Dan Snow's History Hit - 300 years of British Prime Ministers: Part 2

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

Continuing our series looking at British Prime Ministers this episode tackles the period following the Battle of Waterloo all the way up to Winston Churchill. The brilliant Robert Saunders joins us to guide us through the nineteenth century and to discuss some of the most remarkable parliamentarians in history including Peel, Gladstone and Lloyd George. Robert is a Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in modern British history, from the early 19th century to the present, focusing particularly on political history and the history of ideas. Listen to 300 years of British Prime Ministers: Part 1

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We had the sad news about Prince Philip on Friday. Yesterday, many of you will have listened to the obituary podcast. Thank you for your feedback on that. Today we're sort of resuming normal service, I guess. We've got part two of our monster survey of British Prime Ministers. Part one saw the very brilliant Hannah Gregg take us through the long 18th century, correct many of my misconceptions about the men that dominated British politics through the 18th century and into the early 19th. This time we are rolling out Robert Saunders to take us up to a guy called Winston Churchill.

You may have heard of him. So we're going all the way from the Battle of Waterloo, the period of peace that followed the Napoleonic War, we're going all the way from the Battle of Waterloo, the period of peace that followed the Napoleonic War, we're going all the way up to Winston Churchill. And I've got just the man, a titan of 19th century history, a man perfectly equipped to talk to us about some of the most remarkable parliamentarians in history, Robert Saunders. He's a reader at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. He's the Red Historian on Twitter, and he's simply one of the best people to follow in the world on twitter.com. He thinks beautifully and succinctly about democracy, both here in the UK and around the

world. If you wish to listen to previous podcasts of Robert Saunders, or want to go back and listen to the Hannah Gregg one, the place to do it is on History Hit TV. You don't have to listen to any ads, just go to History Hit TV, become a subscriber, support everything we're up to. As you listen to this, I'm on a journey around England with Dr. Kat Jarman. We're on the footsteps of the great heathen army that eventually Alfred would fight and defeat in battle in the 9th century. On his way to becoming Alfred the Great, Cat and I are looking for the archaeological traces of that great heathen army as it rampaged across from East Anglia into Mercia and down into Wessex, toppling kingdoms as it did so. That's why I'm doing this

video. That will be available soon on historyhit.tv as is all the podcasts and everything else you might want to watch and listen to in the world of history. Head over to historyhit.tv as is all the podcasts and everything else you might want to watch and listen to in the world of history head over to historyhit.tv but in the meantime it's robert saunders taking us through our next tranche of prime ministers robert thank you very much for coming on this podcast it's a pleasure thanks for inviting me we've left the office of Prime Minister with Spencer Percival. Pretty dark days for Britain. The assassinated Prime Minister, Napoleonic blockade, bad news, and the office of Prime Minister itself, lots of short-serving premises. But then we get to one of the longest terms of any Prime Minister. Robert, your namesake,

Lord Liverpool. What do you make of make of him well I think he's an underrated prime minister if you want to understand Lord Liverpool you have to start with two things firstly that he was present at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and second that he became prime minister because his predecessor was assassinated so this is a man whose whole premiership was soaked in war and revolution and the threat to the social order. Yes, because we always say about him that he was a terrible old recidivist who kept to lead Peterloo massacre to try to stop this bubbling up of radical reformist ideas. Yes, he's never recovered from Disraeli calling him the arch-mediocracy. But I think we probably have

to divide his premiership into three phases. The first phase is dominated by the war against Napoleon and the peace negotiations that follow. Then the second phase is about that really dark and difficult post-war period, when it looked like Britain itself might have a revolution, and when a lot of the energy of government was about holding down revolutionary pressures. But then there's a third phase from about 1822, where you've got a new generation of ministers coming in, quite liberal Tories, quite reform-minded Tories, where you start to see something emerging like a more reform-minded conservatism. Let's also take a temperature check on the office of Prime Minister at this stage. Are they referring

to him yet as a Prime Minister, not just in terms of abuse? No, he would usually have been referred to as either the King's Minister or the First Lord of the Treasury. And he wasn't in the House of Commons, which I always think is interesting about Liverpool, because is he one of the last really effective Prime Ministers who doesn't sit in the Commons? It feels like he's slightly on the wrong side of history there. Well, I think that was less uncommon then than it would seem now. Later in the century, you have Lord Aberdeen, Lord Derby, and Lord Salisbury, who were governed from the House of Lords. Disraeli himself, in his final years, governed from the Lords. And in some ways,

