How to be an Ex-Prime Minister (Michael Cockerell doc)

[Music] so you want to know how to be a successful ex-prime minister you've just lost your home and your job and your best bet is to learn from those who've gone before you how do you deal with losing the most potent political drug of all power where will you live and what will you do for money i get them to play terminator 4 i mean anything is available now that is definitely the best offer i've had actually the sad thing is the only offer i've had [Music] tony blair is joining the most exclusive political club in britain at the age of 54 he's the youngest member of the ex-prime minister's club [Applause] as a member you face the most difficult of tasks how to find fulfillment in life after number 10. it isn't always easy for someone who used to be the most powerful politician in the land to maintain your dignity and sense of self-worth and make well an ex-prime minister is a rather unusual uh fish in politics if they say nothing what are they doing there if they say something there's every chance it will be construed as an oblique attack on your successor or whatever it may be so it is extremely difficult to have a role that isn't capable of severe misinterpretation i've been covering politics for over 40 years i've counted them in and i've counted them out i've been lucky enough to interview all the last eight prime ministers from harold mcmillan to tony blair and i've been here on the day the traumatic day when they've had to give it all up michael cockrell is down at downing street brushing the hair out of his eyes michael good morning again good morning david what's going on there well i suppose here is really the democratic equivalent of um the tanks on the street that you see in a totalitarian country there are the black rovers here and there may be the john lewis moving vans that there were in 1970 although when i talked to mr callahan about that he thought that this was very undignified way of doing things jim callahan was labour's last prime minister before tony blair to leave number 10 when he lost the general election my father was extremely disappointed this is a brutal transition one moment you are literally in the morning you are in number 10 surrounded by private secretaries and scrambled telephone systems and all the paraphernalia of the office and then everyone politely waves you goodbye and uh you're on your own harold mcmillan was the first prime minister i filmed in october 1963 he went into hospital for a prostate operation the prime minister has had his prostate gland removed there were no complications wrongly believing he had cancer macmillan had decided to resign as prime minister in his hospital bedroom uniquely the queen came to the hospital to receive his resignation macmillan received a blunt reminder he was no longer her majesty's first minister there was a telephone scrambler telephone by bed and i got to sleep about the afternoon after this ordeal i heard a fellow knocking about in the room and i said what are you doing he says the post office man come to take away your telephone you're not entitled to a telephone i said to hell i was prime minister two hours ago you might leave it a bit no that's the rule so that was the end of my power which has never been restored i think that was when the sort of wonderful irony of it dawned on grandpapa he even became aware that you know it had all gone the the trappings of office had vanished instantly and for him as a as a classical scholar there was something splendidly kind of the greek tragedy of the of the people who rise high have further to fall eleven years later i filmed ted heath as he became the ex-conservative prime minister following his shock general election defeat in 74 and years later i talked to him about it well i was bitterly disappointed i wanted to continue but it wasn't possible we got more votes than the labour party did but we got fewer seats it was a bit of disappointment to us and we then went into opposition the removal of ted heath's grand piano from number 10 symbolized the end of the musical prime minister and he faced further graphic evidence of how abruptly the trappings of power are removed on the day you become an ex we do handle these things in britain in a very brutal way when ted heath went to buckingham palace to resign in 1974 he went in the official car when he came to go out again there was no car for him we walked out to get in the car where's the car car had gone up to pick up mr wilson to bring him to buckingham palace seemed to me rather an odd way to perform and so uh we were then told that a pool car was arriving and i remember from a jaguar moved down into a rather dilapidated morris oxford and drove out of buckingham palace in that we've just heard from our staff at westminster that the prime minister mr harold wilson has resigned he feels he has been leader of the labour party for long enough no i'm not happy to go it's a sad moment in many ways but you do feel a certain relief at the burden falling off your shoulder as i say a seven day a week burden thank you very much ladies and gentlemen harold wilson had astonished the country by suddenly resigning just two years after he'd been returned to power for his second period as prime minister i watched him go out the door and he looked almost smaller as he walked out during a busy day how about your day are you very busy not too busy i think he was sadder from then on because wilson's problem was his life had been entirely politics and much of it inside number 10. i think when he walked out of number 10 he left his real self and real life behind there