It was announced yesterday that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had appointed Sir Keir Starmer, MP for Holborn & St Pancras, to be Steward & Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern. This, as my regular readers should well know, is the traditional legal fiction to allow Members of the House of Commons to resign their seats.

Almost exactly ten years ago, David Cameron was appointed Steward & Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead in order to resign as MP for Witney. He, like Starmer, had resigned as Prime Minister in the month of July and initially indicated that he intended to remain a backbench MP until the next general election, but the changed his mind in September.

In an interview at the time Cameron said “I’ve thought about this long and hard over the summer and I’ve decided the right thing to do is to stand down.”, which I remember being quoted on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz with a remark that what he’d actually done was take the paid holiday then quit before he had to go back to work.

I had a look through the lists of holders of these two “offices of profit” to see how many Prime Ministers have taken them. In the whole of the twentieth century the only example I could find was Sir Anthony Eden on 11th January 1957, his premiership having ended two days earlier. Both resignations were triggered by a health crisis.

In the twenty-first century it became more normal, with four examples so far: Cameron and Starmer as already mentioned, but also Tony Blair on 27th June 2007 and Boris Johnson on 12th June 2023. The former quit Parliament on the same day he quit Downing Street, the latter intended to stay on but then resigned in protest at an investigation by the Privileges Committee.

That got me thinking about the Parliamentary careers of Britain’s leaders, specifically the total length of time that they spent in the House of Commons. Rounding to the nearest month (there may be rounding errors), I came up with this table for all those whose premierships began after the end of Victoria’s reign.

(Of course, several of these people had considerable time in the House of Lords as well, but that’s another story.)

Note that Sunak and Starmer both began their careers at the 2015 general election and thus were tied until yesterday, but the latter’s resignation means that the former will now pull ahead. Starmer therefore has the shortest tenure in the Commons of any Prime Minister in well over a century.

The overall trend has notably been downward: Of the nine premiers who have served during my lifetime, only two have tenures over twenty years. Of those who served before my time, all had twenty years at least, with eleven of the seventeen having tenures over thirty years and four of those serving over forty. The kind of long service that was normal in the previous century feels unimaginable in the current.

Of course, premierships themselves have also been shortening: The nine premiers from Churchill to Major served over a period of fifty-seven years, whereas the nine from Blair to present have only managed twenty-nine. It remains to be seen if Burnham will be able to avert this trend, but to balance it completely he would need to serve until 2054, which seems unlikely. It is also worth remembering that Lloyd George, Churchill, Heath and Callaghan all went on to be Father of the House of Commons, with Campbell-Bannerman uniquely managing to achieve that distinction while he was Prime Minister. A repeat of that phenomenon the foreseeable future feels unlikely too.

UPDATE (6th September)

The podcasts Parliament Matters and Since Attlee & Churchill have both put out episodes discussing Starmer’s resignation, and both comment on his admission that he prefers Davos to Westminster.