I docked some hogget-sized lambs today. On the same day that Rishi Sunak became British prime minister.
Because of the wet, I hadn’t been able to start docking the early lambs until the beginning of September. When Boris Johnson was British PM.
The rest were docked during Liz Truss’s brief 50 days as PM.
Three prime ministers in two months.
Truss has beaten George Canning’s record for the shortest tenure as PM by sixty-nine days. Canning was PM back in 1827 and died in office of tuberculosis after just 119 days. I see there have been eight British PMs who lasted less than a year in office.
But are we in any position to mock and be amused by British politics?
Let us have a dive into New Zealand political history.
I guessed that Mike Moore might hold NZ’s record as our shortest-tenured PM with his 59 days when he took over from Geoff Palmer (who held the PM job for just 13 months) and led Labour to a heavy defeat in the polls to National’s Jim Bolger.
Bolger was eventually rolled by Jenny Shipley, who lasted two years in the role before losing her election to Helen Clark.
Bill English is the other short-term PM in recent times, holding the office for just 10 months. Bill is a decent fellow and would have made a good PM if he’d had longer in the job.
Going a little further back in time, Keith Holyoake’s first crack at PM in 1957 only lasted 83 days before his defeat by Walter Nash. He made up for it three years later when he repaid Nash by beating him at the election, and that second tenure lasted 11 years.
And John Marshall’s time as PM was only 10 months before he lost an election to Norman Kirk.
However, history shows that even Moore’s brief dalliance with the job was stellar compared to some of his predecessors’.
A chap called Francis Dillon Bell was this country’s PM for just 16 days in 1925. He was our first NZ-born PM, but only held the office as a caretaker after the death of William Massey.
Our first PM was Henry Sewell. However, his time in the job was short, lasting just 13 days.
He was rolled by William Fox, but the black marble got him too and his time in the office also spanned only 13 days.
So, the combined time in office of our first two PMs, or premiers as they were called then, was only half as long as Truss’s.
Robert Stout was PM for a solid 12 days in 1884. He’d got the job after knifing PM Harry Atkinson, who rolled him after the 12 days, but Stout wasn’t having any of that and got rid of Atkinson again and enjoyed three years as PM on his second go.
Let us return to Harry Atkinson, for it is he who holds NZ’s record as the PM with the shortest tenure. After Stout’s 12 days, Atkinson basked in a mere six days as this country’s PM before Stout got his revenge.
But don’t feel too sorry for Mr Atkinson. As well as his six days as PM, he served in the role three other times. Once for 13 months, another time for 11 months and on his fourth go he’d got the hang of it and hung around for a bit over three years before being defeated by the first organised party of Ballance’s Liberals in 1891.
By my reckoning, there have been 18 PMs that lasted less than 12 months in our history.
Mind you, 11 of those were during the first 35 years of self-government when there were no formal political parties, which have a stabilising influence.
So, we can’t be at all smug watching the goings-on in the UK.
The UK is a cornerstone of Western democracy and like the United States has shown recent vulnerability, which is a lesson for us to not take our own democracy for granted.