and he didn't have anything to replace it and he didn't really have much money and he was probably the last of our prime ministers who was seriously financially deprived because the pension was small he did shrewdly arrange to have a car because what he cleverly did when ted heath left as leader of the conservative party having been prime minister in 75 uh harold generously arranged ted heath should have a chauffeured car as an ex-prime minister so when he retired next year he had a shepherd car as the next prime minister former prime ministers are much better off these days as well as the car tony blair will get an immediate prime ministerial pension of 64 000 pounds a year as well as a further 83 000 to run his office and that's on top of what he earns as an mp and he will get round the clock protection from special branch officers 24 hours a day tony blair will get security and that will be assessed from time to time um but he'll probably um get it for most if not all the rest of his life it's a very mixed blessing it's one thing to have a car it's another thing to have a car which is where you can't open the windows where you are driven by a police officer and where your protection squad really expects to know what you're going to do all the time how your fair as an ex-prime minister will be affected by the circumstances in which you leave if you can you should try to depart with your head held high we're leaving downing street for the last time after 11 and a half wonderful years now it's time for a new chapter to open and i wish john major all the luck in the world but it's never easy if it's your own cabinet colleagues who forced you from office so what was it like for her when the game was up traumatic uh but i think i mean we're not talking about like tony blair's going is not exactly the same uh even though i think he is being pushed out really because of a combination of iraq and and pressure from brown but uh mrs thatcher had been stabbed in the back by her own party not as she pointed out defeated on the floor of the house of commons or in an election and i think that a wrangled more than anything else and blair's made a terrible mistake staying on for too long and lingering about messing about every transition to his successor but at least the dates of his own choosing he's always known when he's going to go so there isn't the overnight shock effect whereas uh i mean one problem with margaret and she knew quite what had hit her what hurt most of all said margaret thatcher was that her cabinet colleagues had conspired to force her to resign one by one they'd come to see her oozing full sympathy it was she declared treachery with a smile on its face it has been an immense privilege to serve as prime minister of the united kingdom over the last six and a half years when the curtain falls it's time to get off the stage and that is what i propose to do i have an appointment with her majesty the queen in a few moments to tend to my resignation after that i hope that norma and i will be able with the children to get to the oval in time for lunch and for some cricket this afternoon give me a nice day sir always do it the oval well the oval was my spiritual home whenever i went there it was a place of solace cares fell away everything else fell away so it seemed a good place to be that day it does seem an unusual thing to to do the the day you stop being prime minister to to go off to the oval i don't think it's unusual at all i think it's i think it's very desirable i recommend it to my successes in the future when you leave your two tied cottages of number 10 and checkers you'll need to have a home to move into you may have had the foresight to buy an upmarket house in west london but will the builders have it ready in time this wasn't a problem for prime ministers from an earlier age who tended to own aristocratic estates but many of your post-war predecessors have had their housing problems my grandfather was effectively bankrupt by the end of the war and he was forced to put charcoal on the market this outraged lord camrose the then proprietor of the daily telegraph who corralled 10 wealthy well-wishers and they each ponied up the princely sum of 5 000 pounds so for 55 000 pounds which in 1946 was a lot of money they bought chartwell on the understanding that my grandparents would live there till the end of their days and then it would be presented to the nation [Music] when the carpenter's son from broadstairs ted heath left office following his surprise 1974 election defeat he was literally homeless the bachelor prime minister had never owned a house of his own and had been expecting to stay on in number 10 downing street he wasn't the sort of man who thought about those domestic details very much so he really had made no provision for himself he literally had nowhere to go tim kittson who was heath's parliamentary secretary volunteered to give up his own london flat for the ex-prime minister to use until he found a place of his own tim kittson said to me we better get the flat ready for mr heath so he and i went round and literally we got out hoovers and brushes and dusters and so on and this was about one octo o'clock in the morning i remember tim and i mopping around to get it ready for him to go there the next day margaret thatcher did have a place to go when she lost office she and dt as she called her husband had bought a new house in a gated community in dullich south london their new home was conveniently close to dullich golf course and not far from the boys public school dennis said to me and i always thought it astonishing it would be very nice for margaret