Hanging about the green room after final retirement from the stage
We have more living former prime ministers than ever, but there is still no settled role for them in public life
As the current prime minister’s leadership continues to be troubled, some in her party—either gleefully or in horror—are looking at her predecessor, Boris Johnson, wondering if he still feels he has a part to play in the Conservative Party’s story. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that these Colombey-les-Deux-Églises fantasies are just that, unreal, that Johnson’s legacy remains toxic and that he will conform to the usual pattern of political lives lacking a second (or third) act. I suspect golden words are being dripped into the Johnsonian ear by populist, Brexiteer Grima Wormtongues, and Johnson is certainly a man susceptible to flattery, but I do not think a return as the government’s saviour is a realistic prospect.
There is rarely an easy way for prime ministers to co-exist with their predecessors, particularly of the same party. Margaret Thatcher’s stint as, in her own chilling words, “a very good back-seat driver” to John Major is perhaps the classic example of disruption and distraction, but it is never easy to know there is someone else who understands what your job is like. Liz Truss has the distinction—let us deploy a neutral word—of having more living predecessors than any other premier: Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Sir Tony Blair and Sir John Major. That is quite a phalanx to line up on Remembrance Sunday.
It is notable, however, that only two of those ex-prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Theresa May, are still in Parliament. My suspicion is that the former, holding a marginal seat and eager to earn serious amounts of money, will not stay long in the Commons; but it is a remarkable fact that none of them is in the House of Lords. Undoubtedly all of them, save Johnson, will have been offered peerages. May has chosen to remain in the Commons for the time being when she could have made a graceful exit at the 2019 general election, and she should be applauded for that. The House needs its elder statesmen, and not all need conduct the epic sulk that Sir Edward Heath undertook for more than a quarter of a century after he ceased to be party leader.
Given how the media works now, being outside Parliament does not mean that our former leaders have no public platform. Major is now nearly 80 but still sallies out to condemn our departure from the European Union; Blair has his own think tank-cum-consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change; Brown, who seems infinitely more comfortable in his own skin than he ever did in Downing Street, has undertaken some public-facing appointments and dips into the political debate; Cameron, a man who literally hummed a tune as he walked away from the premiership, is more disengaged and has concentrated on a few causes like Alzheimer’s research.
It is almost impossible for a prime minister actively to manage his or her predecessors. Much, of course, will depend on the circumstances of their departure. Johnson, of course, like May before him, was deposed by his own party and probably still feels roughly handled, though it is worth recalling that Truss remained loyal to the end of his reign even when most other cabinet ministers could take no more. Cameron was in effect, ejected by the electorate when they chose to ignore his advice on Brexit and to vote to leave; although he had initially said, dutifully, that he would stay in office whatever the result, on reflection it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for him to remain, authority badly damaged, to undertake a massive task which he had thought fundamentally mistaken.
Brown, of course, was ejected at a general election, albeit narrowly. The result of the 2010 election was sufficiently finely balanced that for a day or two he remained in Downing Street, and at least went through the motions of seeking a coalition agreement with the resurgent Liberal Democrats, though he was outmanoeuvred by the younger, nimbler, less tribal David Cameron. Blair, by contrast, left the premiership undefeated, having served a full decade and led his party to three successive general election victories. Yet there was rancour and intrigue: although it was universally expected that Brown would eventually replace him, the Scotsman’s acolytes had agitated impatiently for Blair to go for at least a year before he stepped down, and while he was lavishly praised and honoured, Blair would have been forgiven for feeling a little offended by the vigour with which some Labour MPs had sought to speed his exit.
Major went the old-fashioned way. After six-and-a-half years as prime minister, he led his party to an historic defeat, it worst since the black days of 1906, and in retrospect it is hard to see how he might ever have won that election in 1997. He did not hesitate when the result was in: he announced his intention to resign as party leader, then promptly took himself to the Oval to watch Surrey play the British Universities in the Benson and Hedges one-day cricket trophy. He stayed on as leader of the opposition for six weeks while his party chose a new chief, forming a very temporary and much-diminished shadow cabinet (a record seven cabinet ministers had lost their seats at the general election). He remained in the Commons till the next election but retreated largely into the background.
