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.

Churchill and the Appeasers, Johnson and the Remainers

Would a Prime Minister Johnson "forgive and understand" their wrong-headedness?

Back in February, I remarked in a post here that:

There is even one school of thought that whether the result [of the Brexit referendum] is leave or remain, Boris Johnson will become the next leader of the Conservative party and therefore Prime Minister

and, if anything, this outcome seems more likely, not less. In fact, if being taken seriously is a measure, recent excoriating attacks on Johnson by, for instance, Matthew Parris on 26 March in The Times (Tories have got to end their affair with Boris, Charm can make us forget the dishonesty and recklessness that would be ruthlessly exposed if he became leader) and Nick Cohen in the Guardian a few days later (Boris Johnson. Liar, conman – and prime minister? The mayor of London has been treated with woozy indulgence by the media. But Britain may pay the price), suggest much more likely. Reacting to Parris, John Rentoul in the Independent was calm, It's time to get used to the idea of living under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, or perhaps just resigned.

Not long before, I had come across the biography which Johnson had written in 2014, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. Reviewers tended to regard it as very readable in the style of Johnson’s Daily Telegraph opinion pieces which appear most Mondays (at £5000 a time they say), as not adding much to the huge amount of literature on his subject already available and as being as much about Johnson as Churchill.

It occurred to me that if Johnson were to become PM after a Brexit vote, he would be leading a Cabinet many of whom had been "remainers". How would he deal with them? Would his portrayal of Churchill who, after only three weeks as PM and in a much greater crisis in 1940, had to work with senior members of a Cabinet who had been advocates of appeasing Hitler, offer any insights?

Rather to my surprise, Chapter 1 plunges straight in at this point in Churchill’s life with The Offer from Hitler, made via Italy to negotiate an end to hostilities. This was put to the Cabinet in May 1940 by Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and long-term appeaser of Hitler:

[Halifax] was tall, very tall; at 6 foot 5 he loomed about ten inches above Churchill – though I suppose advantage matters less around a table. (page 11)

Johnson is no more than 5 foot 10 by the way. Later after describing the Cabinet’s deliberations, Johnson comments:

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax’s defeatism; and we need to forgive and understand his wrong-headedness. (page 16)

and later:

All we are saying – in mitigation of Halifax – is that in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. (page 17)

Over 200 pages later (Johnson’s book is thematic in structure, not chronological) Halifax re-appears in 1941, prior to Pearl Harbor and the USA’s entry to WW2, as

… the British ambassador in Washington. This was none other than our old friend the Earl of Halifax: the beanpole-shaped appeaser - he who used to go hunting with Goering. Halifax was the British envoy charged with appealing to the finer feelings of the United States and he was having a terrible time. Shortly after arriving he is said to have sat down and wept - in despair at the culture clash. He couldn't understand the American informality, or their habit of talking on the telephone or popping round for unexpected meetings. In May 1941 the aristocratic old Etonian endured fresh torment when he was taken to a Chicago White Sox baseball game and invited to eat a hotdog. He refused. Then he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group called the Mothers of America. Even for an appeaser, it seems a hell of a punishment. (page 247)

Johnson, if not inclined to vindictiveness, at least seems to have a taste for schadenfreude. He fingers a few other appeasers, for example:

Rab Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, was caught telling a Swedish diplomat that he thought Britain should do a deal – if Hitler offered the right terms (page 230)

returns to Johnson’s sights

… Tory drips such as Butler (the old appeaser) … (page 288)

So perhaps Tory remainers shouldn’t hold out too much hope of forgiveness and understanding from a Prime Minister Johnson.

There are some good things in The Churchill Factor. Johnson gives a whole chapter, An Icy Ruthlessness, to the decision to destroy the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, a tragedy which the British tend to overlook when revisiting the events of 1940. And another, The Ships that Walked, to Churchill’s sponsorship, when at the Admiralty during WW1, of the initial development of the tank by the Directorate of Naval Construction.

Unlike some celebrity writers, Johnson is happy to give credit to various helpers in the Acknowledgements, in particular Dr Warren Dockter, but my favourite is the one to a fellow Old Etonian:

David Cameron did some invaluable devilling into the exact locations of the pivotal meetings in May 1940 – not at all clear in Lukacs, for instance. (page 361/2)

UPDATE 24 APRIL 2016

Remarks by Johnson about President Obama at the time of the visit to London have led to Borises being sold heavily in the reputations market in the last few days – perhaps never to recover, although there are still 60 days to go before the Referendum.

Earlier in the month Johnson had published his tax return:

 - his earnings from the Daily Telegraph seem to match their reputation. In The Churchill Factor (pages 72 and 73), Johnson dismisses Evelyn Waugh’s criticisms of Churchill’s literary style:

Is it that Waugh was a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and the reason was not just that Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty-five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that, for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point of comparison. (page 73)

Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace

A minor milestone – this is the 400th post on this blog which began just over four years ago.

