The King of Sunlight by Adam Macqueen

Author:Adam Macqueen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2011-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

14

ACCIDENTALLY ELECTED

If you want to know how different the politics of the 1880s were from those of today, consider this one thing: the Daily Telegraph didn’t support the Conservatives. The most true blue of broadsheets was founded in 1855 as a radical voice pushing for reform of the House of Lords and against capital punishment; it nailed its colours firmly to the mast of the Liberal party under the leadership of Gladstone, ‘the people’s William’.

It was Gladstone who had dominated the youthful Liberal party, formed from the ashes of the patrician Whigs half-way through the century. He had fostered its reforming zeal and focused it in a series of emancipating measures: education for all; the extension of voting rights; newspapers that everyone could afford. ‘All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes,’ he declared in 1886, and he was not afraid to face his hidebound opponents head on. ‘You cannot fight against the future,’ he told the Tories as he extinguished the last of the rotten boroughs that had ensured the domination of the landed gentry over British democracy for centuries. ‘Time is on our side.’

Gladstone, however, made one serious mistake: not his conversion to home rule for Ireland, then still a full part of the United Kingdom, but the way in which he allowed news of it to dribble out. The 1880s saw a mainland terror campaign by the Fenians that was in every way as effective as that of the IRA a century later: bombs exploded in Manchester, Glasgow and London, and threats were issued against the capital’s spanking new underground train system. Senior staff from the Viceroy’s office in Dublin were murdered. Gladstone publicly insisted on a policy of ‘firm government’ in Ireland, giving the administration summary powers to crack down on the violence. But he continued to negotiate behind the scenes. The agreement he bashed out with Charles Parnell, the leader of the Irish Land League, involved the release of political prisoners, with the public outrage that always provokes. And it was against a background of worsening violence that in December 1885 Gladstone’s son Herbert announced to the newspapers that his father had become convinced that Ireland should rule itself.

It was a political disaster for the Liberals. The party split down the middle, the pro-Unionist faction peeling off under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, whose son Neville failed so spectacularly to deal with Hitler half a century later. They would eventually be absorbed into the Conservative party, but their independent stance at the 1886 election ensured that their former party lost more than 100 seats, and returned the Tories to power with a hefty majority. The Telegraph jumped over the fence, and the Liberals were left in disarray. Their seventy-seven-year old leader looked increasingly out of touch. If they wanted to see power again, party officials knew they needed to bring in new blood.

They found it in William Lever, a lifelong supporter of the party. ‘His liberalism was always more than a

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