What do prime ministers actually do?
Andrew Gimson
Every prime minister repeats, at the start of Prime Minister’s Questions, a formula that is singularly uninformative: ‘This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I shall have further such meetings later today.’ Surely they lead more exciting lives than that?
But Theresa May did not get where she is today by being exciting. She has let it be known that she is ‘not a showy politician’, and that her idea of a good time is to have dinner with her husband. At 8.30 each morning, she holds a meeting in her study with her senior staff, after which she holds further such meetings, and because she is, as one observer puts it, ‘quite slow and methodical, and takes a long time to come to decisions’, she afterwards works late into the night on her red boxes.
Two or three times a week, she works out with a personal trainer, Saturdays are spent knocking on doors in the constituency and, on Sunday mornings, she goes to Holy Communion. Her favourite relaxation is cooking, for which she prefers to buy the ingredients herself at the local Waitrose. She also enjoys shopping for clothes and shoes, both in her constituency of Maidenhead and in London, and sometimes slips out of Downing Street to go to L K Bennett in Covent Garden.
David Cameron was more forthcoming than May about the strain of being prime minister. ‘The pressure to respond to every news event is immense,’ he said while he was in office. ‘When I take people into the Cabinet Room, I say, “This is one of the rooms where, for five days in May, Churchill and others decided that Britain should fight on against Hitler.” Imagine if that happened today – after half an hour, Alastair Campbell or Craig Oliver [Cameron’s director of communications] would pop his head round the door and say, “Sky News are outside. What do I say? Are we fighting on or are we surrendering?”’
At 5.45am, Cameron went to the kitchen table in the Downing Street flat and started working through his red boxes.
‘Later,’ he said at the time, ‘Samantha and I make breakfast for the children. I normally have porridge or toast. It can be pretty chaotic as we’re all getting ready for work and school.’
Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, was likewise an early riser, indeed a workaholic, but generally refrained from talking about his children. In 2000, Tony Blair’s youngest child, Leo, became the first child born to a serving prime minister since 1849, when Lord John Russell’s wife gave birth to her third child: an event that barely figured in the newspapers. Blair, by contrast, emerged from the front door carrying a coffee mug and described himself to the waiting cameras as a perfectly normal man: ‘I feel… I feel like any father who sees their baby being born. It’s very moving really.’
Margaret Thatcher set no store by family life. ‘Home is where you come to when you’ve nothing better to do,’ she told Vanity Fair after stepping down. Throughout her eleven years in Downing Street, she set out to demonstrate that she could work harder than any of the men who surrounded her.
Late into the night, she inflicted excruciating speechwriting sessions on her team, more enjoyable to read about (in Cold Cream, the memoir by Ferdinand Mount, head of her Policy Unit) than to live through.
As a young MP, Thatcher heard Harold Macmillan, PM from 1957 to 1963, remark that, because prime ministers have no department of their own to run, they have plenty of time for reading. She was not sure whether he was joking, but his diaries confirm that he did read a vast amount, and that, as he himself used to put it, he liked ‘going to bed with a Trollope’.
During the Second World War, Winston Churchill would wake at eight for a daily report, have breakfast in bed at nine, and generally work in bed, receiving numerous officials, until taking his bath at 12.30pm, followed by lunch and Cabinet. He would then take a siesta, which he insisted was double the value of sleep taken during the night. At 8pm, he would have a good dinner, followed by energetic work into the small hours.
Herbert Henry Asquith, prime minister from 1908 to 1916, was unbelievably quick at transacting official business, but had, as he put it, ‘a slight weakness for the companionship of clever and attractive women’. In 1912, he became besotted with Venetia Stanley, to whom, over the next three years, he wrote almost 600 letters, some composed during Cabinet meetings.
One Monday morning in the summer of 1916, the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, urgently needing to consult with Asquith, was told to visit him at the Wharf, his house on the Thames near Abingdon. This Bonar Law did, at considerable personal inconvenience. On arriving, he found the prime minister of a country fighting for its survival, playing bridge with three young women. How different from the home life of our current Prime Minister.
‘Gimson’s Prime Ministers: Brief Lives from Walpole to May’ (Square Peg, £10.99) is published on 15th March