thatcher to walk around the playing fields of dullage college and watch the boys playing football this always seemed to be a very very unlikely thing to happen and indeed dennis didn't like the golf course he'll know done what was required of it sounded good a bit off the line but well all right so both of them made miscalculations about what the others would like one of the things that she hadn't taken into account was that in order to get to dullet you had to go through brixton and she didn't like driving through brixton for all sorts of reasons she found it depressing and she found it even threatening so she really didn't spend very much time there i spent most of my youth in brixton until well into my 30s at different houses but it's a very vivid area there is an innate friendliness in the area that those people who live there understand very well my shop let the shop recorded the record shop used to come john major didn't choose to live in brixton as an ex-prime minister but he was to buy a luxury flat not far away on the day he left number 10 he went back to his constituency home in rural huntingdon he faced problems common to all ex-prime ministers how to adjust to the loss of power and the life support system provided by number 10. he vividly recalls the morning after the day he stopped being prime minister well i woke up the next morning and instinctively awakened there's that brief moment when your eyes and your brain are awake but they're not fully functioning just a millisecond and i woke up and then i realized that i didn't have to go and finish boxes i didn't have to go straight away and summon private secretaries and make decisions and and i realize there's a certain element of relief in that of course you missed what you were doing but there's a certain element of relief in it and i remember rather later about a month or so later i turned over in bed one morning i switched on the radio to find that the prime minister was going off to a european summit and i turned the radio off and went back to sleep i think when you stop being prime minister it's a very disorienting experience because you go in such a short period of time from having everything arranged for you to being on your own there's nobody there to remind you how to telephone around the corner code numbers have probably changed since you came in you don't have an up-to-date telephone book of your own because of course number 10 had all your telephone numbers i remember being run up by margaret thatcher a week or two after she left number 10 and being towed on a sunday she had a plumbing problem and i said oh yeah better get a plumber in a long silence how do i do that i try the yellow pages and uh that's the way we had to go i ended up ringing the plumber in the yellow pages as a former merchant sailor jim callahan was a much more practical man when he left number ten he was also looking forward to spending more time with his sheep on the farm he owned near the sussex downs i remember we all drove down to the farm in sussex and pretty soon that new rhythm of life in which the scrambled phones were taken out and the private secretaries weren't any longer hovering on the doorstep as it were became the natural rhythm i enjoy it very much time you you there's a wonderful feeling when you come out in this barn late on a march night and you deliver a couple of lambs i can see one there there is literally one standing there now that i delivered i only i know because she's got a black patch over her left eye i remember coming in here late at night delivering that one and of course you get a tremendous sense of satisfaction out of that you know doing something like especially when you're in politics you know and you're you're dealing with a lot of intangible things and in politics you don't always see have written their memoirs some of them have taken a long time to decide to do it others have done it almost immediately it can be a very good source of making quite a lot of money quite quickly alastair campbell who was tony blair's press secretary said he regarded the diaries that he kept every day in number 10 as his pension but the question for the prime ministers is actually how candid they're going to be are they going to dish the dirt and are they going to admit to doubts they might privately have had while they were prime minister in 1946 my grandfather was already 71 years old he didn't know how much longer he would live he'd already had a stroke and a couple of heart attacks and he was if nothing else he was a dynast and he wanted to leave something to his heirs the wartime leader was a prolific writer and he saw the opportunity to restore his personal finances by writing a lengthy history of the second world war and his own key role in it at his desk in chartwell he completed six volumes of war memoirs which he sold for record sums of money winston churchill was not only justifying his career thus far he was rewriting history i mean his the genuine story was magnificent enough but this was revenge on his enemies the change of events and all the rest of it on a ground scale for a long time historians of the whole epoch through which churchill lived took the churchill account of events both political military and everything else as gospel i think people have realized that um he took a few liberties the truth just to make the record neater all together more glorious when he produced his account of events he would be less than human if he didn't do that and he he once said history will justify me for i intend to write it the bookish macmillan also planned to write his own version of history it helped that he'd