CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

A concise, sharp-witted and illuminating account of the lives of Britain’s prime ministers from Walpole to May, illustrated by Martin Rowson.

For the reader who has heard of such giants as Gladstone and Disraeli, and has drunk in a pub called the Palmerston, but has only the haziest idea of who these people were, Gimson’s Prime Ministers offers a short account of them all which can be read for pleasure, and not just for edification. With Gimson’s wonderful prose once again complemented by Martin Rowson’s inimitable illustrations, this lively and entertaining aide-memoire and work of satirical genius brings our parliamentary history to life as never before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Gimson is the author of Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, published by Simon & Schuster in 2006 and described as ‘brilliant’, ‘scintillating’ and ‘an effervescent delight’. He writes for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and is a contributing editor to ConservativeHome.com. He lives in London.

Also by Andrew Gimson

The Desired Effect

Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson

Gimson’s Kings & Queens: Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066

INTRODUCTION

To become prime minister, and play the role with some slight degree of success, you will need the following qualities:

1. Courage.
2. Luck.
3. Hunger for power.
4. Eloquence, including the ability to think on your feet in the Commons.
5. The ability to distribute patronage in such a way as to gratify to a sufficient degree the appetites of your followers. Contenders for the prime ministership who have thought themselves too grand to do this have failed.
6. A different style to your predecessor, of whom people have grown sick. Soon they will be sick of you.
7. An acute feel for public opinion, and, in the earlier part of this book, an equally acute sense of how to manage the monarch. The longer you are in Downing Street, the harder it becomes to see things as others see them, or even to remember this is necessary.
8. The capacity to rise to a crisis, and give the nation its idea of itself.
9. An understanding of the money, which is the most important thing controlled by the Commons.
10. Respectability, or at least the absence of embarrassing eccentricities.
11. The energy and stamina to do (and to want to do) very heavy work. Overwork has shortened the lives of many of the people in this book.
12. The willingness and skill to perform that most humiliating manoeuvre, the U-turn. A free people cannot be ordered about: you are there to persuade MPs, and the wider nation, to follow your lead, which cannot be in a direction they do not want to take. You are not a tyrant, and must sometimes have the common prudence to change course. So although you need to know when to stick to your guns, you must also convey a tactful awareness of your own vulnerability.

The prime minister requires, in fact, a bizarre combination of qualities. He or she must be at once ordinary and extraordinary, conventional and innovative, safe and audacious, banal and brilliant, a follower and a leader, sensitive to every change in the political weather but tough enough to endure terrible disasters, on the side of the people but able to build a Cabinet from members of the elite.

For a short time, a certain individual may manage to do this better than anyone else. But it is not something anyone is likely to be able to do for very long. The average length of time each of the prime ministers in this book has spent in office, not always in a single stint, is five and a half years. At the top end of the scale is Sir Robert Walpole, who was in power for twenty years and 309 days. At the bottom we find George Canning, a brilliant and amusing figure, but prime minister for only 119 days.

The secret of the prime ministers is that they are weak. We give them an impossible job and blame them when they fail to perform it. The prime minister serves as a kind of glorified scapegoat. It is notable how many of them are remembered, if at all, for a single failure: Lord North for losing the American colonies, Neville Chamberlain for the fruitless appeasement of Hitler, Sir Anthony Eden for the Suez debacle, Tony Blair for the Iraq War, David Cameron for losing the EU referendum. Throughout the twentieth century, British prime ministers strove to cope with the decline and fall of the British Empire, something even Winston Churchill could not avert.

In the eighteenth century, the prime minister’s function was to take the blame on behalf of the monarch. Nowadays, he or she is there to take the blame on behalf of the people, and often on behalf of colleagues too. The Conservatives treated one of their most remarkable leaders, Sir Robert Peel, as a renegade, while Labour MPs came to regard Ramsay MacDonald, who had done so much to create their party, as the worst traitor of all. The role of prime minister is essentially a sacrificial one.

Not that those who compete against each other for it are inclined to see it in this light. They believe they will be powerful, and they assure us they have the solutions we seek, however disappointing their predecessors may have proved. And it is true that most of them have a honeymoon period during which we allow ourselves to share in their optimism, for as voters we are torn between conflicting impulses. We long to believe we have found a saviour, but are determined to throw overboard whoever fails to save us. We allow the stage to be dominated for a time by a successful prime minister, but then restore equality (for which all democracies have a deep yearning) by dragging that individual back down to our own level, often with brutal abruptness.

Previous writers have sought to define the office of prime minister in terms of its fluctuating powers: an approach that can lead to arid constitutional theorising. In this book, temperament is restored to the central place it always in practice occupies.

