Scandalous Leadership by M J Trow;

Author:M J Trow;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Corruption & Misconduct
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2023-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

William Ewart Gladstone 1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94

William Gladstone is the ‘come-back kid’ with four terms in office. He was a professional Scotsman (rather like Bute and just as unpopular with some people for that reason) which is odd because he was born in Liverpool and attended an English public school, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Yet we have the man’s voice recorded on one of the marvels of his age, wax cylinder, and he has a decided Scots brogue.

He was born in December 1809 to a Lancashire merchant family which makes him just as middle class as Disraeli. Because much of the family wealth came from slave plantations and sugar in the West Indies, some people have tried to airbrush him from the pages of history. When compensation was paid to slave owners for the loss of their property, the Gladstones became richer still.

At Oxford, he became president of the union, often seen as a first step to greatness and, like his hero Peel, got a double first in Classics and Maths. At 23, he was MP for Newark for the Tory party. He took on a succession of junior ministerial posts and married Catherine Glynne, who was a feisty woman in her own right and took a cold bath every day for reasons that made sense to her. They had eight children.

With Peel in office in 1841, this ‘hope of the stern unbending Tories’ became president of the Board of Trade. The ‘Parliamentary Train Act’ of 1844 was Gladstone’s idea, providing cheap travel for the masses in third-class railway carriages. When Peel fell in 1846, Gladstone did too but he was soon back as MP for Oxford University. As a Peelite under Aberdeen, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the best in history. He trashed Disraeli’s attempts to do the same job and planned to abolish income tax, which had been brought in as a temporary emergency measure by Pitt and as a permanent one by Peel, because he believed it to be morally wrong. ‘Get your figures up [together] thoroughly,’ was his advice to anybody who asked, ‘and then give them up as if the whole world was interested in them.’ In the House, he was a whirlwind, his electrifying speeches delivered by a young man in a hurry, flailing his arms like a windmill – he was still doing that at 82. His budget speeches were usually three hours long, but nobody missed a word.

Out of office again in 1855, he wrote a three-volume translation of Homer’s Iliad, claiming a non-existent link with Christianity which infected most of his policy. It looked as though his career was over but, as Aberdeen said, ‘he is terrible on the rebound.’

As he aged, Gladstone mellowed. In the 1830s, the only reform he backed was the removal of child labour in the mines; by 1859 he was willing to join the Whigs under Palmerston to espouse a whole range of changes (which actually appalled Palmerston himself). He was Palmerston’s

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