If Thatcher made Major’s life frequently uncomfortable and (needlessly) difficult as a former premier, she had had her own problems in that regard from a most unlikely source. Harold Macmillan, who had resigned due to ill health in 1963 and had left the Commons a year later, had initially returned to his family publishing business, finding an agreeable existence as a well-connected international businessman as well as busying himself as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He had not taken a seat in the House of Lords—perhaps his semi-invented aristocratic persona looked sniffily at the life peers he had brought into creation—but Margaret Thatcher had revived, in a small way, the creation of hereditary titles, making George Thomas, the Speaker of the Commons, Viscount Tonypandy on his retirement in 1983 and sending her indispensible deputy, Willie Whitelaw, to lead the Upper House as a viscount the same year. With hereditary titles back on the table, Macmillan made it known he would accept the earldom which had traditionally been offered to former prime ministers.
So in early 1984, Harold Macmillan became the 1st Earl of Stockton, the title honouring his first constituency (and my birthplace), which he had represented from 1924 to 1929 and 1931 to 1945. He was 90 years old, largely blind and frail, but it gave him not only a new lease of life but also a platform from which to chide Thatcher gently for her radical economic policies. This last period of his life (he died less than three years later, in December 1986) was in some ways the apogee of his political persona. He had always affected a rather old-fashioned air, a tweedy Edwardian aristocrat who took life’s bumps lightly (in fact he suffered badly from both anxiety and depression), but in his extreme dotage he gave it full rein.
One speech in the House of Lords is worth watching if you have the stamina. The old actor-manager, in Enoch Powell’s bitingly disapproving phrase, is at his absolute best, mournful but with a wry smile, dismissing his own importance and relevance, savouring his outdated cultural references and protesting his orthodox conservatism while gently prodding at the new Thatcherite facts of life. The eyes, hooded as ever, were mischievous, the moustache even more walrus-like than in his relative youth. Age had etiolated his drawl but his stamina was extraordinary. And, as he always had done, he knew exactly how to court press attention.
When I ventured to criticise, the other day, this system I was, I am afraid, misunderstood. As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income.I know now, I have learnt now from the letters that I have received, that I am quite out of date. Modern economists have decided there is no difference between capital and income. I am not so sure. In my younger days, I and perhaps others of your Lordships had friends, good friends, very good fellows indeed too, who failed to make this distinction. For a few years everything went on very well, and then at last the crash came, and they were forced to retire out to some dingy lodging-house in Boulogne, or if the estate were larger and the trustees more generous, to a decent accommodation at Baden-Baden.
Even some of their Lordships found this imagery baffling by 1985, but it was perfectly in tune with the overall impression. Supermac was like Banquo’s ghost, though much better mannered, and he was loving every minute of it.
Rarely, prime ministers can happily co-exist with their forebears. When Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Treasury in May 1940, the man he had ousted, Neville Chamberlain, not only retained the leadership of the party if not the country, but stayed in cabinet as Lord President of the Council. He assumed wide responsibility for domestic policy and, we too easily forget, remained extremely popular with many Conservative MPs. But it mattered little, as he was ailing. In excruciating pain, he was diagnosed that summer with terminal bowel cancer, and died in October. It is hard to imagine Churchill was all that sorry.
The best life after death was undoubtedly led by the thoroughly decent Alec Douglas-Home. He had been unexpectedly thrust into the premiership after Macmillan’s resignation in 1963 (though perhaps not quite as unexpectedly as he would have had us believe) and had been narrowly rejected by the electorate after a year. He soon stepped down from the party leadership but remained in the shadow cabinet of his replacement, Edward Heath, and was the obvious candidate to become Foreign Secretary when Heath formed a government in 1970. His return to the post he had held from 1960 to 1963 (albeit in the House of Lords) was greeted gleefully by the Diplomatic Service, the word supposedly being passed “Alec’s back!” in emulation of Churchill’s second stint as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939-40.
Alec Home was perhaps the nicest man to be prime minister in the 20th century. He was driven by a genuine sense of duty: he had missed active service in the Second World War due to spinal tuberculosis and spent nearly two years bedridden and in a plaster cast around his torso. On recovering, he was impatient and full of energy, and as the heir to a peerage (he succeeded his father as 14th Earl of Home in 1951) he knew he had a safe place in the legislature, if it imposed—or so he thought—limits on his ambitions. Of course it played out differently, and he became one of only two people (with Quintin Hogg) to go from the Commons to the Lords, back to the Commons and then to the Lords again.
Home’s character shines through in a thousand anecdotes, but perhaps the most illustrative is this, which, significantly, he told himself. On a train journey in the 1970s, he was approached by a couple who said they had always liked and respected him. He thanked them politely. In fact, the couple continued, they always thought that he should have been prime minister. “Actually,” Home pointed out without rancour, “I was.”