The greatest prime ministers have tended to be fighters and gamblers. But after a warrior PM the country often wants a calmer, more consensual figure, who may have a touch of greatness too. Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill, was the greatest master of understatement in British history, but also, by conducting a team of strong ministers, one of the greatest reformers.

There are very few complete duds in this book, for the Commons can detect a dud as soon as he or she begins to speak. For the same reason, it is virtually impossible for a criminal, or a demagogue, to become prime minister. Someone like Donald Trump could not get to 10 Downing Street. The Commons sees through, and will not tolerate, that kind of person. This check on the abuse of power is highly effective, but generally overlooked. Three of the greatest failures in this book – Lord Bute, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Rosebery – failed because they had never sat in the Commons.

All but four prime ministers (Spencer Compton, Pitt the Younger, A. J. Balfour and Edward Heath) have been married, though some were widowed either before or during their time in office. In many cases a devoted and intelligent spouse has been of the greatest help to a prime minister.

I have met every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, but although most of them have remarkable qualities, none has displayed her force of personality. In the 1980s, I went to lunch in 10 Downing Street with her, along with about six other journalists, all of them older and more distinguished than myself. She astonished me by delivering an economics lecture in tones which might have been designed to impress a few simple truths on a class of 7-year-olds. In the weeks after this event, my fellow guests astonished me by reproducing, in their columns, much of what she had said. She was, after all, prime minister, and journalists like to be able to retail inside dope to their readers.

Tony Blair laughed very charmingly when I inadvertently insulted him while lunching with him at the Gay Hussar, a few years before he seized control of the Labour Party. I gained more of my political education from the Sunday lunches given by Shirley and Bill Letwin in their house off Regent’s Park, where the politics of the day were discussed with bohemian irreverence by about a dozen guests, sometimes including the philosopher Michael Oakeshott or the politician Sir Keith Joseph. In 1983, Shirley and Bill’s son, Oliver, suggested I come and work in the Conservative Research Department in Smith Square. I protested that I had until that point had nothing to do with the Conservative Party, but he said this did not matter, as they just needed someone who could write.

Having taken the job, I began to immerse myself in political history, for to write about the politics of the present day without discovering what went before is to suffer from a kind of self-inflicted short-sightedness. In particular, I began reading the biographies of such giants as Disraeli and Gladstone, which tend to be extremely long. I wished there was a single, relatively short book where I could begin by acquainting myself with the whole sweep of British political history over the last three centuries, told in the form of brief lives. This book is my attempt, after thirty-five years of reading and writing about politics, to fill that gap.

When one is young, giants seem to walk the earth, and I profited from the talk and work of many illustrious figures, including Peter Utley, Alistair Cooke (now Lord Lexden), Alan Watkins, Ferdinand Mount, Frank Johnson, Peregrine Worsthorne and Charles Moore. In 1984, the latter offered me my first job in journalism, as deputy editor of The Spectator. I have since contributed to most parts of what used to be called Fleet Street, have lived in Germany for six years to see if they do things better there, and spent seven years as the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketch-writer.

Little is said here about the eleven monarchs who occupied the throne in this period, for their characters have already been drawn in Gimson’s Kings and Queens. And for full details of the political transactions touched on in these pages, the reader will have to look elsewhere. If these had been included, the book would have become intolerably long.

There is no bibliography, because in the age of Google, it is seldom difficult to trace a book or a quotation. The most enjoyable books I have read include Bagehot’s essay on The Character of Sir Robert Peel, Disraeli’s Sybil and Coningsby, Maynard Keynes’s few pages entitled Mr Lloyd George: A Fragment, Winston Churchill’s essays on Rosebery, Asquith and Balfour in Great Contemporaries, Chips Channon on Chamberlain in his Diaries, Roy Jenkins’s essays on various prime ministers in The Chancellors, and Attlee’s Great Contemporaries, a collection of Attlee’s journalism edited by Frank Field. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available online for anyone with a public library card, is a good first port of call for almost any subject. Of long and admirable books about prime ministers there is no end, but two which might be overlooked are Lord Rosebery’s Chatham: His Early Life and Connections, and Robert Blake’s first book, The Unknown Prime Minister: the Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, in which the author observes that ‘such a book, if it is to have any real value, cannot be short’.

I cannot end without thanking Martin Rowson for his beautiful drawings, my agent, Andrew Gordon, for his invariably astute guidance, Michael Crick and William Franklin for advice about obscure and useful books, my publishers at Square Peg, Rowan Yapp, Harriet Dobson, Sophie Harris and Jo Whitford, for creating such a handsome volume, and above all my wife, Sally Gimson, who greets so much of what I say with a bracing incredulity.