I think it worked for Liverpool, because Liverpool's problem was that he was trying to hold together a very fractious coalition that was full of very talented and ambitious people. So in a sense, he could sit in the Lords above all of that. They could all manoeuvre and machinate in the House of Commons, and they could all look forward to the day when he died, when one of them would take over. And actually, I think we underrate the importance of old age in Prime Ministers. If you think that the Prime Minister is going to die at some point, that's actually a very good way of maintaining party unity. It happens with Palmerston as well and Gladstone later in the century. How interesting. Perhaps the same could be said of Commonwealth unity today around Queen Elizabeth as well. It's just, you know, well, we don't have to deal with this

problem now. There's an end in sight. Well, it's interesting if you take the three oldest prime ministers of the 19th century, Liverpool, Palmerston and Gladstone, all three of them, their parties collapsed after they left office, because there's a sense that tensions have been building and building and building. And when they're gone, the pressure cooker explodes. So let's deal with that explosion, because the fallout from Liverpool's demise, you get several very short-lived prime ministers and arguably the most revolutionary period of the last 200 years in British history although we'll come to some others as well yes well there's a great what if straight after Liverpool because his immediate successor is George Canning the most

talented yeah the most talented charismatic politician of his day who died after 119 days in office so it's very hard to know what his government might have looked like. Then we get Lord Goodrich, who is the second shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, the only one who never met Parliament, who simply couldn't bear the job of trying to hold his party together, and resigned weeping into his handkerchief. And then it feels like an act of desperation. You call on the Iron Duke. I mean, Wellington, one of the greatest commanders in military history, but no politician, really. Yes, I think if you're the king and you're looking for your fourth prime minister in two years, there's a great temptation just to go for a soldier who isn't going to weep in front of you, who is going to be able to stand up to

the pressures of office. And Wellington, I think, is the only prime minister in British history who was internationally famous for doing something else before he became prime minister. And that gave him a great authority, but it also meant he did lack some of the political skills that you needed to be a successful prime minister in that period. There's a story which you can tell me whether it's true, which I always said, which was after a cabinet meeting, he reported, it's extraordinary. I gave them their orders and they wish to stay around afterwards and discuss them. Yes, I think sadly that story probably isn't true, but it's one of those stories that captures a truth because that was very much his style.

And as a politician, he always saw himself as a soldier. He saw himself as an officer of the crown whose job was to, just as he had defended the crown abroad, was to defend the crown and do its service at home. He wasn't a terribly successful prime minister. He wasn't able to hold his party together. But he did do one really important thing as prime minister, which was to carry through Catholic emancipation, to allow Catholics to sit in parliament in 1829. And doing that shattered his party and was hugely controversial, but it also probably prevented a civil war in Ireland. Oh, the Irish question. We've talked to another podcast about that, no doubt we will in the future. Then we get the first reformist Whig, although these terms are often difficult to compare to

the 18th century, but the first Whig for generations. Yes, a man famous for two things, for passing the Great Reform Act and for having a cup of tea named after him, Earl Grey, which was grown in his family plantations. But he really typified that sense that the Whigs had been out of office for generations. He had been in Parliament for 44 years, he had led the Whig Party for 27 years, and he's Prime Minister for four, right at the very end. And that's partly where his prestige came from, the sense that he hadn't been bought by patronage, that he hadn't sold his principles for office, that he had had this great long period sitting in opposition, and that that gave him the prestige to lead a reforming government from 1830. How important are the reforms in 1832? How do they

change the Prime Minister's job in terms of creating and holding on to a majority in the House of Commons? I think they did have a big effect on the office of Prime Minister and we see that actually with Grey's successor. So when Grey retired in 1834, he was replaced by Lord Melbourne. And shortly after William IV did what kings had done for centuries, he dismissed his prime minister and sent for someone else. He sent for Sir Robert Peel. Peel calls an election and lost. And that was the first time that a prime minister who had the backing of the crown had ever lost a general election. And Melbourne came back into office as a result. And no king has dismissed a Prime Minister since. So what the Great Reform

