London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
You would have to be colour blind not to notice the remarkable rise of politicians of South Asian heritage to the very top of British politics. Yes, there’s Rishi Sunak – the UK’s first desi PM. But it’s not just him. Not at all!
There’s the First Minister of Scotland (Humza Yousaf), the Mayor of London (Sadiq Khan), the British Home Secretary (Suella Braverman), and the leader of the Scottish Labour Party (Anas Sarwar). The trend even extends to the only country with which the UK shares a land border – Leo Varadkar is the Taoiseach or Prime Minister of the Irish Republic.
For communities which, a generation ago, were politically almost invisible at the national level, it’s a startling change. And all the more so because these leaders have got to the top while still young.
Sunak became Britain’s youngest prime minister for well over 200 years when he took office last October at the age of 42; Yousaf rose to the top in Scotland earlier this year aged 38, the youngest First Minister since Scotland’s devolved government was established in 1999. Khan was first elected Mayor of London at 45; Braverman was appointed to lead the Home Office, regarded by many as London’s toughest political post, at 42; Varadkar reached the summit of Irish politics at 38; Sarwar became party leader in Scotland at 37.
With the exception of Anas Sarwar – whose father was a British MP who went on to serve as the Governor of Punjab province in Pakistan – none of these are from political dynasties. They made it on their own through ambition, talent and – as always – a fair measure of good fortune.
It’s part of a bigger trend in British politics. The time when veteran politicians, wise old heads, had a monopoly on the top jobs is long over. Winston Churchill was 80 when he finally packed it in as PM back in 1955. Since then, Britain has never had a prime minister in their 70s. And you have to stretch back almost half a century to the last time a British PM was 60 or above when he or she first took office. Tony Blair and David Cameron were both in their early 40s when they first entered 10 Downing Street and Boris Johnson was distinctly on the old side when he took over as PM at 55.
The same generational shift is evident in many leading Western democracies. Emanuel Macron was 39 when he first was elected as France’s President; Mette Frederiksen was 41 when she became the Danish PM – the same age at which Volodymyr Zelensky became Ukraine’s President; Justin Trudeau became Canada’s leader at 43; Giorgia Meloni recently came to the helm in Italy at 45, and Pedro Sanchez was a year older when he became Spain’s head of government.
There are of course exceptions. Olaf Scholz took power as Germany’s Chancellor at the seasoned age of 63; and Keir Starmer, the leader of the British Labour Party, is odds on favourite to win the next UK election, by which time he will be a whiskery 61 or 62.
Younger politicians don’t necessarily bring better governance, but they do suggest that political deference towards time-serving veterans – leaders who are sometimes low on energy and not exactly up-to-speed on the public mood – is fading away. Increasingly, the political centre of gravity is settling nearer to a nation’s median age.
It’s also a sharp break from political business-as-usual. Older politicians are seen as mired in the failed policies which produced the 2008 financial crisis, the baleful effects of which still haunt us, and complacent in the face of the climate crisis and increasing social inequality. Some of the most high-profile of the new generation of leaders – Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Sanna Marin in Finland, for example – have moved on, but the appetite for new ideas and new faces endures.
This emphasis on youth has not spread much beyond the West. For most of the past 30 years, India’s prime ministers have been in their 70s – and you have to go back to V.P. Singh to come across a politician who made it to the top job before he was 60. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa is 70; Lula, Brazil’s left-wing President, is 77; in Cameroon, Paul Biya is 90.
And then there’s the world’s most powerful democracy – which, in another perverse example of American exceptionalism, is peddling fast in the opposite direction to most other Western nations. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both entered the White House when still in their 40s. But the two most recent Presidents are the oldest-ever incumbents.
Joe Biden is about as old as Sunak and Yousaf combined. If he wins a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. And if that relative stripling Donald Trump should wrest control of the White House again, he’ll be a modest 82 at the end of his term. What a choice!
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