Andrew Gimson, Gospel Oak, October 2017

A SHORT NOTE ON THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION

BEFORE THE GREAT REFORM BILL of 1832, the monarch decided who to send for to be prime minister, and even after that landmark he or she enjoyed a degree of discretion. But there was never any point in sending for someone who could not command a majority in the Commons, so parliamentary ability was from the first indispensable.

The first two Hanoverian kings, George I (1714–27) and George II (1727–60), had been brought over from Germany by Parliament because they were Protestants, so were reckoned to favour liberty rather than absolutism. But as foreigners, who longed to spend time in Hanover, they needed someone who could run the British government for them, and obtain for them a handsome income voted by Parliament: a circumstance which greatly favoured the development of the office of prime minister.

In order to control the Commons, it was necessary to have a band of followers. In the eighteenth century, the Whigs and the Tories contended against each other for power, with the Whigs at first getting very much the better of it. General elections took place, but were not yet of decisive importance. As will be illustrated in the account of Sir Robert Walpole, patronage played a large role in securing and maintaining a parliamentary majority, but politics was an intensely competitive business, and the best players were brilliant. From the first, there was a battle between those who were In, so enjoying the fruits of office, and those who were Out, so resentful of their exclusion. Often the latter group gathered round the heir to the throne, hoping for better things in the next reign.

In the century after 1832, the vote was extended to more and more people, until in 1928 it became universal for women as well as men. General elections became decisive, and modern political parties were formed in order to fight them: the Conservatives from the 1830s, the Liberals from 1859 and Labour from 1900. Great men – Churchill leaps to mind – often chafed under the party system, but also shaped it to their and the country’s needs.

A SHORT NOTE ON NAMES

IN ORDER TO render the book easier to follow, I have disregarded the British aristocracy’s habit of frequently changing their names. Each prime minister is referred to by whichever name he or she is best known. So Pitt the Elder remains ‘Pitt’, even after he has been ennobled as Earl of Chatham.

For some reason, this self-denying ordinance broke down while I was writing about Lord Salisbury, who in youth is Lord Robert Cecil, and becomes for a short time Lord Cranborne, before entering the House of Lords as Lord Salisbury.

The term ‘prime minister’ is used even for the long period when ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ – the title which still appears on the letter box at 10 Downing Street – would be more correct.

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE

Lived 1676–1745; prime minister 1721–42

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE invented the office of prime minister, and held it for longer than any of his successors. This fat, affable, shrewd, crude, fearless man had such a keen instinct for power, and for other men’s weaknesses, that he dominated the House of Commons for almost twenty-one years. In his portraits, he looks as trenchant, grounded and confident as anyone in this book. His enemies accused him of buying votes and monopolising power, but what really annoyed them was that he worked the system better than they did, and kept them out. He made himself indispensable to the first two Hanoverian kings and set, by his practice rather than by any theory, a constitutional pattern which has endured to this day.

Walpole was born in 1676 at Houghton in Norfolk, the son of a prosperous squire. He was educated at Eton and at King’s College, Cambridge, and was intended for the Church, but the death of his two elder brothers enabled him to go into politics instead. He entered the Commons in 1701, and soon demonstrated his inestimable value to the Whig cause both as a debater and as a minister. In 1712, the Tories managed to get him confined to the Tower of London on trumped-up charges of corruption, but this pseudo-martyrdom increased his reputation.

With the arrival from Hanover in 1714 of George I, the Tories, some of whom sympathised with the rival House of Stuart, were swept from office and the Whigs, including Walpole, were back. He became First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he demonstrated his acute grasp of financial affairs. In 1717, he followed his brother-in-law, Townshend, into Opposition, but three years later the South Sea Bubble – the maddest speculative fever ever to grip the country – burst, and Walpole seized his chance.

A large part of the ruling class was ruined. Walpole, who had made a huge personal profit by selling before the crash, used his gift of oratory and his financial acumen to restore confidence, and to defend both the Crown and his fellow Whigs against attack. His rivals fell away and his pre-eminence began.

George I did not speak English well, and Walpole did not speak either French or German, which were the King’s preferred languages, so the two men conversed in dog Latin. The King’s heart remained in Hanover, to which he made frequent visits: he needed someone to govern Britain, while the British needed a leader who would not allow Hanoverian interests to prevail. Walpole fulfilled both requirements.

In order to look like a normal country squire, he munched little red Norfolk apples during Commons debates, and let it be known that he opened letters from his gamekeeper before those to do with government business. He loved hunting, in Richmond Park if he could not get down to Norfolk, and said of himself that he was ‘No Saint, no Spartan, no reformer’. He was at ease, in an eighteenth-century way, with sex and money and self-enrichment at public expense. He took a mistress twenty-five years younger than himself, the witty and beautiful Molly Skerret, whom he married after his first wife died.

