So Prue Leith is standing down from The Great British Bake Off. She has done nine years and feels it to be “the right time to step back” and “spend summers enjoying my garden”. Her fans and her friends will be sorry to see her go and will wish her well. The only thing they might question is her throwaway justification, “I’m 86, for goodness sake.”
What has that to do with it? Ever since the Equality Act of 2010, various discriminations in employment have been illegal. They included those based on ethnicity, gender, faith and age.
After the 2010 act, the state pension age was planned to rise to 67, meaning that more older people are staying in the workforce. Those aged over 65 and recorded as “economically active” surged from around 900,000 to 1.5 million in a decade. Still just 12% of over-65s were at work in 2023, but the idea of Britons becoming useless at 60 was increasingly unreal. With a declining birth rate and a shortage of experienced labour during the same period – notably in welfare and hospitality services – an idle resource simply had to come to the aid of the economy.
So hurrah for 86-year-old Prue Leith and her predecessor, Mary Berry, who stood down from the same cookery programme before her at 81. A credit to their generation, they both looked fit and showed no signs of deterioration, but of course they may have wished to go.
Old people are far healthier than they used to be, but they should have their eyes – and ears – regularly tested for driving. Those working in professions such as medicine and the law should be forced to keep up to date. Incompetent public officials should be “retirable” at any age. There are also legitimate and possibly necessary reasons for retiring staff, but they should be stated. Declaring a person unfit to earn their living is a serious matter and should be justified – even if it has led to a rash of unfair dismissal cases.
There are often unquantifiable virtues that come with age. Maturity, judgment and experience are invaluable assets in most forms of work. Every politician I know tends to reflect how much better they might have done in high office if only they had come to it later. They were simply wiser.
Which bring us to the soon-to-be-80-year-old Donald Trump. The US has a great respect for old age. That supreme court justices are appointed for life is said to help guard the constitution. Senators can be as old as they like. But the veneration of age is also their vulnerability, because if age is not an issue then what is the benchmark for bringing a career to a close??
In Trump’s first term in 2017 a team of psychiatrists, backed by a petition from 50,000 mental health professionals, declared him mentally unfit for the job. They called for his sacking under the 25th amendment, which allows the removal of the president if he “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. Trump survived and appeared to prove them wrong by securing re-election in 2024. But who or what determines fitness for office? The answer is set out in exhaustive detail in the constitution. Removal under the amendment requires the collaboration of the vice-president and two-thirds of both houses of Congress. That is a mountain to climb.
Either way this issue seems likely to vex American politics – and possibly global politics – with increasing severity over the next three years. It could well result in an unprecedented Washington power struggle. The one thing to be hoped for is that its outcome should turn on the president’s health, not his age.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and the author of A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump
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