Act really did do was to transfer control of the Commons from the Crown to the electorate. And that meant that Prime Ministers now had to look outwards to the public more than upwards to the Crown. And we should say how it had done that, it extended the franchise obviously a bit, but it also got rid of all these so-called pocket boroughs where magnates, the crown, could just literally decide which MPs were sent to parliament. Yes, it swept away places like Old Sarum, where no one had actually lived for about 200 years, that had two electors, or Dulwich, which had fallen into the sea centuries earlier, the so-called rotten boroughs that you could buy and sell and trade. And the importance of the

Reform Act wasn't so much that it extended the electorate, because it wasn't particularly significant in that. It was the idea that every constituency should represent a real interest in terms of the people who lived in it and the property that was to be found in it. And that made the House of Commons much harder to control. So from 1832 to 1867, between the first two reform acts, I think there's only one change of government as a direct result of a general election. But there are constant changes in the middle of parliaments because parliaments are now much more difficult to control. In terms of how British democracy, I use the term carefully, is supposed to work, today everything seems to revolve around parliaments and indeed lots of voters, members of the public, they don't like it when prime ministers

are removed or replaced within parliaments, it sometimes feels. And yet actually in this period MPs have got huge power as they should, that's the system working as it should. Yes, the core constitutional principle of the 19th century reformers wasn't democracy so much as parliamentary government. It was the idea that what had been known as the king's ministers must be responsible to parliament and that parliament was responsible for the electorate. So in the 19th century Britain really was governed from Parliament in a way that it isn't today. A Prime Minister would spend hours every day sitting in the House of Commons, trying to persuade MPs, responding to amendments, trying to get their legislation through. You had to be a decent parliamentary manager to be a Prime Minister. Today, Prime Ministers, if it wasn't for PMQs once a week, would never come to the House of Commons.

Is it something of a golden age? I'm very keen not to be sort of nostalgic, but in terms of an executive branch that is subject to scrutiny, influence, and the power of the legislature, is this a golden age? I think yes and no, in that the level of parliamentary scrutiny was much higher. And when Parliament was debating things that MPs knew about then you get an extraordinarily high quality of debate. If you read back some of the great debates from the reform acts or over home rule then the intellectual level is remarkable. But of course it was a very narrow electorate which meant there were lots of things it didn't know about. So if you read debates on something like women's suffrage, or indeed any legislation that might relate to women, or debates around things like the poor law

and how you deal with unemployment and low wages, then you get an extraordinarily low quality of debate because MPs simply don't know what they're talking about. Interesting. So okay, after the Whigs, after Melbourne, the King I suppose in some ways does get his revenge, does he? Because we do end up with the Tories again. The Duke of Wellington comes in. It seems to be a one-man government. He holds every office in the British government at this point. Yes, it's one of the curiosities of Victorian history

that no one really knows whether the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister or not in 1834. Because the King sent for Peel, but Peel was in Italy. So in those days, it took weeks to find the man and then weeks for him to get back again and Wellington held the fort in the meantime. Now was he prime minister? Well there's no official role of prime minister at this time so he was really just keeping things ticking over. So Peel doesn't survive as you point out the government loses an election and we get a

reasonably solid period of Whig control in which there's quite a lot of, we might call them, progressive legislation put through. Yeah, so there's this long period of Whig government from 1835 to 1841 led by Melbourne. But I think you'd describe him as a steady hand on the tiller of a sinking ship, in that the Whigs were really losing cohesion after they'd passed the Great Reform Act, they'd abolished slavery, they'd carried many of the big reforms in the first half of the decade, and it was very much less clear what was holding them together in the second half of the decade, other than keeping Peel out of power. And they don't succeed in that, do they? Peel comes in with a sort of rebranded conservatism at this point. Yes, one of the paradoxes of Peel's

career is that this is the man who rebuilt the Conservative Party out of the wreckage of 1832. So after the Great Reform Act, at the first election under the new electoral system, the Conservatives weren't even the second biggest party in the House of Commons. They were a broken rump, and Peel's great achievement was to build them up again and to carry them to an election victory a decade later. And yet the same man then destroyed the Conservative Party in 1846 over the repeal of the Corn Laws. This is the problem with me in 19th century history. I mean, it's just brutal. It's brutal. I don't know how you do it. Luckily, I've got the cleverest man in Britain to help me do this, but I'm very happy. So Corn Laws, difficult to go into them, but it sort of pits the

