The UK, today, has the highest number of living former prime ministers who are entitled to extensive and expensive security measures. 

So far, the UK has seven living former prime ministers (John Major, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Liz Truss) with Rishi Sunak expected to join them after the next general elections, according to opinion polls. 

The British public's misfortune of having a streak of short-lived terms of inept prime ministers was exacerbated rather than being compensated by the hefty and accumulated costs of security services that taxpayers continue to be billed with.

A report by Politico explains how British taxpayers' money is being ineffectively allocated. 

“It’s an industry, there is no other word for it,” Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection at the Met Police, was quoted as saying by Politico. 

With Truss, Sunak, and Johnson (in addition who will likely join the ex-PM club soon) all under 60, Politico assesses that taxpayers will likely be burdened by multiple VIP security costs for decades to come.

Furthermore, the costs of security services remain undisclosed by the Home Office. 

“It is our long-standing policy not to provide detailed information on protective security. To do so could compromise the integrity of those arrangements and affect individuals’ security,” a Home Office spokesperson said.

Matters of VIP security are managed by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (RAVEC), which includes officials from the Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and Royal household who make recommendations of security risk assessments of Prominent UK politicians and Royalty. 

Typically RAVEC rules in favor of offering security protection to former prime ministers through deploying units of the Royalty and Specialist Protection Command as entourage for the officials even when traveling abroad, Politico reports, citing informed sources. 

“It’s been remarked upon how many ex-prime ministers we now have — we’ve never had this many in quick succession who have required this much security, After all the [government] reshuffles, the Met were struggling to find enough security to protect everyone at once, and were having to think about numbers,” one of the people with knowledge of the Met Police protection teams said.

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The sources added that officers within the RASP unit had complained about the cancellation of annual leaves and rest days and that for Boris Johnson specifically “they were pulling officers from other teams to try and put his together quickly.”

The officers are “expensive people by any standard of civil servants, They are always experienced police officers,” Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection at the Met Police says. 

Given that the former prime ministers are no longer in office, their arrangements and travels become private affairs but still taxpayer sponsored. The private status of their arrangements makes keeping track of security expenses almost impossible. 

According to a 2015 Daily Telegraph investigation, Blair was spending thousands of dollars on protection while expanding his business empire by traveling to up to five different nations each week. 

Similarly, Johnson, May, and Truss have all been making hundreds of thousands of dollars from speaking engagements abroad, the security to whom have been funded by tax-payer money. 

“It’s us paying for it all, while they are having a jamboree really,” Davies said.

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