, and the perception that 60 was the beginning of the winding-down phase, had no effect on his removal from ministerial office.

(Age has sometimes been explicitly cited as a reason for someone’s removal or dismissal. When Jim Callaghan became prime minister in 1976, he left the cabinet he inherited from Harold Wilson largely unchanged, but removed Barbara Castle from her position as social services secretary. They were bitter political rivals but she did not wish to leave, and was in the midst of taking what became the Health Services Act 1976, a complex and technical bill, through Parliament, but Callaghan told her that he wanted to lower the average age of his cabinet. “I’m awfully sorry, Barbara,” he said, “but I think it’s time we make way for the young.” Castle did not take it well, since the new prime minister was only 18 months younger than her, and four years older than Wilson, whom he had replaced. She said later that the greatest restraint she ever exercised was in not replying, “Then why not start with yourself, Jim?”)

Someone will say (or mean) Autre temps, autre moeurs! The pace of life was different then, the job of politicians less demanding! That’s true, but our 60-80-year-olds are also much more robust. Our culture is moving apart in both directions, people quitting the front line earlier while they live longer, healthier lives. So that cannot explain everything. I also have a stubborn feeling that a determined and intelligent minister or cabinet minister could take a stand against the tide and do less, prioritise better, delegate more, exercise more restraint when it comes to ephemeral media stories. Maybe it’s foolish and reactionary idealism on my part; certainly it would take single-mindedness and an imperviousness to criticism on the minister’s part. But I think we could slow the pace and ease the burden a little.

It would also, I suspect, lead to better government. Too many decisions are taken under crushing pressure of time, without the chance to reflect on the best course of action or even if action is required at all. Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state 1973-77, summed it up in The White House Years:

There is little time for leaders to reflect.  They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important.  The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should expect all politicians to flog themselves into their 80s out of some kind of Stakhanovite dedication. Occasionally figures will decide to call time on their political career and do something else: Dehenna Davison, Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, is leaving the Commons this year although she’s only 30, noting that “I haven’t had anything like a normal life for a 20-something” and wanting to turn her focus to “life outside politics—mainly to my family”. James Purnell, a cabinet minister under Gordon Brown, left the Commons in 2010 at the age of 40, saying that “while this has been a huge privilege, I’ve realised I don’t want to have spent all my life in frontline politics”. He was director of strategy at the BBC from 2013 to 2016 then director of radio and education from 2016 to 2020, and in 2021 became president and vice-chancellor the University of the Arts London. There is absolutely no harm in having politicians who are dedicated and enthusiastic but for whom positions in Whitehall and Westminster and not the alpha and omega of a fulfilling existence.

What do I want to happen? It’s difficult. Because I’m describing an essentially cultural problem, there is no easy or quick solution. No-one can simply make people more comfortable with politicians staying active into their 70s. A new prime minister, if minded to do so, could make a point of bringing in some seasoned veterans: Cameron did this by appointing Kenneth Clarke, then almost 70, as lord chancellor and justice secretary in 2010, while Vince Cable became business, innovation and skills secretary at the same time, aged 67, though that was partly a product of the novelty of a coalition government.

Blair did this too, in a smaller way. The Labour Party in 1997 had been out of power for 18 years and had hardly any experienced ministers, so there were some eccentric appointments like John Morris, 66 and a former Welsh secretary, as attorney general, and John Gilbert, 70, as minister of state at the Ministry of Defence, which he had been in 1976-79. Lord Donoughue was made a junior agriculture minister at the age of 62, having been head of the Number 10 Policy Unit from 1974 to 1979, while Lord Clinton-Davis, who had been a junior trade minister from 1974 to 1979 then a European commissioner from 1985 to 1990, became minister for trade at the age of 68. By the summer of 1999, however, all of them had left government.

In any case, we would need a change in culture further down, in the selection of parliamentary candidates, so that there was more opportunity for men and women with substantial careers behind them, in their 50s and 60s, to get into the House of Commons with the chance then to show themselves as potential ministers. It seems an obvious direction for us to go in, as people in “the real world” face the prospect of working longer, whether they want to or not, the government encourages older people either to stay in the workplace or return to it and we enjoy the prospect on the whole of longer, healthier lives. If children born now can expect to live easily to their late 80s, the idea of them being eased out of political life 25 years before that seems counter-intuitive and wasteful.

So while we celebrate the arrival of young bucks and does, and then muse grumpily on how young or not-yet-born they were when we were sitting our A-levels or graduating or celebrating our first big promotion, let’s also look for our elders or at least peers, examine their career histories and the contributions they could yet make. Perhaps, if the coming general election produces the result most people expect, we should doff our hats to Sir Keir Starmer, by then 62, the oldest new boy for nearly 50 years, and urge others to follow his example.