landed interest against those who wish to see the price of food set by the market, which therefore would be a bit cheaper. Yeah, so the Corn Laws were essentially attacks on imported grain, which was designed to protect the agricultural interest, partly as a security in time of war, on the basis that if you were at war and foreign supplies were difficult, you needed to have a secure supply of corn at home. But what the Corn Law debate was really about was about how you govern Britain, and that's always the question in the 19th century. The question for governments isn't what should governments do, it's how in an age of revolution is government possible at all. And Peel was a man who was obsessed with the French Revolution. He had the largest collection of books in England on the revolution, and he always had this almost Marxist feeling that capitalist society was cycling towards destruction,

that the rise of industry was creating a mass-impoverished proletariat who one day would explode and blow the system to atoms unless you governed with great care. And his fear was that the Corn Laws were going to become the issue around which a revolutionary movement could build. Whereas if the government launched a kind of pre-emptive strike, if you abolished the taxes on food, then you could say to the people, yes, you're poor, yes, you're suffering, but it's not the fault of government. The remedy lies in trade union action, or challenging your employers, or improving your own personal work ethic. It's not overthrowing the government. So it's interesting that he didn't extend, though, to an activist platform.

He wanted to sort of remove government from making problems worse, rather than, as some later 19th century politicians, I guess, actively passing measures to make life better for the working class. Yes, where Peel is totally different to a later figure like Disraeli or Gladstone is that Peel was openly frightened of the people, that Peel thought that the people were dangerous, so they had to be kept out of politics. Now, one part of that, you remove the taxes on anything that might actually affect the people, but what you don't do is then step in and say, well, government could be regulating your working hours, or it could be regulating your wages, or it could be providing social services,

because that's drawing the people into politics. And the thing that most frightened Peel about the Great Reform Act wasn't anything the bill did itself, it was the popular agitation that was whipped up around it. The idea that Whig aristocrats of all people had encouraged the masses to come out in the public squares and demonstrate and protest and demand changes in government. He thought that was something that no government could survive in the long term. The Bristol riots I thought about the other day when Bristol again saw rioting. But Lord John Russell, who succeeds Peel, a Whig, a different approach?

seeds peel, a wig, a different approach? Yes, Russell is in some ways a tragic figure as a Prime Minister, in that he is a decent case for being the most liberal senior statesman of his day. This is someone who had a really powerful sense of his own family's history as the leaders of the people, as people who had played a role in the Glorious Revolution, in the reform debates, people who had played a role in the Glorious Revolution, in the reform debates, who saw it as his role to get rid of religious disabilities, the laws that oppressed Catholics and Jews and non-conformists, who had been involved in the abolition of slavery, reform. Charles Dickens dedicated a tale of two cities to him, but he never built up any kind of personal following because he simply couldn't function in the age of mass politics. He was a very proud aristocrat. He had an extraordinary sense of his own social class. And he was very personally sensitive, which made him often quite a sort of

crotchety, spiky personality. And this period, there are lots of administrations the same big names seem to keep cropping up darby palmerston russell and then we get to a slightly different period when we get the disraeli gladstone stuff going on but we get darby very briefly and this is the first of three periods in which he's prime minister yes it's a huge difference to the present day. You look at someone like David Cameron. He came into the House of Commons in 2001, and he left the House of Commons in 2016. His entire political career lasted for 15 years. You compare that with Gladstone, who came into Parliament in 1832 and resigned as Prime Minister for the last time 62 years later in 1894. So we're dealing with a different order of magnitude, partly because this was a social

class that expected to govern across its life, that by and large didn't need a parliamentary income. So it could spend long periods in opposition. You could, like Lord John Russell, be Prime Minister in the 1840s and in the 1860s. So one of the weaknesses of this political class was that it didn't bring a large number of voices into the conversation from different social classes, but one of the strengths of it was that it fought long term. It's an aristocratic class that inherits its estates from its parents and transmits it to its children and it expects to govern over decades and so thinks with that in mind. Yes it's so fascinating isn't it when you think that the experience that we have paid for

of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, David Cameron, these were people who for the next 20 or 30 years they could still be playing an active part in our public life and might actually have some rather useful interesting contributions to make and And yet they're off. They're working for like private companies trying to make some cash. It feels like a loss, actually, whatever your politics. Yes, being a politician has shifted, I think, from being a life to being a job. Well, for these guys, it was certainly life. We've got the Earl of Aberdeen, who I know absolutely nothing about, who was prime minister for two years. Tell me about him. We've got the Earl of Aberdeen, who I know absolutely nothing about,

