On age advantage in general elections

There have been 20 elections in the UK since the end of the second world war. A recent post looked at the vote share of the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) in these elections. Another, perhaps less well-grounded, updated the remarkable record of graduates of Oxford university being the winners – now 18 times out of the 20.

Yet another, but not altogether serious, statistic about elections which is easily captured is the age difference between the contenders (Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition), shown for the post-war period in the chart below.

The green shadow indicates where the election generated a change of governing party. 1945, following the wartime coalition led by Winston Churchill, and 2010, leading to a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron, are assumed to be changes of party. Eight of the 20 elections were then of this kind. In the four elections from 1966 to 1974 the age difference between the contenders was insignificant, Harold Wilson being born in March and Edward Heath in July 1916. For this reason, no conclusions can be drawn about the 1970 and February 1974 changes of government. However, in five of the remaining six elections in which there was a change of party, the successful challenger was younger, on four occasions by 10 years or more. The only older successful challenger was in 1951, when, having failed to displace Clement Attlee in 1950, Churchill returned to the Prime Ministership.

In the 12 continuity elections (ie with no consequent change of governing party), Wilson’s successes against Heath in 1966 and October 1974 are as before insignificant as far as age differences are concerned. Cameron’s success in 2015 against Ed Miliband, who was three years younger, and John Major’s in 1992, when a year and a day older than Neil Kinnock, are probably best regarded as inconclusive as well. In the eight remaining continuity elections, three of the victors had an age advantage of more than 10 years and two were more than five years younger. Three were older, Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Kinnock in 1987, when more than 15 years older, being easier to understand than Harold Macmillan’s of Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 when more than ten years older.

Is there any underlying significance to all this? It could be that for the electorate to move a party from opposition to government, there has to be an appetite for change and the case for fulfilling it can be made more convincingly by a younger person – Wilson in 1964, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Tony Blair in 1997, Cameron in 2010.

And what should the two parties’ strategies be for the next election if they were to take age advantage seriously? Labour would, it seems, be more likely to succeed in selling change to the electorate with a much younger leader than Jeremy Corbyn, 68 but now not easily dislodged. It is worth noting that while Cameron at 43 in 2010 was the youngest PM since 1812, Justin Trudeau became Canadian Prime Minister in 2015 at the same age and Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France this year at 39. Labour might well want to wait for the Tories to move first but ought already to be considering that their man or woman should be much more than five years younger than Boris Johnson or Amber Rudd (both currently 53) and significantly younger than Michael Gove (49, going on 60) or Sajid David (47). The Conservatives (on the assumption that Theresa May is no longer PM by then) should aim to nullify any future Labour leader’s age advantage by choosing someone in their early forties. It would also be to the Tory’s advantage to play it long and keep Labour waiting.   Oh, and if they'd been to Oxford ...

Anyone thinking of starting up a new party under, say, David Miliband, should remember that he is 52 next month. How time passes.


Update 27 June 2017 

On 25 June, the Sunday Telegraph carried an article by Ben Riley-Smith, Tory plot to skip 'toxic' generation and install younger face as next leader.

Tory MPs and donors are plotting to “skip a generation” and install a younger MP as their next leader after concluding the front-runners to replace Theresa May are too toxic. A growing number of Conservatives believe that Boris Johnson and David Davis have “had their day” and only younger faces can revive the party’s fortunes.  

… Hopes are now turning to the “golden generation” of Tory MPs first elected in 2010 to win back younger voters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn en masse at the election.  Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, Dominic Raab, the Eurosceptic justice minister, and Priti Patel, the International Development Secretary, are all being talked up by colleagues.  Other ministers from the 2010 intake such as Jesse Norman, Brandon Lewis and Jo Johnson - the brother of Boris - are also mentioned as possible contenders.  

Supporters of the plan point to how David Cameron, the last Tory to win the party a majority, was barely known when he joined the leadership race in 2005.  

“If and when this happens, we need Year Zero – a real radical revolution,” said one 2010 MP about a leadership switch.  “We need an equivalent to Ruth Davidson [the Scottish Tory leader] – someone completely counter-intuitive. She is a lesbian kick-boxer who doesn’t fit the mould. When she first got elected she didn’t have much cut through. But because they are new and different it will gather stream [sic].” 

One veteran MP warned that “all the front-runners are contaminated in one way or the other". Another younger MP said: “They’ve had their day and it hasn’t worked. For the current lot – Boris and the rest of them – their time is up.

Raab is 43; Patel, 45; Norman, 55; Lewis and Jo Johnson, both 46.