gone from number 10 back to head the family firm of mcmillan the publishers although he was coy when asked about his plans i want to do other things what other things well i got pay some attention to my family at first and i was hoping possibly to write a little your own memoirs perhaps not necessarily but no difficulty in finding a publisher oh i don't know very difficult in fact macmillan planned to write three volumes of memoirs as his grandson recalls as his publisher i have to say i think it would have been better had he stuck to three volumes but of course the later you get the more material there is and you oh i can't leave that up oh i've got to put that in we were did six volumes as it turned out uh we'd have certainly been up around the 10 had we not cut some of the material out mcmillan gave tv interviews to the bbc to publicize his memoirs and proved a master in the new fangled art of product placement carefully displaying his book for the cameras should pay me to talk about the book which i have written and which my little company has published i authorized on which the settlement was reached when harold wilson produced his memoirs just a year after he'd become an ex-prime minister for the first time it caused a publishing sensation even at 4 pounds 80 a copy the book selling fast twenty thousand copies had gone before publication and this morning at its launching mr wilson was submerged by lunchtime crowds after his signature a pop star with a hit record wouldn't have attracted more attention harold wilson was still leader of the opposition questions over his memoirs led to a huge row between wilson and the bbc [Music] for an irreverent bbc tv documentary called yesterday's men the presenter david dimbleby had asked wilson how much the sunday times had paid him for the serialization rights to his memoirs wilson had bitterly objected to dimbleby's questions mr wilson earned six figures for the book but what those figures are remains a closely guarded secret the bbc under great pressure from wilson agreed to cut the exchange from the finished program you couldn't you couldn't set our minds at rest on the vex question of what sunday times did actually pay for no i don't think it's a matter of interest to the bbc or anybody else it's a ridiculous question about yes and i mean it cut off i don't want to read in in the times diary on me tell me that i asked for it to be cut out wilson was in fact paid a quarter of a million pounds but when i talked to him years later his anger hadn't subsided and the bbc in all its history has never put that kind of question to a conservative or any other leader there must have been something wrong that night and uh naturally i wasn't going to be a full guy for that kind of thing [Music] yesterday um ted heath amassed a huge amount of official documents and papers which he kept in an old warehouse but he couldn't bring himself to use them to write his memoirs until 24 years after he left office apparently he thought that memoirs were for ex-politicians and he didn't quite see himself as that margaret thatcher had wasted no time in producing her version of history producing the memoirs was vital to her she wanted to get her side of the story out straight away if you feel you've been unjustly dispossessed to the office of prime minister if you feel your colleagues have turned on you you're going to get your revenge on them you're not going to pull any punches you're going to tell the story as you saw it and as you believed it i didn't write my memoirs with the intention of sticking a knife into old opponents and nor did i as anyone who reads those memoirs will readily see if you have a lot of things that's happening putting them down on paper and drawing a line underneath it is a very cathartic thing to do secondly there were so many misconceptions so many things that were misreported or misunderstood that i thought everyone is entitled to their own individual opinion but i will write down what happened as i saw it so what should be your approach to your memoirs you've served longer than any other post-war prime minister apart from margaret thatcher and you've been a similarly divisive figure but you know best where the bodies are buried so how much is your story worth i asked ed victor the new yorker who's now the london literary agent to the superstars i think tony blair is worth a lot of money um there's no question about it we're talking about many millions of pounds how many can you put a figure five plus or minus which is a lot of money ten million dollars yeah not bad and um he may well michael have have made a deal along the way i mean not a deal writing because he wouldn't do that but he may have looked rupert murdoch in the eye and murdoch may have said i'll pay you x and we'll do a universal deal with you for a book a column a television you know a series murdoch has it in his power to do all this he's a huge multimedia company so that may have happened what's the possibility of you becoming tony blair's agent of me being his agent i live in hope that the phone will ring one day because of i i think i have him surrounded in a way with blanket and campbell his close colleagues you've been their agent i've been their agent yeah and i know what i'm doing and i i think i think tony blair who was a brilliant politician may not be such a brilliant tactician on my ground he's now on my ground and and he could end up being um beset by doubt i also think the issue of speed is important for him speed a he should sell his memoirs immediately and ronald reagan did the deal the day after he left office and and that was very smart thatcher