who was Prime Minister for two years. Tell me about him. Aberdeen is a tragic figure. So he was a coalition Prime Minister. He was selected on the basis that he was a conciliatory, moderate figure who could hold together a coalition of Whigs and Peelites, or followers of Sir Robert Peel. He had no particular ambitions himself, so he could hold together the ambitious figures beneath him. But then his premiership was completely derailed by the Crimean War, and Aberdeen himself

always felt deeply that he had failed over the Crimean War, that he hadn't had the strength of personality either to impose a peace policy or to be sufficiently belligerent to have deterred the war. And so he always felt morally responsible for that conflict. And there's a really touching letter that he wrote years later to his son, in which he explained that he wanted to build a new church for his labourers on one of his estates, but he couldn't build it himself because he had blood on his hands. So he had simply marked out a portion of money, and after he was dead he wanted his son to build that church. Now that's a prime minister really haunted by what they've done in

office. Crikey. We then get the arrival of one of the more colourful and dramatic characters that ever held the office of prime minister, Palmerston. Tell me about him. Well Gladstone called him the tallest antlers in the forest and this is another example of just an extraordinarily long public career. He was a cabinet minister before Gladstone was born, yet Gladstone was his chancellor of the Exchequer and he was probably the first prime minister who really built his power on his popularity with the people. He wasn't a great parliamentarian, he wasn't a great executive politician, but he was hugely popular with the public. And he did that by a patriotic foreign policy, by cultivating an image as a man of the people, and by rather celebrating his

fantastic sexual appetite. Okay, this period I find very difficult because we get Palmerston, then we get Derby, then we get Palmermerston then we get darby then we get palmerston then we get russell then we get darby what is going on in the 1850s and 60s why this chopping and changing it's because during that period you had a parliament that was very difficult for any party to control parties were very weak at this point in time they were almost more like personal followings so we talk about wigs or Liberals or Conservatives, but it's probably better to talk about Palmerstonians or Russellites or Peelites. And parties didn't have the kind of discipline that they could use to control a House of Commons. And so because of that,

we get this series of short-lived, very weak governments. And an illustration of that would be, there was a general election in 1857, which is the nearest thing we get in this period to a personal vote of confidence. It was very much about, do you back Palmerston? And Palmerston won an overwhelming majority. A year later, he was kicked out by the House of Commons and replaced by Derby. So even someone with that kind of personal following just can't control the House. What about reform? You mentioned elections.

I mean, they're becoming more important. We're coming up to the second Reform Act here. What is the sense of this ruling class of aristocratic landowners? How much disagreement is there within that around the amount of power we should give people or extending the franchise, for example? There was general agreement across parties that there should be reform. So actually every government from 1852 to 1867 introduced a reform bill. And why is that? Is that like, let's slowly enfranchise the propertied classes to broaden our base against revolution? Is that the impulse to

reform? So that's part of it, that it was a sense that what made the British constitution successful was that it adapted over time. This class had a very powerful sense that they were the only country in Europe that didn't routinely collapse into revolutions. And if you believe that that happens because your constitution evolves, then there's an incentive to keep evolving. There's also just a more sordid motive, which is that if you're operating in this very chaotic, very disorganised parliament, and you think there's another group of electors out there who will back your party, you want to bring them into the electoral system. So everyone agrees that there should be change, they just don't agree on what that change should be. Because if you bring in agricultural labourers, then that's probably going to help the Conservative Party. But if you bring in factory workers, that's probably going to help the

Liberals. If you bring in non-conformists, that's bad news for the Church of England. So every reform bill tries to bring in a different cohort of the electorate. But precisely because Parliament is so chaotic, it's very difficult to build a majority behind any single reform bill. We do get the second of the great reform acts in 67, is it? Yes. And that happens under the Conservative, doesn't it? Why does that one get through? Well, principally, actually, because of Gladstone, the Liberal leader. So Gladstone, in 1866, had proposed a new reform bill, which failed in the House of Commons as all

