Surely there must be some room at the top for a mere lad of 57?

Nick Clegg excited some predictable mockery when he recently referred to rich people living “literally in a different galaxy” when it came to paying tax.

Deputy Prime Minister and Lord President of the Council. No, honestly.

Sadly it is not so. They are very much on this planet, and many undoubtedly share the late Leona Helmsley’s view that “only the little people pay taxes”. And have, as Mr Clegg correctly pointed out, armies of lawyers and accountants dedicated to making this a reality.

Leona: sentenced to 16 years for tax evasion, served 18 months

But those at the top are different in other ways, too: notably in what they contribute in time as well as money. And time, I can say with confidence, is ultimately far more precious.

For example, the other day Tesco led the private sector in raising its normal pension age to 67. Yet its last boss Sir Terry Leahy conveniently retired, shortly before the business began to be described as “troubled”, at the ripe old age of 55.

Leahy: before the wheels fell off

The excuse, I keep being told, is that the job of Chief Executive, Prime Minister or even Headmaster is so impossibly demanding nowadays that no one can stick at it for more than a decade. This would at least make my age of 57 the ideal time to apply for a senior position if the same rules applied at the top as everywhere else.

But, strangely enough, they don’t. Although we are all living longer, and retirement dates for most of us keep receding, those in the most senior roles just go on getting younger. Aspiration is confined to a 20-year window between leaving university full of promise (for which read inexperienced and unemployable) to being considered pathetically over the hill.

We see the results all around us. Most of the present Cabinet, with the right honourable exception of Kenneth Clarke, look like children to me.

Clarke: I may not care much for his politics, but I applaud his dress sense

Yet Palmerston was appointed Prime Minister for the first time at 71, Gladstone for the last time at 82. Churchill was 65 when he succeeded Chamberlain in 1940, and 80 when he finally left Downing Street in 1955. We may debate the merits of all these men, and question whether they were on top form towards the end of their careers, but surely few would deny that the political class of 2012 look like pygmies beside them.

What a British Prime Minister should look like

Similarly, the list of possible successors to Rowan Williams has several men marked down by the bookies as “too old” because they are over 60.

There was a time when one could at least rely on bishops and judges bringing the wisdom of age to their vocations, with the added bonus of some easy laughs when they found themselves baffled by the more outlandish aspects of modern life.

Today it seems that only the British monarchy and the Papacy have room for someone seriously old to play the lead – even though it is so obviously good for the individual filling the role.

In the days when cardinals really were walled up in the Sistine Chapel until they elected a new Pope, there was a strong temptation to vote for the oldest and feeblest of their number to give themselves a break. Time and again this granted a spectacular new lease of life to some poor old chap who had been at death’s door until the Pope’s triple crown landed on his head.

Pope Leo XIII: crowned at 68, died at 93

I am under no Blair-like illusions that my best years are ahead of me, but I do feel that it is time for those of us born in the mid-1950s to launch a crusade to make 57 something fuller of promise than simply a number on the side of Heinz tins.

In short, I am still eager to get to the top of something: indeed anything. All suggestions will be most gratefully received. I promise to apply myself conscientiously for at least the next ten years, and not to spend a penny of my very reasonable salary on employing sharp tax accountants.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The PM who would rather have been Pope

Those who have found the comfort of religious faith often speak of the moment of revelation when it all suddenly made sense – and I finally understand what they are talking about.

My lightning bolt of comprehension struck at about 6.20 on Sunday evening, as I was driving out of Alnwick tip – sorry, household waste recycling centre – and Radio 4 aired a programme about Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation. The most electorally successful Prime Minister of my lifetime, whose chief adviser insisted that “we don’t do God”, suddenly announced “I'm really and always have been in a way more interested in religion than politics.” A statement so astonishing that I have just checked it on the BBC website to ensure that I was not hallucinating.

True, there were hints of this before, notably in the 2006 interview with Michael Parkinson in which Mr Blair announced his belief that God would judge him for his actions in Iraq. Which will be a moment to savour, if he turns out to be correct.

But now I finally got it. Not just the wrongness of that war, but the destruction of the Union between England and Scotland, the vandalism of the House of Lords, the hundreds of hours wasted on the unenforceable foxhunting ban, the widening gap between rich and poor and the overarching failure to use his massive Parliamentary majority to do anything much for the mugs who kept voting him in.

None of this was based on stupidity or malice, as I had always assumed, but simply on the fact that the Prime Minister’s mind was on higher things. The poor soul cannot even have derived much consolation from such duties as the selection of bishops, since his adherence to the Church of England turns out to have been a mere political convenience, swiftly ditched when he left office and felt free to turn to Rome.

It is, of course, a truly splendid joke that one of the world’s most secular societies should have been led for a decade by a closet religious “nutter” (as he feared being described), but it is also profoundly wrong. Not in the fact, but in the concealment of it. Those who stand for office should be open about their beliefs and aims. Church of England clergy are currently barred from standing for Parliament, along with felons and lunatics (though quite a few of those seem to have slipped through the net). This ban should be lifted forthwith and those who fancy a vicar as their MP should be free to vote for it.

Indeed, we should be allowed to choose absolutely anyone we like so long as they have a respectable amount of experience of life and work. Surely the most grotesque thing about the controversy over the selection of the new Labour candidate for Erith and Thamesmead is not the fact that the apparent front-runner, Georgia Gould, is the daughter of Labour’s focus group guru Lord Gould; it is that she is a mere 22 years old. We have apparently reverted to the days before Lord Grey’s Great Reform Act, when rotten boroughs were routinely handed to unemployable young aristocrats.

I sincerely hope that Mr Blair’s confession will count against him as he lobbies for his next big job as President of Europe (a post whose creation is speeding down the track despite the technical inconvenience of the Irish refusing to ratify the necessary treaty). Sadly his wife and four children will count against him in any application for the perhaps more appropriate position of Pope.

Meanwhile I wait eagerly for news of what Gordon Brown was really more interested in during his long years in charge of the British economy. The bad news is that we will presumably have to wait until he leaves office to find out. And the good news: not long now.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.