waited a little bit and i think she got less money as a result of it so aside from your memoirs what other media opportunities are there you wanted to be an actor at school and you've been the most theatrical of prime ministers i get them to play terminator 4 i mean anything is available now that is definitely the best offer i've had actually the sad thing is the only offer i've had you'll always be in demand as a surprise guest on tv shows although harold wilson's colleagues had doubts about him appearing with morcom and wise you might even try your hand at hosting a chat show of your own good evening i've got three guests tonight now the man with probably the most revered name in the world winston churchill [Music] [Music] winston i don't know if you'll heard that well is that an advantage or a disadvantage to have your grandfather's name well i suppose it gets one invited on the harold wilson cha-cha that's not why i invited you as you will find out i recall there was a lot of friendly banter and he actually was quite good at it um i regretted he didn't sort of carry on a bit longer or that the program producers knocked it on the head even if your chat show only lasts for three episodes there's big money to be made if you agree to appear in a tv commercial you can get cheshire cheese in three colors personally i prefer the blue i said you've got to get into 10 seconds i said i've got a damn sight more it's 10 seconds on that one i've wanted to if you don't fancy doing cheesy commercials the place to go where you can make really big money is america if you're popular there there's a fortune to be made on the u.s lecture circuit you can follow in the footsteps of your own wife and those of another prime minister whose passionate pro-american stance and special relationship with the president one great admiration ladies and gentlemen it's now my honor and privilege to introduce to you one of the greatest ladies and leaders of our time lady margaret thatcher sweden huge sums for herself and for the institution she'd set up to promote thatcherism worldwide ideals are not enough to secure peace and freedom only military superiority and the will to use it to have actually been so close to her i feel will always be with me the rest of my life the way i was touched this evening as an american uh to see her and to meet her and she's inspiring that's she touched me she really did we do a number of occasions like this where i speak or answer questions and then we do a signing of various books afterwards this lecture circuit particularly in america has now become hugely lucrative the norm more than bill clinton but all our ex prime ministers can make a fortune uh margaret went on the lecture circuit john's been doing very well on it i'm sure tony blair will follow the same path it is extremely lucrative it also has a another purpose and margaret thatcher was very widely admired in the united states and when you've been used to public adulation and it suddenly disappears when you stop being prime minister at least appearing before wildly enthusiastic audiences of hundreds of americans in tuscaloosa or somewhere still has a nice road in your life it makes you think you are still as mad and wanted and psychologically i think it's a great compensation for the for the loss of office here is margaret thatcher thank you for that wonderful reception far better than i ever got in the house of commons mr speaker the prime minister of the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland to acknowledge your enthusiastic reception you can use your own or shucks version of lady thatcher's opening line i'm deeply touched by that warm and generous welcome that's more than i deserve more than i'm used to quite frankly the rapture that once greeted you may be waning but there are still big buts waiting for you in america one of the things he can do is lecture and it's amazing how much money you can make i mean we're talking about i think in america he would make at a minimum of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars seventy five thousand pounds per lecture per lecture all expenses paid flown there first class put up in a you know nice suite he has to give something to a lecture agent but it would be minimal because any lecture agent would be thrilled to have him on their books and at that kind of you know the usual rate for a lecturer a good one would be 25 to 50 000 but he i think he'd get three times that and how often could he get that do you think oh how busy will he be if he does 10 a year he's making a lot of money isn't he um you know once every month um you know it's huge huge money the lecture circuit can be uh a lucrative thing for for for ex-prime ministers it can has been for you uh it can be uh lucrative and i thoroughly enjoyed it you may also want to go into business so what are your prospects what kind of companies might you work for and how much can you earn there are many do's and don'ts to learn from the experiences of your predecessors take ted hee soon after losing power the tory ex-prime minister went to red china he met the legendary chairman mao whose country had been for so long off limits and heath saw business opportunities there dan significantly had been involved in the opening up of contacts with china and he had had strong contacts with china when it was first beginning to have contacts with the outside world he maintained a very strong interest in china he went there frequently strong connections with china and i think he did give commercial advice on china i went to the stunning house in salisbury that heath bought partly out of his earnings from advising