Posts here earlier this year have touched on baroque architecture, in particular one on South East Sicily. The more restrained exteriors of English baroque buildings have in the past provided the background to posts concerning Chatsworth and Greenwich Old Royal Naval College. But the most famous example of English baroque is Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace, constructed in the early 18th century by a grateful nation for the 1st Duke of Marlborough and now a World Heritage Site. My long-standing intention to visit Blenheim was turned into action by the opening of the Ai Weiwei exhibition which launches the Blenheim Art Foundation’s programme of leading international contemporary art.

Ai Weiwei is too well-known to need much description here. Born in 1957, his family were exiled from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, returning in 1976. From 1981 to 1993 Ai lived in the US, mostly in New York. After returning to China he became the country’s leading contemporary artist and designer of international standing. His criticisms of the Chinese government led to his being put under considerable pressure in various forms and at present to his being forbidden to travel outside China. It is reported that President Xi Jinping recently advised artists, authors and actors:

Fine art works should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles.

so Ai’s work, much of it conveying a pointed political message, is probably not quite what he has in mind. 

There are about thirty works (or more, depending the way they are counted - some works are groups of related pieces) at Blenheim, mostly indoors and distributed among the Palace’s permanent displays ,but some are outside, for example Bubble (2008, above) in the South Park. The interior of Blenheim and its furnishings are mainly grand English aristocratic, but there is a unique focus on the first Duke’s military achievements in a European war over 300 years ago and Winston Churchill’s 70 years ago. Interpolating work by a highly political contemporary Chinese artist can be stimulating but carries the risk of appearing oddly inappropriate. The first piece the visitor encounters is Chandelier (2002, right) in the Great Hall, which, unsurprisingly works well, as does the set of marbles, Cao (2014, below) in the North Corridor alongside Blenheim’s own antique Chinese porcelain.

However, using the Churchill Rooms as settings for Ai’s work didn’t seem as appropriate at first – or is perhaps intended to be constructively inappropriate. Slanted Table (1977, below left) might be a metaphor for what Ai sees as a lop-sided Chinese system and leadership, pointedly placed in front of Churchill as wartime PM - though the latter probably had more power and less accountability to his party during wartime than President Xi does now. The wooden Handcuffs (2012, below right) are displayed on the bed in which

Churchill was born – is it meant to be about childbirth, the parental bonds which children have to break to achieve adulthood, who knows? Ai Weiwei is almost certainly trying to make us think about what we are seeing in its context. As the curators explain:

Ai Weiwei has not been able to leave China since 2011when his passport was confiscated by the Chinese authorities. The exhibition at Blenheim Palace has therefore been realised through a close collaboration between the artist and the Blenheim Art Foundation who have worked together with detailed drawings, architectural plans and models of the site and grounds. lntegrating artworks throughout the richly furnished palace rooms, as well as in the park and gardens, the exhibition will showcase the work of an artist known to raise critical questions on social, cultural and political issues and for his decisive breaking with tradition.

But how to interpret Han Dynasty Vase with Coca Cola Logo and Han Dynasty Vase with Caonima Logo (both 2014, below) in their particular context? The furniture and painting are 18th century, the visitors Artwork Guide gives the dates of the dynasty as 202BC – 220AD and the Coca Cola logo dates from circa 1890. As for Caomina - the Wikipedia entry is essential reading.

More vases from the same period are strangely harmonious in the Green Drawing Room - Han Dynasty Vases in Auto-Paints (2014, below left), perhaps not so much so He Xei (2012, below right) in the Red Drawing Room:

Careful examination of Grapes (2011, below) in the Green Writing Room reveals just how ingeniously this structure made from antique stools has been formed:

The stools date from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) as does the iron wood from demolished temples used for Map of China (2009 below) in one of the State Rooms; Hong Kong seems to have been positioned nearest the fireplace:

Blenheim’s magnificent Long Library (below top) is used to display prints of the 40 images which make up Study of Perspective (1995-2011, below middle), three wooden spheres Divina Proportione (2006, lower left; icosahedrons, even) and marbles of a helmet and Surveillance Camera (2010, lower right):

The above are only a few of the works on show inside and outside the Palace. In the gallery space which has been created in the Stables Courtyard, there are some fascinating photographs of Andy Warhol’s visit to China in 1982, which emphasise the remarkable material progress of China in the last 30 years, and of Ai Weiwei in New York (below with Alan Ginsburg) in the 1980s and early 90s.

In a year’s time at the Royal Academy in London there will be a major retrospective of this brave, tough and subtle artist’s work. No doubt the RA organisers will be learning about the challenges involved from the Blenheim Art Foundation team. Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace ends on 14 December. Any readers of this post on the US West Coast and unlikely to visit Blenheim soon may be able to make the trip to @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz which runs until 26 April next year (Refraction, 2014 below). It is difficult to imagine any other artist having exhibitions in a palace and a prison at the same time and so redolently.

Update 27 December 2014

This exhibition has been extended and will run again from 14 February to 30 April 2015.