LONDON — Nobody likes a backseat driver. But what if the person trying to grab the wheel is a former prime minister?
Britain has cycled through a stack of leaders in the past decade, leaving it with an unprecedented eight former PMs still standing — and frequently commenting on the person doing their old job.
Just this weekend, Kemi Badenoch, leader of Britain’s battered Conservative Party, tried to distance herself from the troubled economic legacy of former Tory prime minister Liz Truss — provoking a howl of outrage from Truss herself. It’s unfortunate for Badenoch, as barely a day goes by without the Labour government raising the specter of Truss.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has his own problems, with his Labour predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never far from the headlines, offering (largely) unsolicited advice.
“You have incomplete prime ministers,” says historian Anthony Seldon, who has written books on many departed prime ministers, including “The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister.” “Some of them felt that their agenda wasn’t yet over.”
“They still want to feel like they have a purpose,” said political communications adviser Laura Emily Dunn, who has worked for Conservative cabinet ministers.
Second bite of the cherry
Since Starmer won his landslide just over a year ago, the Blair and Brown interventions have come thick and fast.
Blair has used his Institute for Global Change think tank to publish a flurry of policy papers, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.
Just days before crucial local elections earlier this year, Blair set alarm bells ringing in Downing Street with lines in a report warning that a maximalist approach to net zero carbon emissions was “doomed to fail” — and that politicians needed to face “inconvenient facts.”
A Downing Street spokesperson said the government would reach net zero “in a way that treads lightly on people’s lives” and “not by telling them how to live or behave.” While admitting there were a “range of views,” No 10 says it sees net zero as an “enormous economic opportunity.”
Gordon Brown, who left office in 2010, has unapologetically spoken out on social justice issues through tweets, books, op-eds and even guest editing an edition of the New Statesman magazine — often in ways that are unhelpful to the Starmer project.
Most notably, he called for the abolition of the “cruel” Conservative-era two-child cap on social security payments, a view shared by many Labour backbenchers, despite the cash-strapped government’s public opposition to a U-turn.
Labour insiders insist there’s no resentment about the ex-leaders opining. A former Labour adviser granted anonymity to speak candidly said: “There is no expectation from the leader of the Labour Party that previous prime ministers should somehow stay silent out of respect.”
“They’ve been diplomatic, but it’s been pretty clear what they think,” says Stewart Wood, a Labour peer and former adviser to Brown.
Life after power
The interventionist streak in Britain’s former prime ministers may be a consequence of the strange wilderness in which they are left to roam after leaving office.
While they receive £115,000 annually for life, a permanent security detail and are expected to attend Remembrance Sunday commemorations at the Cenotaph, there is no official responsibility or equivalent of a U.S.-style presidential library to promote an ex-prime minister’s legacy.
That can leave former leaders feeling stuck on the sidelines. “There is a resource that the country could benefit from using … in some way,” says Wood. “These people did serve us and serve our country,” agrees Dunn. “If they were to disappear into lonely retirement, that would be wrong.”
For some prime ministers, the well-trodden path of writing a memoir and joining the speaking circuit is seemingly no longer enough.
“There’s been a trend in modern prime ministers not to want[ing] to consult their predecessors,” argues Seldon, saying leaders often fail to assess the actions of those who came before them in office. “They justifiably see their successors falling into the same bear traps that they fell in.”
Even John Major, the reserved Conservative former PM who kept out of the spotlight during Blair and Brown’s tenure, re-entered the public fray during the Brexit years. He became a frequent and strident critic of former prime minister Boris Johnson. More recently, he demanded the strengthening of parliamentary standards for rule breakers.
Theresa May couldn’t resist wading in either by urging the U.K. to act on delivering net zero, while David Cameron had a full-scale political comeback as foreign secretary during the last eight months of the Tory government.
For others, there’s a desire to settle old scores.
Johnson and Truss both saw their premierships implode abruptly — leaving them with plenty of unfinished business. Johnson writes columns for the Daily Mail newspaper and hasn’t shied away from strident interventions attacking Starmer’s agenda, including a fresh blast at his Middle East policy in the past few days.
Truss, Britain’s shortest serving prime minister, frequently opines on X about Starmer’s economic policies, as well as his approach to justice and free speech, as she fights to reshape her tarnished legacy.
Over the weekend, she laid into current Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch, accusing her of failing to talk about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government” and warning the same party that made Truss prime minister is now in “serious trouble.”
Making it work
So what makes a genuinely effective intervention from a former prime minister?
“They have most influence when it’s least known publicly,” argues Peter Just, author of the book Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street. Just says public interventions can be a sign that advice given behind the scenes “is not being listened to.”
Seldon says Rishi Sunak, Britain’s most recent former prime minister, is a rare exception who has managed life after Downing Street well. Now a backbench MP, his statements have been limited to supporting Ukraine and backing India during its conflict with Pakistan.
Just divides ex-PMs into statesmen and women who focus on “whether or not the subsequent government of any party is doing things in the right way or in the wrong way” and politicians who represent “a particular philosophy of the world.”
“If you’re a bit more strategic and a bit more infrequent in your interventions, maybe they’ll carry more punch,” says Kieran Pedley of polling firm Ipsos, who argues that too many contributions can dilute a message.
Ultimately, effective prime ministers can simply ignore the back seat drivers and hit the gas.
“You should just do the policies you want — and let politics deal with itself,” says a former Tory adviser.
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