Lord Chesterfield, a polished aristocrat, could not help feeling shocked by Walpole:

Walpole refused the offer of a peerage. He knew the Commons was harder to control than the Lords, so demanded his personal attention. His language was as crude as any backwoodsman’s: he said of Queen Caroline that he ‘took the right sow by the ear’, for it was through his friendship with her that he was able to control George II. Others supposed the way to the King’s favour lay through his mistresses. They were mistaken. Caroline did not try to stand between her husband and his mistresses. She contented herself with ensuring that the mistresses had no power.

In 1727, George II had attempted, on ascending the throne, to get rid of Walpole. But within a few days it was clear that only Walpole could persuade the Commons to grant a handsome income to the royal couple. He was recalled to service, and the Civil List went through without a division. One mischief-maker tried to make trouble between Walpole and Caroline by telling her he had referred to her as ‘the fat bitch’. She sent the chief minister the message that ‘the fat bitch had forgiven him’.

Walpole described, to his successor Henry Pelham, the methods needed to steer George II:

We may smile at how tactfully the King had to be managed, but is it really much different to how an audience of voters, or of party activists, has to be managed today?

‘All these men have their price,’ Walpole once said, indicating some opposition Members of Parliament. He used patronage to entrench his power: he knew how to buy the support he needed by distributing offices of profit to MPs. He and his family carried off many of the plums, leading to bitter attacks on the ‘Robinocracy’, Robin being one of his nicknames; others were Screenmaster-General, in reference to the way he shielded the Establishment, and Sir Bluestring, because of his membership of the Order of the Garter, whose sash he wore in the Commons. He took no interest in literature, and was assailed by the best writers of his time – Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding – but this seems to have done him no harm. He was, however, so annoyed by the portrayal of himself as a thief in The Beggar’s Opera, and by offensive allusions in the same work to his mistress, that he arranged for the passing in 1737 of the Licensing Act, under which, until 1968, all new plays had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain. Gay, the offending author, had his next play banned.

Walpole used the spoils of office to build a Palladian masterpiece, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, which he filled with a stupendously expensive collection of paintings, later sold to Catherine the Great and today adorning the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Houghton is an intimate palace: it impresses you with its grandeur and classical statuary, but the rooms are small enough for the guests to be worked on by their genial host. His income was vast, but his debts were even larger, and were not paid off until many years after his death.

Unlike many notable leaders, Walpole hated the expense of war and wanted the country to grow rich in peace. This policy he managed to follow for many years, cutting taxes and promoting trade. Under his skilful management, the national debt was reduced by means of a sinking fund, and interest rates fell to only 3 per cent. In 1733, he introduced the Excise Bill, a reform of the customs duties on wine and tobacco which would have eliminated smuggling. This reasonable proposal was immensely unpopular and Walpole only saved himself by abandoning it.

The King yearned for a land war in Europe, in which he could demonstrate his martial prowess, while the City of London wanted a naval war to capture the trade of its competitors, but for many years Walpole managed to avert hostilities.

When the War of Jenkins’ Ear against Spain broke out in 1739, his power was thrown into question, for he was not a war leader. His great ally, Queen Caroline, had died two years before, he had forced his most able rivals into Opposition and his own health was failing. The war started badly, as is usual in Britain, and Walpole took the blame, as is also usual. In 1741, he was accused in a Commons censure motion of making himself ‘sole and prime minister’. The term ‘prime minister’ was at this time a gross insult, implying belligerent ambition and grasping self-interest.

Walpole met this attack with his usual intrepid self-confidence, and managed to hang on. In February 1742, he lost control of the Commons, resigned and was elevated to the House of Lords, where he remarked with wry amusement to another newly created peer: ‘My Lord Bath, you and I are now as insignificant men as any in England.’ That was an exaggeration: Walpole’s enemies, who had spent years looking forward to his impeachment, narrowly failed to bring it about, and the King still valued his advice. In 1745, Walpole died of a lacerated bladder, caused by a remedy he had taken for kidney stones.

SIR SPENCER COMPTON

Lived 1673–1743; prime minister 1742–43

A CAPACITY FOR rising to the level of events is a necessary qualification for success as a prime minister, and Sir Spencer Compton did not possess it. He was described by Lord Rosebery (prime minister in 1894–95) as ‘the favourite nonentity of George II’. That king had previously employed him to run his household, and was attracted by Compton’s punctilious subservience, which seemed to promise scope for royal assertion. So, on ascending the throne in 1727, George II told his father’s first minister, Sir Robert Walpole, to go to Sir Spencer Compton and take instructions from him.