It was at one point rumoured that David Cameron, the most aristocratic prime minister since Home, might emulate his noble predecessor and return to cabinet under his successor. A 2018 profile in GQ, of all publications, suggested he might serve as Theresa May’s foreign secretary, and that the smooth salesman might be an effective diplomat and ambassador for UK plc. The same idea was bruited by the New Statesman, if in rather more caustic terms, noting that the ex-premier was known to be “bored shitless” by life after office. My own estimation is that Cameron might have had the temperament to survive contentedly as a minister under May, and might even have been a capable foreign minister. In the end, however, there was no return. At least, not yet.
Why, one might reasonably ask, are there now no former premiers in the House of Lords? It is, after all, a body which contains members of far lesser distinction: some Liberal Democrat peers can only point to repeated failures to be elected to the House of Commons, while there are those who never even achieved cabinet rank and are forgotten names in the annals of Whitehall’s middle order. Although these things are never discussed openly, it is inconceivable that any except Johnson, who has only just moved out of Downing Street, was not offered a peerage (though they will have been life baronies; hereditary peerages have disappeared again after Thatcher’s brief revival).
My suspicion is that it is a largely commercial and financial matter. The House of Lords maintains a relatively stringent and transparent register of interests, and active peers must make full disclosure of their financial affairs. Given the broad range of remunerated activities which former prime ministers undertake to earn some money after the modest years of ministerial salary, it is my best guess that Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron have decided simply to avoid that potential minefield. Perhaps some have principled objections to the concept of the Lords, though it seems unlikely. And they may, too, have taken the view that a seat in the Lords would give them little or nothing they do not already have. Maybe it is a combination of all of those things. But if we look back at the 20th century, the only other premiers not to accept a peerage were Campbell-Bannerman, Law and MacDonald, all of whom died shortly after leaving office, and the impenetrable and irascible Edward Heath. It makes today’s refuseniks a striking sight.
As a political society, we are yet to have the conversation we need about what to do with our rejected or retired leaders. With prime ministers often leaving office at a younger age now—Blair was 54 when he stepped down, Brown 59 and Cameron 49—we have former leaders who are by no means ready for a comfortable and inactive retirement. Nor, for a British prime minister, are there many international jobs of a stature which might be attractive. When the Treaty of Lisbon created a permanent position of President of the European Council from 2009, it was widely rumoured that Tony Blair was interested in the role (Gordon Brown’s likely reaction was brilliantly but affectionately imagined by William Hague in the House of Commons). But the moment never quite arrived, nor was the post quite so heavyweight as some had hoped.
In 2011, Michael White of The Guardian reported doubtfully on the possibility of Gordon Brown becoming Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (the French finance minister Christine Lagarde was eventually appointed). A future ex-PM might look briefly at the secretaryship-general of NATO, though British holders of that office (Ismay, Carrington and Robertson) have so far only been former cabinet ministers. There are not really any other posts of sufficient heft to interest someone who has led a British government.
Until we have that conversation and, ideally, reach some workable solutions, retired prime ministers will be like awkward guests at a wedding, attracting attention, sometimes causing trouble but impossible not to invite. They will always be the object of political daydreams—Tony Blair, nearing 70, is still looked at wistfully by a certain sort of Labourite when he makes any public intervention—but it remains, at the moment, an unlikely event. Only Harold Wilson has held separate periods of office since Churchill’s second ministry in 1951-55, and a prime minister who leaves against his or her will is generally damaged enough by the circumstances of departure to make a return impossible.
I may be quite wrong. The Conservative Party may despair of Liz Truss over the coming months and, nostalgically, turn back to Boris Johnson, which would be a truly remarkable outcome for the erratic and self-consumed MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. It would smash the pattern for fallen leaders, and open up their futures in an extraordinary way. But I still think it is highly unlikely. After a febrile party conference, Conservative MPs will return to Westminster, climb back into the legislative trenches and find there are more pressing and immediate fires to fight than a dream of Johnson Redux.
NB The title of this essay is a quotation from Harold Macmillan. In 1973, a decade after his retirement, he wrote “It has always seemed to me more artistic, when the curtain falls on the last performance, to accept the inevitable È finita la commedia. It is tempting, perhaps, but unrewarding, to hang about the green room after final retirement from the stage.” He did not entirely follow his own advice.