A quick history quiz for the weekend: only five recent Prime Ministers have not subsequently taken a seat in the House of Lords. Who are the five?
Three you should find quite easy, a fourth not too hard if you are an older reader, but the fifth may surprise – or make you think “oh, of course!”…
(Answer after the jump)
Winston Churchill, Edward Heath, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Hat-tip: Dishonourabe Insults by Greg Knight
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Why community politics matters (Mark Corner)
A Federal Britain: 1. Renewing democracy through fair representation (Iain Donaldson)
A roadmap to Queer Equality (Tara Foster)
A strange but welcome feeling (Jennie Rigg)
Fifteen years ago today…… (Caron Lindsay)
The Disneyfication of Haley Mills
Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial
Survation now put Andy Burnham 10 points ahead in Makerfield
A perpetual pirouette of prevarication?
Michael Meadowcroft: A Liberal of Intellectual Rigour and Uncommon Integrity
Debt-ridden graduates claim they are seen as cash cows
Ruth Bright 
BigTallTim 
Daniel Walker 
Richard Good 
Matt (Bristol) 
15 Comments
Six. David Cameron.
I got them all. Quite worryingly quickly too!
I don’t know them very well, but apparently Lloyd George new my father…
… or was it the other way round?
Could you make the jump bigger (I could see the answers just at the bottom of my screen when the page loaded so accidentally read them out of the corner of my eye).
I only got four. I’d completely forgotten about Gordon Brown.
I got all five as well (although as Richard says Cameron counts unless you re-phrase it to former Prime Minsters). Churchill and Heath stayed on as MPs for many years. In fact Churchill was offered a hereditary peerage as often happened to former PMs but turned it down as he didn’t want to harm Randoph’s political career (this was before Tony Benn changed the law).
Should have remembered that life peerages were only invented in 1958 so a hereditary peerage was the only option beforehand.
Scott: Good point. Will try to remember that for any similar future posts.
Interesting definition of recent. Former PMs were entitled to an Earldom. Douglas-Home had been an Earl (Earl Home) and renounced it to become PM so returned to the Lords as a plain Baron life peer (Lord Home of the Hirsel). Wilson started the craze for being just a life peer, Heath refused to have anything at all, Thatcher couldn’t have been an Earl anyway. I suppose she could have been a Countess but the peerage would have had to specifically apply to women unlike most hereditary peerages. (There are a few Scottish peerages that go through the female line – a Countess and a hereditary Lady sit in the Lords at present).
Tony Greaves
I wonder what titles these ex-PMs might have chosen? Here are some suggestions –
Lord Churchill of Bloody Mindedness
Lord Heath of Great Sulking
Lord Major of Conesfolly
Lord Blair of Sanctimonious-on-Greed
Lord Brown of Vesuvius
Winston Churchill may have thought son Randolph had a future political career in 1945, but hardly when Winston finally retired as PM in 1955. Randolph never actually won a contested parliamentary election. I remember seeing him interviewed on television when he seemed to have “dined too well”.
I got all five too, BEFORE I saw them at the bottom of the screen. I remember them all in office as PM!
I forgot about Gordon Brown and was thinking of Bonar Law!
Until Profumo sadly died, a great one was: Who is the last person alive to have voted in the House of Commons’ Norway Debate of 1940?
How about Home? He already had a seat in the Lords.
I got four, but forgot Heath and my fifth was Home.
If you were thinking about Bonar Law, you should have been considering Neville Chamberlain and Ramsay Macdonald too.
I believe all three of those were either MPs at the time of their deaths or had only stood down in the preceding dew weeks.
Surely Lloyd George, although enobled, never took his sea in the Lords.