IMAGINE for a moment that Tony Blair, like Michael Howard, had become leader of his party at the age of 62. The Prime Minister would now be 72, well past the normal retirement age, even for ambitious politicians. Admittedly the 72-year-old Jacques Chirac is dropping hints about running for a third term as President, but he is probably the only man in France who can’t see how laughable that prospect is.
No, Blair would almost certainly have gone by now, particularly with a dicky heart. He would have looked forward to a gentle retirement, with a seat in the Lords, the occasional game of tennis and a gaggle of grandchildren to enjoy.
Instead, we have a 51-year-old man with three teenagers and a toddler in Downing Street, who says that he intends to stay for another four years. Gordon Brown is justifiably aggrieved that his rival failed to keep his promise to stand aside last autumn. But, as well as blaming the unreliability of his former friend, the Chancellor should also blame the social trend that gives top jobs to people at an absurdly young age.
Ten years ago, when Blair had just become party leader, I interviewed him and two other men who had found themselves running huge organisations in their early forties: Martin Taylor and Howard Davies. The theme of the piece was “the incredible shrinking career”.
These young men, I wrote, “will not have had the wedge-shaped careers that their fathers experienced: gradual promotion from their twenties to their sixties, followed by sudden retirement. The new shape of careers is triangular, with an apex in the middle.”
But that raises the problem of how people cope with the downward slope. Taylor, then chief executive of Barclays Bank at just 42, explained: “The problem is that most people can’t get off the moving staircase until they fall off it. Sometimes they are concerned about the loneliness of retirement and they don’t have enough to do. That prospect is very frightening.”
I asked Blair the same question. He replied: “You have to come to terms with the fact that you will probably do something else before you retire. Whereas if you became leader of the Labour Party at the time that John Smith did, you would think of being leader of the Labour Party for a time — if everything went well, Prime Minister — and then you would retire.” What might he do, then, after ceasing to be Labour leader? “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I really don’t know.”
The trouble is that, although the shape of our career trajectories has changed, our expectations haven’t. We don’t expect to go backwards in our careers, to carry on working at a lower level after having been very senior. It seems somehow humiliating, like being kept down a class at school.
What is more, the new triangular career is horribly ill-suited to our domestic demands. In the past, people were appointed to the most demanding jobs in their mid-fifties, which happily coincided with their children reaching adulthood.
Getting to the top 15 years earlier plunges a parent into a maelstrom of conflicting demands and emotions. Blair’s children were aged between 6 and 10 when he became leader — and then Cherie had another once he reached No 10. In that 1994 interview, he told me: “The greatest hesitation that I had, and the single biggest worry, was that I wouldn’t get the time with my kids as they were growing up. That did make me hesitate very, very much indeed. I didn’t go for the deputy leadership after the last election and my elder boy said once he was glad about that.”
He admitted that “there are lots of times when you look at friends and envy how much time they can spend with their kids”. He claimed to console himself with the thought that he might be able to see more of his children as teenagers than he would have done had he taken this job at a more conventional age. Yet here he is, still Prime Minister, with one child at university, the next on his way and the third already in the sixth form.
And what will he do once he steps — or falls — off the moving staircase? Martin Taylor, a Chinese scholar, revealed his fantasy to me: “I was always struck by the two-way pull between the Confucian and Taoist traditions which enabled somebody who had been holding a lot of power at court, when they were disgraced, to go away to a remote part of the empire and have water lilies and write verse. Gosh, I think that would be nice.”
A decade later, that is more or less the life that Taylor has achieved. Could Blair even contemplate it?
Sack the spooks
WE WENT to war with Iraq on the basis of bad intelligence. As a result of our intelligence failures, some 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives. Yet not a single British spymaster has even lost his job.
The failure of MI6 to get its facts right about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was catalogued meticulously in Lord Butler of Brockwell’s report. Of the five main sources reporting on WMD, the evidence of three turned out to be unreliable. The other two painted a much less worrying picture of Saddam’s WMD capability. What is more, says Butler, the validation procedures that should have tested sources’ credibility were inadequate.
In America, the CIA made similar mistakes. But the chief resigned in disgrace and the service is being overhauled from top to bottom. In Britain, the chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, left only because he had reached retirement age and was replaced by the very man, John Scarlett, who had presided over the discredited dossier. Now MI6 has instituted two minor reforms: the appointments of an unnamed non-executive director and an internal watchdog. And that’s it.
The Prime Minister — who more than anyone should be angry about having been led into war on the basis of false intelligence — should shake Sir John out of his complacency and demand full-scale reform. And don’t any of those spies deserve to lose their jobs?
Sexy or skeletal?
LAST WEEK I commended Dove for its ad campaign featuring real women alongside tick boxes such as “wrinkled or wonderful?” Dawn Oliver e-mailed me with a clever suggestion for a follow-up campaign. Dove should run some posters with proper models on them alongside tick boxes for “elegant or emaciated?” Or perhaps “attractive or anodyne?” Royalties straight to her, please.
Soft as steel
AT Tony Blair’s press conference this week, I accused the Prime Minister of lying about his opponents and distorting their policies during election campaigns. My husband chastised me afterwards for being excessively rude. Another newspaper, however, complained that I had bowled Blair a soft ball. So what on earth qualifies as a hard-ball question these days? Do I have to call the PM a paedophile next month?
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
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