When the incumbent prime minister – presumably Andy Burnham – lays a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday this year to honour ‘the glorious dead’, he will potentially be joined by a record number of the glorious undead. If everyone who is eligible attends, there will be nine former prime ministers at the ceremony.
Yes, nine: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. This is a statistically significant proportion of the 59 prime ministers there will have been since Sir Robert Walpole established the position on his appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in April 1721. Their average age is just under 65, still too young for the state pension.
What does a former prime minister do? A century ago, the pattern was relatively straightforward: if you lived long enough, you departed office, received an earldom, made occasional speeches and died. Today it is striking that only two of the nine – Cameron and May – have accepted places in the House of Lords. But it is understandable that driven, ambitious men and women still want to be active in public.
Starmer’s record on defence has been one of the worst examples of this government’s gap between words and deeds
