Biden, Attal, Pitt the Younger – what is the right age for a politician?

WHEN, in the closing weeks of 1783, William Pitt the Younger became Great Britain’s youngest-ever prime minister at the tender age of 24 – a record he retains in today’s United Kingdom – his government had a poor prognosis. It was dubbed “the mince-pie administration” on the assumption that it would not last much beyond the Christmas period, while satirists mocked the “infant Atlas”. Was the nation safe with “a kingdom trusted to a schoolboy’s care”?

But Gabriel Attal, the fresh-faced 34-year-old appointed last week as French prime minister, should be encouraged by Pitt’s example. Before his untimely death, the Georgian premier went on to a successful near-20-year, two-term career in the top job and still makes the lists of great political leaders.

Attal has not yet reached the dizzy heights of command: as No 2 to the French president, his mentor, he has been described as “baby Macron”. Speculation is rife on whether the choice of a loyalist, subordinate in age (Elisabeth Borne, 62, female, and therefore never a Macron mini-me, resigned after less than two years), will end like Caesar’s sponsorship of Brutus: is it a chance for the protege to overtake or even betray the older man?