Why can’t former prime ministers stay out of the limelight?

There’s nothing as ex as an ex-prime minister,” so they say, but that has never stopped our most senior elder statesmen and stateswomen from trying to prove otherwise. Usually they make no difference; sometimes it can be fun to watch.

David Cameron is an interesting example. Telling Boris Johnson to be more “muscular” in his environmentalism might carry more authority had Cameron not turned down the offer of chairing the COP26 Climate Conference in November. It’s also worth recalling how he once famously dismissed the climate crisis as “green crap” and fitted a ludicrous miniature windmill to his house in Notting Hill, derided as the ultimate in pretentious token politics and rumoured to be powered off the mains. The Coalition government he led might have had some success is getting CO2 emissions down, but part of that was by crashing the economy into an austerity recession. In his memoirs Cameron did take the opportunity to tell a few home truths about Johnson in his memoirs, published in 2019, but bybthen it was far too late. Knowing that Johnson never believed in Brexit might have been handier Intelligence had we known about it earlier.

To be fair to Mr Cameron, though, his interventions during the premierships of his two successors have been rare. No doubt this has been partly a matter of good manners, but also from a sense of ineluctable shame about Brexit and his failure to carry the country for Remain. As Danny Dyer later asked: “So what’s happened to that twat David Cameron who called it on? Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice with his trotters up, yeah? Where is the geezer? I think he should be held to account for it.”

“Twat”.

Of course prime ministerial contempt can run in both directions. Since she left office, Theresa May has asked some poignant questions about Brexit and Covid, and stayed in the Commons to do so, but when she rose to make a short speech on lockdowns last November, Johnson just got up and scuttled away before she’d got to the end of her first sentence. You get the impression that those two have an icy relationship that can only grow colder: right or wrong, he will always be the man who got Brexit done where she did not.

Indeed it is Tory premiers who enjoy the most bitter and long running feuds, often as not with Europe in the background. After Margaret Thatcher toppled Ted Heath back in 1975 he never could accept it, and embarked on “the incredible sulk”, which lasted well into the twenty first century. They disagreed on virtually everything, and made little secret of it, Heath once exploding on television with “the little mind is her own, minute that’s what it is”. In her turn, Thatcher spent much of her “retirement” conspiring against her successor premier, the ultimate “back seat driver”. The long rivalry between Blair and Brown was mostly conducted while Brown was still Blair’s Chancellor, and the pair have confined their insults to their autobiographies, after both had left office. Blair says Brown possesses “zero” emotional intelligence” and that he’d be a “disaster” as prime minister; funnily enough Brown agrees that he failed to make a “connection” with the public because he was brought up “to contain, even suppress, my inner feelings in public”. Different spin, same conclusion.

As you’d expect, the most magisterial barb about a predecessor was delivered by Winston Churchill, and in a novel way. Referring to the failure of the Tories to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s, Churchill’s memoir ‘The Gathering Storm”, carried this entry in the index:

“Baldwin, Stanley ... confesses putting party before country”. Baldwin, prime minister twice in the 1920s and 1930s, had died before Churchill published the ultimate put-down. You wonder, in any case, just how many of our prime ministers of any party could escape that judgement. They have more in common than that which divides them, and that includes Cameron and Johnson, the most recent Old Etonians in Number 10.