companies that wanted to do business with communist china it's the first house he ever owned and he was immensely proud of it when he died two years ago he left over five million pounds in his will along with plans for the house to be open to the public among his prized photos are one that shows him with richard nixon the first american president to foster friendly relations with china and there's another shangheeth with the veteran chinese leader deng xiaoping whom he would often visit over the years heath kept sources of his income deliberately opaque like a complex chinese puzzle his earnings were paid to the obscurely named dumpton gap company that didn't make its accounts public the former labour prime minister jim callahan was rather less successful with his business ventures he agreed to become a paid advisor to the fast-growing international bank of credit and commerce bcci that was run from london and abu dhabi but when suspicions grew about the activities of the bank's directors callaghan claimed that from his knowledge of them they were men of the utmost integrity but it wasn't so and bcci was to be proved guilty of massive fraud and after arrests of its staff in america for laundering of money from arms and drugs deals the bank collapsed that did become controversial yes i think he managed to disentangle himself before it became a scandal but do you think it was a cautionary tale for i think it may have been well i don't know whether of course a retail for prime minister i think it was a cautionary tale for him margaret thatcher was for a time a paid advisor to the giant philip morris tobacco company [Applause] it reportedly paid her a million dollars a year and she celebrated her 70th birthday in america but many people wondered about an ex-prime minister joining the tobacco lobby how careful do you think a prime minister and ex-prime minister needs to be very careful i think you have to be very careful because it is not only um that you need to make sure you're doing something that is actually appropriate to the job that you once held i think that is important but also you need to be sure you don't put yourself in a position where malicious tongues can suggest things that are not true you will now see the future john major became a director of the mayflower company which developed an environmentally friendly vehicle engine i waited to see what offers would come and quite a few offers came some of them were very attractive some of them were frankly inappropriate and i just pushed those immediately to one side what kind of things well i was offered jobs at uh to chair organizations that i wouldn't wish to have had an interest in and i didn't and i pushed those to one side i was very selective i knew there were some things i would never do i would never lobby i would never use my address book and my past contacts for specific business purposes i knew i wasn't going to do that the register of mp's interest for 2001 the last year that john major was in the house lists the companies he worked for chief among them is the american private equity company the carlisle group which likes to employ ex-presidents and prime ministers and what about you did work for the carlyle group which which people don't really know very much about although they know it famous private equity group and and involved in arms deals did you think that was uh appropriate to be working i didn't lobby for carlisle i advised carlisle on what was happening in different parts of the world and that sort of thing so i didn't know lobbying at all and uh they're one of the finest private equity groups in the world and hugely successful you may be able to make a good living from business over the years as john major has you'll also have to take another key decision about your own future what should be your attitude to your successor as prime minister if you've had a fraught and bruising relationship it may be tempting for you to stay in politics and become a backseat driver and candid critic again the experience of your predecessors is illuminating jim callahan jim callahan became a very popular figure in the house of lords and was always careful to refrain from criticizing his successors he always said to me that he was living by the old siemens mantra that you don't speak to the man at the wheel and you don't spit on the deck i you know stay out of the day-to-day things and retain what influence you can on policy issues but don't get involved i just wonder what view you took once you stopped being prime minister in terms of whether you you should interfere with that i should intervene only occasionally not on the trivia of party disputes that are here today in don tomorrow i can't be bothered to waste my time and effort on those anymore but if there's something that is a strategic and importance then as the last 10 years will have shown i have spoken out and expressed my views on it but i suppose i was thinking also of an approach to uh your successor as as party leader whether you you took some quite specific view i but ted heath and margaret thatcher both saw things in a very different way from john major we wanted you to be on my right [Laughter] and his personal behavior after he was replaced by margaret it was it was the greatest sulk i've ever known uh i mean several of these prime ministers are quite remarkable and unusual personalities and ted was unusual in that he maintained this fantastic fantastic silence aloofness and uh sulk was the best way of describing it years and years and years he he disapproved of what his successor was doing he made that perfectly clear he was not on speaking terms