Project Petrolhead

On the odd occasion where I find myself watching a Prime Minister being whisked away from 10 Downing Street, my mind is usually only focussed on one thing. Well, two things. Firstly, on how much I dislike Robert Peston, but secondly, the choice of wheels used to ferry Britain’s politicians around, because the history is more diverse than you might realise. You see, in a nation that calls itself home to the likes of Bentley and Rolls-Royce, it would be quite easy to plonk our PM in a Phantom, and to hell with the proletariat, but they never do. Instead a good ministerial car should be able to do two things; Showcase the British Car industry to the rest of the world, and still be relatable and attainable for the working man.

The earliest reference I can find to a car specifically used by a Prime Minister comes from Winston Churchill’s tenure in 1951. Large, stout, and unshakable in the face of the second world war, the Humber Pullman seemed to reflect the Prime Minister quite accurately. Putting out a heady 100 horsepower from it’s 4.0 litre straight-six, the Rootes Group limousine ferried PMs to and fro until the arrival of Harold Wilson in 1964.

Question: If you’re the Queen in the 1960s, and you don’t feel like being ferried around in the back if a chauffeur-driven Rolls (as our notable petrolhead Queen Elizabeth often didn’t – but that’s another column), then what do you choose to rag around in? The answer is the Rover P5B – of which the Queen owned at least 3 – and if it’s good enough for Her Maj, then it’s good enough for the PM. Harold Wilson’s P5 (a saloon, not the lower-roof coupe) featured a stand to rest his pipe on (not a euphemism) and shag-pile carpeting, all of which was shifted around by the Rover’s stalwart 3.5 litre V8. Cushty.

Now I get to talk about something I really like, and something I don’t much like. Old Jags (wahey!) and Margaret Thatcher (booo!). You see, Prime Ministers were happy to keep on with the ageing P5B until the arrival of Mrs Thatcher to No.10, when it was finally replaced by the then brand-new series III Jaguar XJ. And that kind of set the tone for then next few decades of PM, really. Bland, square-eyed John Major got a bland, square-eyed Jag XJ40 (albeit tarted-up by Daimler), Tony Blair got an X308, Gordon Brown had an X350 and David Cameron had an X351, as did Teresa May and Boris Johnson. Interestingly, the latter three Jags were powered not by diesel engines like the common man, but by large-capacity supercharged V8s. Oh how the other half live.

The problem now, is that Jaguar stopped building the XJ in 2019, and have yet to announce it’s replacement, so what will the PM do? In the case of Mr Johnson, that meant replacing his humble XJ with a large and boisterous Range Rover… But not just any Range Rover. This is a Range Rover Sentinel, and don’t let the Chealsea tractor appearance fool you, it’s a VR8 certified armour-plated monster, and about the closest thing to a fortress that you can drive on the street. With a self-sealing fuel tank that ‘heals’ itself when ruptured, reinforced tyres that can still be driven on if they’re full of holes, multi-laminated armoured glass that can withstand 15kg of TNT, and a supercharged 5.0 litre V8 to shift it’s new 4.4 tonne kerb weight to 60mph in under 10 seconds, the sentinel is just about the pinnacle of ministerial motoring.

I think the PM’s car is much more important than we tend to give it credit for. Not only is it tasked with transporting the leader of our nation, but it’s a rolling advert for the British car industry. When a sleek XJ or muscley P5B parks up outside a gathering of nations, upstaging a sea of Mercs and BMWs in the process, it shows that we as a nation have always been pretty bloody good at building luxury cars, and that’s quite a cool thing to be known for.