Compton was three years older than Walpole, and from a grander family. He served as Speaker of the House of Commons and also as Paymaster General, an office of colossal profit. But he was frightened out of his wits by the King’s call to serve as first minister. His first task was to write the speech George II would deliver to the Privy Council. He asked Walpole to write it for him. Within a few days Compton made the humiliating admission that he felt unequal to the task of being first minister, and Walpole was reinstated. Compton, as a kind of consolation prize, was made Earl of Wilmington. Historians do not regard this episode as a prime ministership: it simply demonstrated Compton’s inadequacy.

Yet when Walpole fell in 1742, George II’s choice again fell on Compton, as we shall continue for the sake of simplicity to call him. He was a figurehead, but this suited his more able rivals, for the likelihood was that he would be a transient figure. Politics was dominated by foreign policy, and that was in the hands of the brilliant Lord Carteret.

In the summer of 1743, a few days after George II had led his troops into action against the French at Dettingen, the last British monarch to do so, Compton died in office. He is the only prime minister of whom no full-length biography has been written, and Lord Hervey’s description of him explains why no ambitious young historian has felt tempted to fill the gap:

HENRY PELHAM

Lived 1694–1754; prime minister 1743–54

OTHER MEN WERE cleverer than Henry Pelham, but none was steadier. He possessed the judgement and tenacity needed to stay at the top for over a decade, a record of continuous service broken only (in ascending order) by Thatcher, North, Liverpool, Pitt the Younger and Walpole. His tolerance and good humour are caught in his reply to a proposal that the publication of (often largely invented) reports of Commons debates be punished with fines and imprisonment: ‘Let them alone; they make better speeches for us than we can make for ourselves.’

He was born in 1694, and in 1715 commanded a troop of dragoons, raised in Sussex by him and his elder brother, which helped defeat the Jacobite rebellion. For this act of loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty, which had only arrived on the British throne the previous year, the elder brother was created Duke of Newcastle and proceeded to help the younger to enter the Commons. Here, Pelham soon demonstrated his mastery of financial questions, his unremitting diligence and his gift for explaining things in clear, unshowy language. He became very close to Walpole, who was at once his friend and mentor, and under whom he served a ministerial apprenticeship of over twenty years. Pelham showed his gift as a conciliator by helping to keep his somewhat tricky elder brother, Newcastle, on side. During the Excise crisis of 1733, when Walpole was threatened outside the Commons by a well-dressed mob, Pelham pushed the prime minister into the passage leading to Alice’s coffee house and, drawing his sword, barred the way with the words: ‘Now, gentlemen, who will be the first to fall?’

When Walpole was at length driven from office, he wished Pelham to succeed him, and in 1743, after the brief interlude of Spencer Compton, this came to pass. The new prime minister’s early years in office were precarious, for George II hoped to replace him with the altogether more brilliant figure of Carteret, who described Pelham as ‘the chief clerk’ and could not be bothered with the management of Parliament by the distribution of patronage: ‘What is it to me who is a judge or who is a bishop? It is my business to make kings and emperors.’

Carteret was a specialist in foreign policy, for which he possessed exceptional qualifications. As Macaulay remarks, ‘He spoke and wrote French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, even Swedish.’ He thought Pelham’s job was to pay the bills for British participation in the War of the Austrian Succession, which lasted from 1740 to 1748. Pelham wanted to get a grip on the ‘vast arrear’ he had found at the Treasury, and doubted there was anything to be gained from the war, so wished as soon as possible to make peace.

In February 1746, Pelham forced the issue. He and his colleagues resigned. George II sent for Carteret (now known, rather confusingly, as Granville), who was unable to form a government, so in three days the King had to recall Pelham.

While Walpole had excluded dangerously gifted rivals, meaning the Opposition became stuffed with talented individuals, Pelham preferred to include them in a ‘Broad Bottom’ administration, and was now strong enough to bring even William Pitt – a brilliant orator very unpopular with the King for making slighting references to Hanover – into government.

Pelham consolidated the nation’s finances. He sought tranquility, and attained it. In 1751, he tried to retire, but the King, who was by now fond of him, prevailed on him to carry on. In 1754, he died in office. Horace Walpole (son of Sir Robert Walpole) wrote of him: ‘He lived without abusing his power and died poor.’ The King lamented: ‘Now I shall have no more peace.’

DUKE OF NEWCASTLE

Lived 1693–1768; prime minister 1754–56 and 1757–62

THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE is the first and, so far, only prime minister in British history to take over from his brother. He was fourteen months older than Henry Pelham and, although deeply stricken by his death, within a few days recovered sufficiently to set about obtaining the vacant office. For this role, his qualifications and disqualifications were equally striking.