with remarkable people because he did not forgive them from working with that woman as he always described her i heard that when mrs thatcher fell from power you rang your office and said rejoice rejoice i said it three times i think rejoice rejoice rejoice deeply wounded by the way she had been forced out margaret thatcher soon made life very difficult for her successor john major she was accepted to classic margaret thatcher thing she went to war she decided she'd be betrayed and it it it wasn't very long before she was spending her time trying to get her revenge uh on people including her successor john major was very um hurt really that margaret thatcher who had after all chosen him as her successor let it be known from time to time how that she disapproved of the things that he was he was doing because that wasn't done in public but by word of mouth which spread it was actually very difficult very difficult for him to deal with what did you feel about the role that your your own predecessor margaret thatcher played in in that's all ancient history i'm talking about what happened after i left palm i'm not going to crawl over all those old battles again michael no i suppose the reason i'm i'm asking is in terms of you were saying that that you kind of took this self-denying ordinance uh as an ex-prime minister not to to intervene in politics um whereas margaret thatcher approached it in a rather different way everyone operates in their own particular way according to their own particular dictates and i think we'll leave it at that harold macmillan said that once you leave the stage as prime minister you shouldn't hang around the green room when i was a child it was the ambition of almost every boy to drive a railway i've never achieved it to have one named after me is a very high honor but even that high honor was not enough for the old statesman he broke his pledge about not intervening in politics by giving a tv interview as the country seemed to be sliding into chaos in his interview macmillan called for a government of national unity just supposing mr macmillan that someone went to ask you to form such a government do you think that this could be easily done to form the right combination of men to produce the right common policies well you're tempting me you know mr gatson formed his last government and he was 83 and i'm only 82. you mustn't put temptation in my way but of course it wouldn't be easy nothing's easy but i say what is the alternative he raised the question of a government of national unity or national government of some kind of coalition and suddenly it became clear that you know off somewhere someone had sounded a trumpet which only he could hear and the old war horse was reacting to it and and he genuinely thought oh maybe you know so assuming you're highly unlikely to get your old job back how easy will it be to find happiness as an ex-prime minister [Music] on the evidence of your predecessors it will largely depend on whether you have a hinterland of fulfilling personal interests outside politics we know you're still a keen electric guitarist [Music] we also know you love exotic holidays and they'll doubtless be a continuing array of rich friends with fine villas where you'll be able to stay just as there had been for winston churchill when he left office for the last time in 1955 at the age of 80. his two favorite watering hulls were marrakesh in the winter and monte carlo he was 80. but he had his hobby of painting he really loved that he really liked bright lights and bright colors would he also go on on um aristotle and nasa's yacht the christina yes he loved that do you think he enjoyed his last years after he'd stopped being prime minister oh yes until the last 18 months of his life he was still in good form good spirits harold wilson's years as an ex-prime minister were less fulfilled wilson's problem was his life had been entirely politics and he didn't have a personal hinterland of other interests that you can fall back on when the big job is taken away and he didn't have anything to replace it and it became sadder later when his mind went the bachelor ted heath had his music and his sailing [Music] they may have provided some consolation for the hurt he felt at losing the premiership but when i would visit his house in salisbury to interview him he struck me as a profoundly lonely man and one of his staff told me he would go most nights to a local pub and drink for an hour with only a police driver and special branch detective as company well ted was not a happy man ted i think had had bouts of happiness and and and about of regret and unhappiness i think he was his his retirement was a complicated affair but not at least not in the end a miserable one i screamed for those who smiled my father was definitely happy and definitely content tony and sheree blair very kindly gave a very nice 90th birthday reception for him at number 10. and he was quite moved and quite apparently frail on that occasion although he wasn't always and he gave a very moving speech really it's one i know the tony blair himself remembers and quotes sometimes about what it meant to be prime minister and but more importantly what it meant as he said when all this huge responsibility and high office is finished what really matters and he said well what's really mattered to me is my family at the oval which was john major's first stop as an ex-prime minister he launched his new book on cricket last month he'd been kept happy writing it between business engagements for the past three years over the last few days i've noticed there's been a great deal of talk about what uh former