Boris Johnson: Work Hard, Party Hard?
With the revelations that staff inside Downing Street held two staff parties with alcohol and music the night before Prince Philip’s funeral last April – and while social contact remained banned – health and wellness store Eden’s Gate wanted to ascertain the hardest working Prime Ministers of all time.
Using Hansard, they looked into how many spoken parliamentary contributions each PM has made, as well as how many weeks they held office, and ranked them to reveal the hardest working Prime Minister of the 20th and 21st century.
Key points:
- Boris Johnson is the hardest working prime minister, making an average of 12.8 contributions in parliament per week.
- James Callaghan and Theresa May come second and third, with an average of 11.3 and 6 contributions per week respectively.
- The Labour party is the hardest working party overall, with average weekly contributions per PM of 4.8 compared to the Conservative party’s 4.
- Tony Blair only made one contribution per week on average, making him the least hard-working Prime Minister of the past decade.
Full data can be found below.
Tyler Woodward, CEO of Health and Wellness store Eden’s Gate, said: “It comes as no surprise to me that Boris Johnson has been named hardest working PM in terms of parliamentary contributions. After all, he has been in office throughout Brexit and a worldwide health crisis!
“I’d suggest he makes sure to make time for himself and ensure he’s sleeping and eating well to avoid burnout.”
| Past Prime Ministers | Spoken parliamentary contributions | Weeks in office | Av. Contributions per week |
| Boris Johnson | 1,405 | 109 | 12.8 |
| James Callaghan | 1,821 | 161 | 11.3 |
| Theresa May | 960 | 158 | 6 |
| Gordon Brown | 853 | 150 | 5.7 |
| Harold Wilson | 2,326 | 405 | 5.7 |
| Sir Edward Heath | 1,067 | 193 | 5.5 |
| Harold Macmillan | 1,293 | 353 | 3.6 |
| Sir Anthony Eden | 328 | 92 | 3.6 |
| David Cameron | 684 | 322 | 2.1 |
| Sir John Major KG CH | 668 | 335 | 2 |
| Baroness Margaret Thatcher | 1,019 | 603 | 1.7 |
| Sir Winston Churchill | 696 | 451 | 1.5 |
| Neville Chamberlain | 179 | 159 | 1.1 |
| Tony Blair | 510 | 530 | 1 |
| Stanley Baldwin | 198 | 377 | 0.5 |
| Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman | 35 | 122 | 0.3 |
| Clement Attlee | 0 | 326 | 0 |
| James Ramsay MacDonald | 1 | 354 | 0 |
| Andrew Bonar Law | 0 | – | 0 |
| David Lloyd George | 0 | – | 0 |
| Herbert Henry Asquith | 0 | – | 0 |
| Arthur James Balfour | 0 | – | 0 |
| Robert Gascoyne-Cecil | 0 | – | 0 |
Methodology: Eden’s Gate used Hansard to find the number of spoken parliamentary contributions each prime minister made whilst in office. They then divided this by how many weeks each prime minister spent in office to get the average number of contributions each PM made per week. They then ranked these in order to find the most and least hard working prime ministers of the 20th and 21st century.