Newcastle was a flurried, flustered, anxious man, who would take hold of your lapels while he addressed you in a confused and rambling way. In most of the anecdotes about him, he appears absurd. On one occasion, he had to visit Pitt the Elder, who was confined to bed by gout. The room was freezing cold, for it was November and Pitt would have no fire, as this aggravated his symptoms. Newcastle, who was a great hypochondriac, asked if Pitt would mind if he climbed, cloak and all, into the other bed in the room, which belonged to Pitt’s wife. Here the two statesmen were found, arguing from bed to bed about whether Admiral Hawke should put to sea in pursuit of the French. Newcastle thought it was too dangerous to risk the fleet at that stormy time of year, but Pitt carried the day and on 20 November 1759 Hawke won the decisive victory of Quiberon Bay.

Horace Walpole said of Newcastle, ‘He was a Secretary of State without intelligence, a Duke without money, a man of infinite intrigue, without secrecy or policy, and a Minister despised and hated by his master, by all parties and Ministers, without being turned out by any.’ Spencer Compton said of him, ‘He always lost half an hour in the morning, which he was running after for the rest of the day without being able to overtake it.’

But Newcastle had greater abilities than his critics were prepared to admit. He held high office for almost fifty years because of his unflagging eagerness, diligence and ambition, and also because he was not too grand to disdain the arts of parliamentary management, on which gaining and holding power depended. At a young age, he inherited land in eleven counties, which gave him a controlling interest in at least a dozen seats in the House of Commons, with influence over many more. He made friends with George I, which was more than most Englishmen were able to do. He was obsessed by patronage, and gradually extended his reach into Scotland, the American colonies and the Church of England, where he appointed bishops who were not just orthodox, but who would vote the right way in the House of Lords. He entertained on a vast scale, ran up huge debts and ended his career much poorer than he had started it.

Walpole, to whom Newcastle early signified his allegiance, found in him a valuable subordinate, who served from 1724 as a Secretary of State, with a large measure of responsibility for foreign policy, though in 1739, swayed by popular pressure, Newcastle was far keener than Walpole on going to war with Spain.

For the decade from 1744 that Pelham, his beloved younger brother, served as prime minister, Newcastle continued to act as a valued subordinate, though he was also jealous and craved an equal share in power: ‘everything, as far as possible, should first be talked over by you and me’. When Newcastle became prime minister, everything went wrong, for although he had by now accumulated great experience, he was frightened of taking decisions. He had never served in the Commons, and was worried about bringing into the government anyone with the ability to control that chamber, who might soon outshine him. Britain drifted into an undeclared war with France and, as usual, things started badly. Pitt, whose gifts as a war leader were desperately needed but whom George II could not abide, resigned from the Cabinet and launched a series of devastating attacks on Newcastle from the backbenches. Amid humiliations in America and India, the fall of Minorca to the French was the most embarrassing defeat of all, for a relief expedition sent under Admiral Byng had sailed back to Gibraltar without fully engaging the enemy.

The public was dismayed and angry, and Newcastle knew he was in acute danger of being blamed for these defeats. So when a delegation from the City of London came to see the prime minister to complain about Byng’s conduct, he replied: ‘Oh! Indeed he shall be tried immediately – he shall be hanged directly.’

There was a considerable delay before Byng was shot on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch, anchored off Portsmouth. The judges who tried him recommended clemency, and so did Pitt, but Newcastle made no attempt to persuade George II to show mercy. The way was open for Voltaire to explain, in Candide, that in England it is considered a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time ‘pour encourager les autres’.

Newcastle had by now been forced to resign, and that, one would have thought, was that. But his addiction to the game of politics and his ability to get along with George II meant he was soon back as prime minister, and so was Pitt, in an arrangement that for a time worked wonderfully well, with Newcastle providing the money while Pitt directed the war. In 1759, Britain celebrated a Year of Victories over the French.

In 1760, George II died and his 22-year-old grandson ascended the throne. For Newcastle, this was the beginning of the end. George III was very moral and very naïve. He disapproved intensely of the great Whig families who regarded themselves as the trustees of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and had held a monopoly of power since the arrival in 1714 of George I from Hanover. George III wished Lord Bute to be his prime minister, and in 1762 he managed to get him.

There was now a ‘purge of the Pelhamite innocents’, with Newcastle’s appointees cast out of their offices, and Newcastle himself stripped of the Lord Lieutenancies of Middlesex and Nottinghamshire. Yet even now, he could not renounce politics. He had one more minor comeback, as Privy Seal in 1765–66, and in 1768 he died at the age of seventy-five.

DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE

Lived 1720–64; prime minister 1756–57

THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE had the attractive quality of quite genuinely not wishing to be prime minister, and held out for five days before yielding to the King’s entreaties. This handsome and retiring nobleman took office at the age of thirty-six, and held it for only 225 days, the shortest span in the eighteenth century. He was from one of the great Whig families, and was chosen because he was a tactful and honest figure who knew how to mediate between different factions, as he had just shown while acting as Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. Dr Johnson said of him, ‘If he promised you an acorn, and none had grown that year in his woods, he would have sent to Denmark for it.’

Pitt the Elder proposed Devonshire to fill the gap left by Newcastle’s resignation, with Pitt himself as the most forceful minister. But Pitt spoiled this arrangement by resigning in protest against the execution of Admiral Byng (see above), which left the government rudderless.

Newcastle, who most definitely did want to be prime minister, was soon back, and so was Pitt, who definitely wanted to run the war. But Devonshire stayed in office as Lord Chamberlain, and in the words of Lord Waldegrave, ‘lost no reputation, for great things had never been expected of him as a minister and in the ordinary business of his office he had shown great punctuality’.

When George III ascended the throne, he singled out Devonshire as a Whig aristocrat who deserved to be humiliated, which he did by refusing to see him when the duke arrived in October 1762 at court to say farewell. Devonshire at long last lost his temper, and tore off the gold key which was his badge of office as Chamberlain. In 1764, he died at the age of only forty-four at Spa, in what is now Belgium, where he had gone in search of a cure for dropsy. In the words of Amanda Foreman, ‘He only participated in government out of a sense of duty and the effort it cost him ruined his health and destroyed his peace of mind.’

LORD BUTE

Lived 1713–92; prime minister 1762–63

LORD BUTE WAS the most hated prime minister of all time. He was hissed and pelted by the London mob, which broke the windows of his house, and the upper classes loathed him too. His defenders point out that he was a distinguished botanist, but cannot deny he had little understanding of human nature. He possessed almost no parliamentary experience and reached the heights because he was a royal favourite. In the words of his contemporary, Bishop Warburton, ‘Lord Bute is a very unfit man to be a Prime Minister of England. First, he is a Scotchman; secondly, he is the King’s friend; and thirdly he is an honest man.’

His career turned on a chance meeting at Egham races in 1747. It started to rain, and Frederick, Prince of Wales, wished to play cards in a tent. A fourth player was needed, Bute was recruited and a friendship began between the prince and the Scottish peer.

Not that the prince had a high opinion of the newcomer’s abilities: ‘Bute, you are the very man to be envoy at some small proud German court where there is nothing to do.’ But in 1751, the prince unexpectedly died, and his widow, Princess Augusta, who was from Gotha in Germany, grew deeply fond of Bute. Now he really was envoy to a small proud German court. The princess harboured the paranoid and quite unjustified fear that her late husband’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, intended to murder her eldest son, George, and make himself king instead. She entrusted the boy’s education to Bute. The new Prince of Wales was shy and backward, kept by his mother in isolation from the temptations and depravities of English society, and he too became deeply fond of Bute, who was twenty-five years older than him. Bute was handsome – his legs were accounted remarkably fine – and took a serious interest in his pupil’s education. The public assumed Bute had become Princess Augusta’s lover. Why else did he keep visiting her? In English eyes, the idea that this could be for educational purposes was laughable.

In October 1760, the old king, George II, died and was succeeded by his 22-year-old grandson, who declared: ‘Born and educated in this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ The word ‘Briton’ had been inserted by Bute in the place of ‘Englishman’. George III wished, with his former tutor’s help, to be a patriot king, who would end party distinctions and drive out the corrupt Whig aristocracy that had held power since George I arrived from Hanover in 1714.

The aristocracy hated this, and so did the people. Bute was vilified as a Scotsman – the Scots being at this time cordially detested in England – and a favourite, who exercised a malign and secret influence behind the scenes. The jackboot – his symbol (for his first name was John and his last was pronounced ‘Boot’) – was burned by the mob, along with a petticoat representing Augusta. In response, he displayed his customary mixture of hauteur and naïvety. He had been a member of the House of Lords twenty years before, as a Scottish representative peer. But he had never spoken, and had annoyed the Whigs by voting with the Tories.

For a few months, Bute was the power behind the throne, and from March 1761 a Cabinet minister. But first Pitt and then Newcastle felt forced to resign, and in May 1762, he succeeded Newcastle as prime minister. Almost unbelievably, Bute had only delivered his maiden speech in January. To the disappointment of his listeners, it was not a total failure. But it was pompous and dull, so did nothing to lessen his unpopularity. He never discovered how to carry people with him.

