Leo Varadkar could learn something from Jimmy Carter about how to retire

Very soon – probably around November 15th – hordes of stir-crazy politicians will be barrelling out of Leinster House like store cattle liberated from the shed after a long winter, frenzied with the scent of fresh grass and the lure of a foreign holiday in a month that’s not August. They will be the ones who are choosing to step down. Whether some are already suffering sellers’ remorse having thrown in their hand before Fine Gael’s startling recovery is for their families and therapists to know.
The die is cast now. But politics is an addiction; believe them when they say it. It’s hard to let go of an identity and a platform. That much is obvious watching former leaders who lack the grace to quit the stage or at least dial down the wise-after-the-event pronouncements for the sake of those left to carry on – Donald Trump and Boris Johnson being the obvious examples, with Leo Varadkar galloping up the wing.
The afterlives of political leaders are often greater measures of their character than their times in office are. A former US president who turned 100 on Tuesday is probably the greatest exemplar of a leader whose best life was lived in the aftermath of political power.
When Jimmy Carter lost re-election by a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980 he woke to “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life”, he later wrote, and descended into depression, which is hardly unusual.
But what was thoroughly unusual about Carter was his total lack of interest in getting rich. He was 56 when he returned to Plains, Georgia, the only modern president to return full-time to the home he had lived in before politics – a two-bedroom farmhouse assessed at $167,000, less than the armoured secret service vehicles parked outside. His peanut business, held in a blind trust during his presidency, was a million dollars in debt. Still he wouldn’t be using his subsequent public life to enrich himself, or to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because he didn’t want to capitalise financially on being in the White House, he said.
The average Joe might sniff that his $210,000 presidential pension should be enough for anyone but those statements were in sharp contrast to his immediate predecessor Gerald Ford and successors who went on to make tens of millions on the private-sector opportunities that fall into ex-presidents’ laps. Forced to sell the peanut business, Carter started writing, ending up with 33 not-so-profitable books on everything from his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, ageing and fishing to a children’s book written with his daughter.
His one-term, post-Watergate/Vietnam presidency had been doomed by wars, oil and gas crises, double-digit inflation, the Cold War, a hostage crisis (when Iranian students seized the US embassy and kept 54 American diplomats hostage for 444 days) and a disastrous rescue attempt that convulsed the last year of his presidency.
But he also brokered the improbable Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, normalised relations with China, delivered the SALT II strategic arms control agreement, and dared to argue half a century ago that West Bank settlements had become a roadblock to a two-state solution, warning that Israel was on the road to apartheid.
Half a century ago he was also warning about climate change, calling energy conservation an act of patriotism, wearing sweaters in the White house to offset the lowering of thermostats.
He used executive powers to ram through protection for a vast swath of the Alaskan wilderness, directed federal funds toward the development of renewable energy and installed solar panels on the White House. And he – a white southern child of the Jim Crow era, when black sharecroppers were little more than slaves – appointed more women and lawyers of colour to the federal bench than all earlier presidents combined.
But what will burnish his legacy is the fiercely practical trajectory of his life once politics had finished with him.
He hauled himself out of post-election depression by becoming a global health advocate, democracy and human rights defender, establishing a transformative new model for former presidents in the Carter Centre dedicated to resolving conflict, public health initiatives and election monitoring around the world. He had a bracing, thoroughly bipartisan approach to critiquing his successors but was nonetheless sent to monitor the 1989 election in Panama – where he was widely respected for previous treaties – by the Republican George HW Bush administration. Standing on a platform in the middle of the count centre, the ex-president called out rampant electoral fraud by the Noriega regime, demanding of fraudulent vote counters: “Are you honest or are you thieves?”
It is telling that the Carter Centre’s Democracy Programme, which has recently worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and Sierra Leone, is bringing its international election observation expertise to bear on the US itself, where it is supporting non-partisan election observation missions in up to five states.
Meanwhile Carter himself has helped to renovate thousands of homes in a dozen countries for Habitat for Humanity. He was bringing his own hammer and tool belt along well into his 90s, still rising with the dawn and conducting 7am meetings about his programme to wipe out Guinea worm disease.
For about-to-be-former politicians, it’s worth noting that it was in his post-Washington life that he became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won three Grammy Awards and – more than 20 years after his presidency – was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At 100, Jimmy Carter, the decent, intelligent, modest, fearless and ferociously stubborn one-termer, has a lesson for every politician who thinks they’ve lost. His favourite song is Garth Brooks’s Unanswered Prayers.