15 Comments

• Richard Gadsden 20th Nov '11 - 4:48pm

  Six. David Cameron.

• benjamin 20th Nov '11 - 4:54pm

  I got them all. Quite worryingly quickly too!

• Tom Papworth 20th Nov '11 - 4:56pm

  I don’t know them very well, but apparently Lloyd George new my father…

  … or was it the other way round?

• Scott 20th Nov '11 - 5:00pm

  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).

• Nigel Ashton 20th Nov '11 - 6:11pm

  I only got four. I’d completely forgotten about Gordon Brown.

• Dave Besag 20th Nov '11 - 6:18pm

  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).

• Dave Besag 20th Nov '11 - 6:27pm

  Should have remembered that life peerages were only invented in 1958 so a hereditary peerage was the only option beforehand.

• Mark Pack 20th Nov '11 - 7:18pm

  Scott: Good point. Will try to remember that for any similar future posts.

• Tony Greaves 20th Nov '11 - 8:10pm

  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

• Old Codger Chris 20th Nov '11 - 8:30pm

  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

• Ian Sanderson (RM3) 21st Nov '11 - 8:42am

  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!

• Lib Dem Member 21st Nov '11 - 10:07am

  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?

• Eileen Birch 21st Nov '11 - 10:32am

  How about Home? He already had a seat in the Lords.

  I got four, but forgot Heath and my fifth was Home.

• Ian Sanderson (RM3) 21st Nov '11 - 11:03am

  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.

• Roger Roberts 21st Nov '11 - 3:36pm

  Surely Lloyd George, although enobled, never took his sea in the Lords.