The Seven Years War with France was drawing to a close. Bute was appalled by the cost of the war, drove forward the peace negotiations and defended the Treaty of Paris in February 1763, under which Britain made gains in Canada, India and the West Indies, and even regained Minorca.

It was a reasonable settlement, but Pitt denounced it and Bute became ever more hated. The libertine MP John Wilkes assailed, with scandalous freedom, Bute, the peace and even the King in the radical newspaper The North Briton, its very title a jibe at Bute’s Scottishness. Bute worsened his position by imposing a deeply unpopular tax on cider. Eight days later, he resigned, unable to take any more vilification. He had served as prime minister for 344 days. For some years, he remained an influence on the King, though much less of one than his detractors supposed. He also remained deeply unpopular, until even the King became fed up with him and he faded into a long retirement where he pursued his botanical studies.

To Bute’s credit, he persuaded George III to confer a pension on Dr Johnson. The great doctor said Bute was ‘a very honourable man, a man who meant well’, but ‘a theoretical statesman, a book minister’ who ‘thought this country could be governed by the influence of the Crown alone’, and ‘showed an undue partiality to Scotchmen’.

GEORGE GRENVILLE

Lived 1712–70; prime minister 1763–65

GEORGE GRENVILLE RELISHED even the driest aspects of politics. According to a member of his family, ‘An Act of Parliament was in itself entertaining to him, as was proved when he stole a turnpike bill out of somebody’s pocket at a concert and read it in a corner in despite of all the efforts of the finest singers to attract his attention.’ He was regarded as the ablest man of business in the House of Commons, but lacked charm; his career as prime minister was cut short by his tactless handling of George III, and he is remembered for his tactless treatment of the American colonists.

At the invitation of his uncle, Lord Cobham, he entered the Commons in 1741 as MP for Buckingham, a pocket borough with only thirteen voters. Grenville was one of the Patriot Boys who assailed Sir Robert Walpole. Soon he was in government himself, serving for many years as Treasurer of the Navy. He was shocked by the profligate spending of William Pitt, his brother-in-law, on the war with France, and aspired to sort out the public finances, by making rigorous economies and introducing new taxes.

In 1763, Grenville upheld the unpopular cider tax, which was the final act of Lord Bute’s government, by asking where else the money was to come from. ‘Tell me where,’ he repeated, and on the Opposition benches, Pitt began to hum the tune of ‘Gentle Shepherd, tell me where’, a well-known song of the time.

The House laughed at Grenville, and from now on his nickname was ‘Gentle Shepherd’. But George III turned to him to fill the gap left when Bute stepped down. Grenville drove a hard bargain: there was to be no ‘secret influence’ by Bute. He harassed the King, who said of him: ‘When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for an hour more.’ Grenville never knew when to stop. Now there was peace with France, he made drastic defence cuts, reducing the size of the army from 120,000 men to 30,000. Pitt deplored the sight of ‘the bravest men the world ever saw, sent to starve in country villages’.

Grenville decided the American colonists must pay the cost of their own defence, by means of a new Stamp Act on legal transactions, passed in 1764. The colonists were affronted by this measure, and soon the cry of ‘No taxation without representation’ was heard. But Grenville did not have to deal with the problem, for George III contrived, in July 1765, to replace him and was determined never to have him back, stating that he ‘would rather see the Devil in his closet than Mr Grenville’. In 1770, he died of a blood disorder at the age of fifty-eight. But his influence on British politics was not over. The Grenvilles and their cousins remained prominent for several generations, and one of his sons served as prime minister.

MARQUESS OF ROCKINGHAM

Lived 1730–82; prime minister 1765–66 and 1782

SOME WRITERS HAVE mocked the Marquess of Rockingham for leading a government composed largely of his friends from the Jockey Club. It is true he had a passion for racing and gambling. He decided the name of one of England’s classic races, the St Leger, built magnificent stables at his vast house, Wentworth Woodhouse, and was an enthusiastic patron of Stubbs, whose portrait of Whistlejacket, one of Rockingham’s horses, today delights visitors to the National Gallery.

But the idea that love of the turf means political frivolity is simply wrong. Rockingham took his political responsibilities seriously. He was too shy to be a good public speaker, and is one of only four prime ministers who had not previously held ministerial office (the others being Ramsay MacDonald, Tony Blair and David Cameron). He understood the danger of alienating the American colonists far better than George III did, and his amiable disinterestedness commanded such respect among the Rockingham Whigs, as his followers became known, that he held them together through sixteen years in Opposition.