Not going gentle into the good night

Retirement, especially for a prime minister, used to being frantically busy in the full gaze of the public, is a melancholy thing. The younger he — or she — is, the more it hurts, with long years of inactivity and growing oblivion stretching ahead. I often think that the most successful of all British politicians, in a worldly but also in a personal sense, was Lord Palmerston. Not only did he hold offices of one kind or another for longer than anyone else, a total of nearly 60 years, but he died as prime minister. His last words, as reported, were: ‘Die? My dear doctor, that’s the last thing I shall do.’ So he was confident to the end; and if the key word in the rhetorical question had been ‘resign’, the saying would have been even more apt. Shortly before, he had made the last of his many jokes. He accompanied the queen on a hot day, while she was inspecting the Brigade of Guards in Hyde Park. Victoria complained of the smell of the men’s sweat. ‘Yes, Ma’am, that’s known as esprit de corps.’ Not many prime ministers have died in office. Offhand I can think of only one other: Pitt the Younger. On Campbell-Bannerman’s death, just three weeks after resigning as prime minister in 1908, Edward VII summoned Asquith to Biarritz to appoint him, the only occasion when a prime minister was invested, to suit the monarch’s pleasure and convenience, at a French watering-place.

A sad case of retirement was Sir Robert Walpole’s. To be sure, he had had his fill of office: two decades of power in all its plenitude. But it left a huge hole in his life. He occupied No. 10 for several weeks after resigning. But when he finally got to Houghton Hall, the splendid palace the spoils of office had built him, and ensconced himself in its well-stocked library to do the reading he had promised himself all those long years of activity, he found it impossible.