Out of time: the art of knowing when to step down from the top job

The name Peter Hennessy might not mean much if you live outside the UK, but inside, the 79-year-old peer is a celebrated political historian whose many admirers regard him as a national institution.

He is also funny. I still remember how he lifted my Brexit-battered spirits in June 2016 with his assessment of the shattering EU referendum result that voters had just delivered.

“Europe was set up by clever, Catholic, leftwing, French bureaucrats,” he said. “Most Brits have got problems with at least three of those five.”

Last weekend he did something more striking. He said he was retiring from the House of Lords because the Parkinson’s disease he has had for years had reached the point where “I can’t think terribly well, and the words don’t always come” and “I couldn’t do a proper job”.

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“Being a decorative old husk on the crossbenches may be nice for me, but it’s a waste of public money,” he told BBC Radio 4. “So bye-bye it is.”

This surprised a lot of people, including me. He did not sound incapacitated. He was being interviewed about his latest BBC programme, which clearly required much thinking and speaking. But Parkinson’s is a brute, so there we are.

The question is why so many other older leaders in politics and business stay on when impairment strikes.

To be clear, I am not talking here about simply being older. I have written often about the blight of ageism and the mistaken assumption that workers past their 50s are more feeble than they are. I know 90-year-olds who are sharper than people a third of their age. But sometimes the weight of years is evident.

On the same day Hennessy spoke, Kentucky’s 84-year-old US Republican senator, Mitch McConnell, finally broke weeks of silence about why he had been hospitalised nearly a month earlier. He had been recovering after a fall, lost consciousness and then had pneumonia, he said. This was the same McConnell who suddenly stopped talking mid-sentence and froze during a press conference three years ago. Repeatedly.

He plans to step down in January from the Senate, where the average age is just under 66. But his weekend statement came just a day after the sudden death of senator Lindsey Graham, who had turned 71 two days earlier.

Graham is the second senator to die in office in recent years after the Democrats’ plainly frail Dianne Feinstein passed away at the age of 90 in 2023. By then, “she didn’t know she was a United States senator”, Rahm Emanuel, a potential Democratic presidential contender, told a reporter the other day.

Emanuel has long urged mandatory retirement at 75 in all three branches of government, meaning Congress, the supreme court and the White House.

That would have saved his party from the disaster of Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, after the then 81-year-old president’s faltering debate performance.

It would also have stopped Donald Trump, who has just turned 80, and Vermont’s leftwing Bernie Sanders, who was 83 when re-elected to the Senate in 2024 for another six-year term.

Fans of both men would have been displeased. Still, in a hopelessly divided country, US polls show that one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on – in their droves – is age limits for elected officials.

[ Donald Trump attacked Joe Biden for being too old. Now his critics say the same about himOpens in new window ]

It’s hard to imagine this happening. US senators are among the world’s most powerful and lavishly staffed legislators. A lot of people depend on them staying put for as long as possible.

Dozens of countries won’t let you stand for elected office until you reach a certain age, but mandatory retirement limits are rare.

In the UK’s House of Lords, it is not unknown for party whips to have a quiet word with relatives of peers showing signs of wear and tear. I suspect the same happens elsewhere, but strict age-limit rules are another thing.

In business, Sumner Redstone remains a byword for the magnate who clings on too long. But then there are the likes of Fred Smith. The FedEx founder was still executive chair of the delivery company he founded when he died at the age of 80 last year. He had, though, spent years grooming chief executive Raj Subramaniam to be his successor. Warren Buffett did much the same at Berkshire Hathaway before stepping down at the end of last year at the age of 95.

Elected officials cannot arrange a personal heir, but they can do what is best for their health and for voters, rather than staying on to satisfy their sense of self or the agendas of those around them.