its predecessors had done. But unlike Derby or Palmerston or Russell, Gladstone was determined to see this through. So he resigned and made clear that if he and his party came back into office, it would be with a commitment to do this again. And he was willing, if necessary, to fight a general election on it. So the Tory party took the decision that if there was going to be a reform bill, it was better that they did it than that they let Gladstone do it. And they could at least then control the details. So yes, we get the surprise of the Conservative Party under Darby and Disraeli enfranchising artisans and working men in towns. Like today's Republican Party in the US, do they try and identify, albeit without all the advantages of AI and constituency boundaries and things, but do they try and identify groups that would be more likely to vote Tory? groups that would be more likely to vote Tory? Yes, it was partly about protecting the areas of the country that already voted for them. So the 1867 Reform Acts didn't have much impact on

the county seats or the rural seats where the Tories were strongest. Its impact was mainly felt on the towns. So it was partly a sense this is going to be more of a problem for the Liberals than it is for us. But also, the Liberals had generally wanted to enfranchise what they called the best of the working class. So educated, reasonably propertied working people, mostly non-conformists, probably mostly Liberals. Disraeli was one of the first to argue that if you went over that, if you enfranchised poorer working class voters, then actually they might vote Tory. That you could rally them behind a kind of activist foreign policy, rally around the flag, rally around the crown, a kind of Toryism that obviously recurs again in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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Spread the word, people. Spread the word. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. we're still talking about that kind of tourism now where was disraeli's influences there him

working that out by himself he deserves a place within the pantheon of great political thinkers just on that alone i mean what were the influences why was he looking around thinking it was going to be possible to create a new kind of nationalism that could actually benefit their entrenched existing interests? Well, it's partly that Disraeli was always from outside that aristocratic world that we've been talking about so far. He's really the first prime minister of the 19th century who doesn't come from that world of wealthy businessmen or landowners who had been to Eton or Harrow and Oxford. But also Disraeli was really the poet of British politics. His hero was Lord Byron. He'd wanted to be a romantic poet. Politician was his second choice. And he was really the first Tory statesman

who recognised that you didn't have to view the people as a threat, they weren't a problem to be managed, that actually you could get the people to support the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, if you appealed to their imagination. So his premiership in the 1870s was very much a premiership of theatre. So you make Queen Victoria Empress of India, you buy the Suez Canal, you send the fleet to Constantinople, you have an imperial Durbar, and it's all tremendously glamorous and romantic and exciting. And if you do that, the public will respond. Fascinating echoes all the way up to the present. So we've got Disraeli, a very brief 270 days or something in 1868, and then it's Gladstone, and we get this extraordinary duel

between the two. Disraeli-Gladstone-Disraeli-Gladstone stretching for 15-20 years. One of those great duels of British politics. Tell me about this relationship. Why are we still obsessed with this standoff? Well, it even predated them becoming Prime Minister minister they had alternated as chancellors of the exchequer for much of the period from 1852 onwards gladstone brought down disraeli's first budget and it's partly they were radically different characters so disraeli was light-hearted witty romantic frivolous in some ways quite cynicalstone, I always think of him as the priest of British politics, someone who believed passionately that politics was a holy activity, that everyone involved in it would have to stand before the throne of the heavenly grace at the day of judgment

and account for what they had done. So he regarded Disraeli as someone who corrupted and debased politics. Disraeli looked at Gladstone and just thought he was a madman. So there was this personal kind of character mismatch, but also they were both operating just as politics were starting to move out of the House of Commons and into the country. And so you could market these personalities to the public. So there were whole merchandising industries that produced Gladstone dolls. Or if you were a Tory, you could buy a Gladstone chamber pot and you could empty your bowels every morning on a picture of Mr Gladstone. Working people cultivated the Gladstone pee in their allotments. So it's partly that they became brands that represented their parties. that they became brands that represented their parties. You can also see modern parallels.

