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Gladstone was a political giant compared to our puny, modern MPs | Geoffrey Wheatcroft Born 200 years ago today, Gladstone's vast intellect and personal dynamism inspired awed admiration from political friend and foe alikeOn the day in March 1894 when William Ewart Gladstone resigned as prime minister for the last time, he went to church, wrote half a dozen letters and saw half a dozen people, before he "read I. Hen. VI. And finished my version of the Odes of Horace". He was 84, had sat as an MP for more than 60 years, had been prime minister four times and, while stepping down as leader of the greatest power on earth, thought nothing of reading a Shakespeare play and completing a Latin translation.Whether or not this extraordinary creature, born 200 years ago today, was the greatest of our prime ministers, it's hard to disagree with his biographer, Roy Jenkins: "He was the most remarkable specimen of humanity." In his moral earnestness, his intellectual curiosity, and his sheer demonic energy he towers over all our politicians today.Like Gordon Brown, he hailed from Scotland, though by way of Liverpool. Like David Cameron he went to Eton and Oxford. Others have made personal journeys across the political spectrum, but few more dramatic, as his lifetime saw England emerge from corrupt patrician autocracy to incipient democracy. A man whose family wealth had come from West Indian sugar or, more bluntly, slavery, and had been called "the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories" by Macaulay, ended as "the people's William", adored by labourer and cottager, and a champion of national freedom.After Gladstone had left the Tories when he was converted to free trade, he demolished Disraeli's 1852 budget in a lethal Commons speech. Succeeding as chancellor, Gladstone became one of the greatest of all, a byword for financial rectitude who would have been appalled by the profligate incompetence of Brown's chancellorship – just as he might have seen in Cameron the flashy insincerity he so disliked in Disraeli.His personal dynamism was very Victorian, and slightly demonic. Gladstone burnt off his physical energy in long walks, hill-climbing and tree-felling ("The forest laments, in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire," Lord Randolph Churchill sarcastically said); his intellectual energy by reading more than 20,000 books in six languages, and writing copiously on every subject from papal infallibility to a 15,000-word essay on Tennyson.And he found time to lead four Liberal governments. The first, in 1868-74, was one of the great reforming administrations, to rank with the Liberal government before 1914 and the Labour government after 1945, and making the present one seem feeble by comparison. Gladstone has been acclaimed lately in Tory newspapers, which seems a little thick when you remember the venomous hatred he once inspired among Tories.From the 1870s he was reviled in a way that would take Tony Blair aback. I have a book of cartoons called Gladstone & Co, all of a startling savagery, the tone set by an epigraph from Hamlet: "How absolute the knave is." At the time it was published, Gladstone's private secretary, Edward Hamilton, dined among the Tory elite with the Cavendish Bentincks, where "I was the solitary Liberal. I am sure that if I had been a Tory all my life the bitterness and narrow-mindedness of my friends would have converted me to radicalism."Even those who weren't driven by angry partisanship could find Gladstone sanctimonious and overbearing: in Henry Labouchere's phrase, he not only had the ace of trumps up his sleeve but was sure God had put it there. Queen Victoria complained that her prime minister talked to her as if addressing a public meeting, and he recognised his own tendency "to turn every conversation into a debate". Or as his wife Catherine told him: "Oh, William dear, if you weren't such a great man you would be a terrible bore."Nor have all his legacies been happy. In 1876 liberal opinion was convulsed by atrocities in the Balkans, and Gladstone sprang back to political life with a scaldingly eloquent pamphlet: "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses … one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned." This was by way of promoting the doctrine we now call liberal interventionism, whose recent consequences have been so unhappy. And yet in 1882, prime minister once more, Gladstone disgracefully attacked Egypt, inaugurating the age of high imperialism.Even then, everything recedes alongside his achievements, and his towering personality. It's easy to play laudator temporis acti – or in English, grumpy old man – lamenting past glories. But can anyone read about political life then without feeling that it was an age of giants compared to the puny figures of today? How many MPs now have read, let alone written, a fraction of what Gladstone did?And there was a very generous side to this driven man. The great drama of 1890-91 was the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish leader, when he was exposed as the lover of another man's wife. Although Gladstone, as we know from his Diaries, was a little kinky about sex, he could be self-righteous and sometimes priggish. "But he was not," as Jenkins says, "a hypocrite." His verdict on the Parnell case – "What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it. It would make life intolerable" – might usefully be remembered when the next political sex scandal breaks.In 1886 Gladstone's first home rule bill had failed, splitting the old Liberal party, with Liberal Unionists defecting to join the Tories. When Gladstone returned to Downing Street for the last time in 1892, he was determined to bring justice to Ireland. His second home rule bill did pass in the Commons (something Irish nationalists tend to forget) before the Lords threw it out.Outside the Commons chamber one evening during the passage of that second bill, and after another great performance by Gladstone, the sulphurous Tory Lord Randolph stopped a Liberal Unionist. "And that is the man you deserted," Churchill said. "How could you do it?" When did we last have a leader who could inspire that kind of awed admiration, from foe or friend?Gordon BrownDavid CameronEgyptConstitutional reformElectoral reformWilliam ShakespeareTony BlairGeoffrey Wheatcroftguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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