Three Paris Exhibitions: (1) Picasso

Shows seen last month in a city subdued and uncrowded after les évènements of 13 December


While in Paris, I came across an article by Robin Pogrebin in the International New York Times about developments at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Back in 2010, a NYT art critic had described MoMA’s conventional wisdom as “a reluctance to question the linear unspooling of art history according to designated styles that remains the Modern’s core value and its Achilles’ heel”. Now, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture was being quoted as saying that the museum was “reflecting a more widespread shift from thinking in categories – or thinking in so-called canonical narratives – to thinking about multiple histories. Having a sense of curiosity, rather than a desire for pronouncement.” Of the three exhibitions in Paris, the first two, Picasso.Mania at the Grand Palais (described below) and Splendeurs et Misères, can probably be regarded as concerned with multiple histories, the third, Villa Flora (to follow), probably not.

Shows at the Grand Palais aren’t what they used to be. By comparison with their major retrospectives, Georges Braque in 2013 and Edward Hopper in 2012, Picasso.Mania seemed thin stuff. Its thesis was apparently that

After World War II, Picasso became renowned as a modern artistic genius. This public recognition came at a time when contemporary art was once again moving towards “avant-gardism”. This movement’s values, as incarnated by Marcel Duchamp, were in contradiction with Pablo Picasso’s flamboyant subjectivity, media presence and commercial success. As a result, it was only in 1971 that a collective tribute by living artists from different disciplines was organised for the artist’s 90th birthday. In the 1980s, exhibitions showed a new generation of artists how Picasso’s later works were years ahead of his time.

A proposition which was not exactly supported by telling visitors that in the 1960s Roy Lichtenstein was inspired by Picasso and that David Hockney was a repeat visitor to the Picasso exhibition at the Tate in 1960. The show made a good initial impression with Sort of Fabulous (2015), a video installation of 18 artists talking about the impact of Picasso on their work, including Jeff Koons, Frank Gehry, Thomas Houseago and Cecily Brown. An unspooling of art history then followed, starting with All hail the artist!, the Self-Portrait of 1901 (below left), borrowed from the Picasso Museum, and some recent images of the artist including Van Pei Ming’s Portrait of Picasso (2009, below centre) and Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (2012, below right):

and some of the 90th birthday lithographs from 1971:

The most successful of the exhibition themes which followed was probably that given over to cubism – a wall of Picassos:

and then a homage in the form of various works, many by David Hockney, beginning with his Artist and Model (1973/4, below left) and Harlequin (1975, below right):

From the 1980s onwards Hockney explored multiple viewpoints evoking cubism (“a kind of mechanical cubism”) in, for example, Paint Trolley, LA (1985, below top) and Place Ferstenberg, Paris, August 7, 8, 9 (1985, below lower):

More recent Hockney works were The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012, below), 18 films on 18 screens shown over 22 minutes:

and A Bigger Card Players (2015), as at Annely Juda Fine Art, London last summer. After that, the show began to meander. Picasso on screen projected on three walls clips from a wide variety of films (below) in which either the painter or his works or both appear, ranging from Truffaut’s Jules et Jim to Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear to Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Demoiselles from elsewhere and Guernica, a political icon were both Hamlet without the prince, the originals not being available. Various works inspired by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), included Untitled by Sigmar Polke (2006, below top) and Jeff Koons’ Antiquity (2011, below lower):

Of the works pertinent to Guernica, one of the most interesting to British eyes was Goshka Macuga’s construction, The Nature of the Beast (2009), commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery in memory of their having exhibited Guernica in 1939 and now owned by the Castello di Rivoli (below left). Part of the work is a glazed circular table which exhibits documents relating to the Spanish civil war and more recent conflicts. I thought the photographs from the Whitechapel’s archive of Clement Attlee in 1939 were thought-provoking (below right) – there is a mention of the Major Attlee Company (sic) in his Wikipedia entry.

After this, a section, It’s a Picasso!, grouped his paintings and prints from the late 1930s and later:

and then some pieces relevant to Picasso and Pop art’s reaction to abstract expressionism including Andy Warhol’s Head (after Picasso) No III (1966, below right top) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Life after Picasso (1964, below right lower):

Out of what followed, the impact of Picasso on Jasper Johns’ The Seasons (1985 – 87, Summer below left) with, nearby, Picasso’s Minotaure à la carriole (1936, below right) was notable:

A section covering the media attention Picasso received in his later years was followed by a large display of his late works, some reminiscent of Japanese shunga, seen at Avignon in 1970 and 1973. The final theme was the impact on artists in New York of the Guggenheim’s 1984 Picasso show, for example Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984, below):

Picasso.Mania ends on 29 February 2016.