prime ministers do once they've left office actually and i'm sure tony would agree with this i think there may have been a touch too much talk about what prime ministers do i'm not sure that tony will write a book on cricket reasonably sure he won't but i can't be absolutely certain but i can certainly recommend writing as a cathartic return to the real world i mean do you think that in terms of what you do after you have been prime minister having some kind of hinterland like cricket is important i certainly think it's very desirable i mean there are some prime ministers who spend the rest of their life looking back and wondering all was about politics or others who move on um it's a matter of personal choice but the important thing as far as you can is to look forward to the things that you propose to do in future i was always determined not to have my life solely bounded by the constraints of politics margaret thatcher no other real interest other than politics i think this makes it infinitely hard i mean john major had his cricket harold macmillan had his trollope book and other people had other interests and whatever margaret thatcher was a highly political animal whose whole fiber and being was concentrated in the world of politics makes it much more difficult i think i just wonder whether you think um you never find happiness as an ex-prime minister i don't know whether you could be happy after being prime minister but i can tell you that i don't believe margaret thatcher has had a happy day in her life since she sees being private stuff if you're in politics you expect to be knifed in the back what i will never forgive is it wasn't by a parliament that i was thrown out i shall never forget that and i shall never forgive so how will tony blair cope with life as an ex-prime minister after what john major describes as the longest farewell tour since dame nelly melba one of blair's closest advisors inside number 10 told me tony still has no idea what's going to hit him the thing he'll miss most of all is being cut off from top grade information he'll no longer receive secret intelligence reports and papers and briefings which tell him what's really going on in britain and the outside world people ask you questions and you're about to answer and you think to yourself hang on i'm about to express an opinion on this i haven't seen the papers i don't know what it is that the prime minister knows that i no longer know so here am i about to say well i think he should have handled this differently but he may know something that i once would have known that nobody else knows so when people ask you those sort of questions you are more cautious than you would otherwise be because you're conscious that the information flow that once automatically came to you that you absorbed as a matter of course is no longer there after a 15-minute meeting at number 10 off mr blair sped to sedgefield today i announced my decision to stand down from the leadership of the labour party what tony blair calls the feral beasts of the 24-hour media will no longer have him to feed on those closest to him say the role blair wants to take on immediately is that of a roving world peacemaker i suspect there's all sorts of things that he'll do in the future and he got you know it's interesting that the because i mean he's 53 leaving us 54 yeah leaving office i mean you know gladstone churchill these guys they're getting into their 80s and when they kind of left real top flight political life and you look at something like bill clinton and al gore you see what they've achieved since leaving office and i think tony's probably thinking you know i'll be able to do some of that and i'll still be involved he's never going to want to profile if he wants it he's never going to want for opportunities he's never going to to want for opportunities to make a difference and i think he will still want to do that i think that is kind of ingrained in it to make a difference in what kind of what kind of thing would he want to make a difference i think you probably i certainly don't think you'll be hanging around you know sort of backseat driving on gordon i think you do any of that so i think actually a lot of it will be it will focus on some of the big international stuff i mean he is he's going to want what somebody in business would want if he ceased to be the chairman and ceo which is the last big job you know the next big job in the career in tony's case i think it'll be trying to govern the world and advise all the other political leaders how to run things and now you find that difficult because there is a sudden you are very ex as an ex-prime minister it may take you a very long time to adjust fully to no longer being the most powerful person in the land for the one thing all members of the ex-prime minister's club have in common is that they've lost the most exciting job they'll ever have i think most of almost all of them if you if you said that by some amazing miracle you could go back tomorrow and you could be prime minister again and take on all that hassle and all that strain all that criticism and all those strategies they'd all jumped at it and gone straight back straight away [Music] right wing and working class jeff norcot takes aim tomorrow night how the middle class ruined britain over on bbc two at nine download bbc sounds for brexit cast laura koonsburg katya adler adam fleming and chris mason with the gossip from westminster and brussels

Channel: SJ

Views: 58,993

Rating: 4.9181585 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: PohYBaQvvQ0

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021