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.