The slightly more patrician character Gladstone, and actually whose career started, it was a very high Tory initially, he ends up being the more progressive of the two. It's Disraeli, the echoes of Thatcher and John Major, an outsider who is the conservative here. Yes. I mentioned earlier that Gladstone was in some ways the priest of British politics,

and there's a personal dimension to that. Gladstone had wanted to be a priest when he was a young man. He had felt that he was called to the priesthood, and he had been persuaded by his father that he should go into politics instead. But there was always a fear inside Gladstone that he had turned away from his calling, that God had called him to the clergy, and that he had rejected it for the sake of worldly ambition. He'd rejected it for fame. So there's a psychological need in Gladstone to prove that he can do the work of God in politics, that politics didn't have to be just about competing for office or making speeches in the House. It had to be about doing the Lord's work. So he's really the first Prime Minister who comes to office with a

list of policies that he wants to pass. He sets out in the 1850s a whole series of bills that he intends to carry when he's in charge, and he carries almost all of them. Then Disraeli gets subbed out and replaced with Salisbury, who again spends 15 years being on and off Prime Minister, one of the great titans of 19th century history. Do we associate Salisbury with a more patrician conservatism? I mean, I always think about him in the bits where I come across Salisbury, it's him moaning about how they should have intervened in the American Civil War and beaten the upstart American Republic while they had a chance, and sort of angst about the eclipse of British power. Salisbury was a very different character to Disraeli. He was also, I think, the last Prime Minister who had a full beard.

And he was a deeply gloomy and pessimistic personality. So whereas Disraeli believed that conservatism could win the public, Salisbury was more like Peel in that he thought that the people ultimately were revolutionary. He thought that ultimately people would vote for their class interest and so the working classes would vote for socialism. So democracy was a problem to be managed. He recognised it was happening and he couldn't stop it. So he likened himself to the driver of a lorry that's rolling downhill. You can't change direction, but you can apply the brake. So his purpose is just to slow the inevitable collapse into disaster.

I've never thought about this properly, but I love that you're bringing out this extraordinary tension that exists within conservative thoughts, not what we now call conservatism, which strikes me as rather radical, but the 1900s conservative thought, which is, yeah, this fascinating Disraeli versus Peel and Salisbury. Is everything tending towards entropy or can you win in democracy with kind of conservative values? It's fascinating. Yeah, I think there are two very distinct types of conservative in the 20th and 21st century, very distinct types of conservative in the 20th and 21st century. There are those who believe that this is a conservative country and if you just have the confidence to make the case you can win the people. And then there is a conservatism that is mostly concerned to keep radical political forces out of office. So in the 20th century a loss of conservatism is simply about keeping socialists out of number 10

which is partly I think why the conservative party goes through a kind of nuclear winter electorally after the end of the cold war because so much of 20th century conservatism was about being against communism and against socialism and suddenly that's gone and the unity that the party had previously had just disappears one thing we haven't mentioned at all so far is queen victoria the monarch when and how does the monarch really last make itself felt in the electoral politics of the united kingdom well queen victoria made a nuisance of herself politically but that is a mark of the declining power of the monarchy,

that that's the most that can be said. She couldn't stand Gladstone. She said, he speaks to me as if he's addressing a public meeting. And she harassed him, she consumed a lot of his time, she occasionally vetoed the appointment of ministers. But that was really the most that she could do. And the monarchy, I think, had learned an important lesson from 1834 when a monarch had tried to fire a prime minister and had failed. Also, one of the big projects of the 19th century was cutting the cost of government, retrenchment as it was called at the time, reducing the amount of patronage that was available to the crown. And that meant actually

monarchs couldn't anymore buy up politicians or buy up constituencies in a way that had been routine in the 18th century. Right, let's come on to Rosebery. Pretty remarkable character is our Archibald Rosebery, isn't he? He's one of those people who, if he had never become Prime Minister, everyone would say what a fabulous Prime Minister he would have been because he seems to have all the attributes. He was charismatic, he was a dazzling orator, he was a scholar, he was a champion horse breeder. And yet when he became prime minister, he simply collapsed under the strain. Partly he was inheriting a liberal party that was falling to pieces after Gladstone's resignation, but he simply didn't have the attributes that was needed to hold together

a party of that kind. And I'm remembering this, did his administration collapse in scandal or not? It collapsed over the supply of cordite to the army, which was almost certainly simply a pretext. It's a rare example, I think, of a prime minister who was frankly desperate to leave office and so took advantage of a fairly minor defeat in the House of Commons just to throw his cards up in the air. Brilliant. But then we get Salisbury again, another good chunk of Salisbury. 1895-1902, we associate internationally splendid isolation, the rise of other powers, the rise of America, Germany, of course, this hope that Britain could just survive by disengaging. Yes, people start to talk about Britain in that period as a saturated power,

in the sense of a power that is now looking simply to defend what it has rather than to expand. So although we talk about Salisbury accurately as an imperialist, there was no great ambition to expand the empire, but simply to defend the empire Britain already had against forces that simply hadn't been there earlier in the 19th century. When we think about Palmerston, Palmerston was operating really in a unipolar world. There was no other power for most of Palmerston's time in office that could challenge Britain globally. By the time you get to 1900, Britain's being outpaced by Germany and Europe. It's being outpaced by the United States in the Atlantic. It's facing

competition in the Pacific that other countries are challenging its empire in Africa. So it's moving into a much more defensive model of imperialism. We have reached the 20th century. I cannot believe we have not yet discussed some of the biggest names in the history of politics in this country. We are going to have to rattle through. Arthur Balfour, who feels to me like he's a sort of addendum to that 19th century conservative world, before we reach the kind of radical reforming of the Campbell-Bannerman and his successor liberals in this first decade of the 20th century. was Salisbury's nephew, so he simply inherited the premiership from his uncle, which is probably the origin of the phrase, Bob's your uncle. Now actually, if you look at his time in government, and he was only Prime Minister for three years, there's quite an impressive record. So there's a major education act passed in 1902, which really laid the foundation for primary education in Britain. There was a major land reform act that transferred lands

to tenant farmers in Ireland. He created the Committee for Imperial Defence and the General Staff. You start to see alliances being formed with Japan and with France. But his premiership was torn apart by the issue of tariffs, tariff reform, which was really the Brexit of its day. The question of whether Britain should remain a free trading power or whether it should build a tariff wall around its empire. And the effect was that a government that had won a landslide in 1900 didn't even make it to the next general election. The government simply collapsed in 1905. And the general election that followed, Balfour himself lost his seat. Isn't it weird? It seems to me in this period, and perhaps across the 200 years we're going to talk about, the Tories seem to lose office when they just turn on themselves in kind of extraordinary moments of internecine fighting.

And then there's always reforming liberals like Campbell Bannerman and Russell or Melbourne, who are able to kind of jump in and do some stuff before the Tories get their act together again. Yeah, conservatives are often held together by their opponents so those years of salisbury's dominance brought together wildly divergent political characters all of whom opposed home rule for ireland but once that unifying enemy recedes and by the early 1900s home rule had sort of dropped off the political agenda then as you say the divisions in the party re-erupt it breaks down and you get these reforming interludes and you get campbell bannerman who's a kind of interesting figure but dies in office doesn't he and obviously and followed by asquith and lloyd george

the first world war looms very large here but but domestically, perhaps second to only Labour in 1945 as a reformist series of administrations. Yes, the Liberal governments from 1905 to 1914 under Campbell Bannerman and Asquith leave behind an extraordinary legislative record, and they really invent what Liberalism was. It's no longer about the Constitution or about reform of the church. Now it's about old age pensions, free school meals for children, national insurance against unemployment or sickness, maternity benefits. So you start to see the beginning of the welfare state. You also get the removal of the veto of the House of Lords in 1911 and a major Home Rule Act, which if the First

World War had not intervened, might have taken the history of Ireland down a completely different path. I can't believe we're going to do this, but let's not really talk about the First World War very much, because I think what's so interesting about David Lloyd George and his administration, obviously having been an extraordinary reformist chancellor under Asquith, is his fingerprints all over modern Britain in all these other ways. I mean, partition of Ireland, enfranchising women, over modern Britain, all these other ways. I mean, partition of Ireland, enfranchising women, even apart from the First World War, this gigantic enterprise, incredibly important domestically.

Yes, a rare example of someone who was both a brilliant campaigning politician, he was the best speaker and the funniest speaker of his generation, and someone who was very good at problem solving in government. Also the only Welsh speaker as ever to have been Prime Minister and someone who was useful to his political allies when they wanted to get something done. So when they wanted to fight the First World War, if you're a Tory or if you're a reformer and you want to hold each pensions, he's the man to make that happen. But also someone that you regard as very dangerous if you don't like what he's doing. It's remarkable that even in 1940, he was a potential candidate to lead the country during the Second World War. Extraordinary, isn't he? One minute he's being chased around by Tory mobs, the next minute he's

building giant numbers of dreadnought battleships, he's enfranchising some women, he's going to... Just an extraordinary career. The liberals, despite laying the foundations of the welfare state and enfranchising working class men and some women in 1918, they don't do what the Democrats did in the US and become the kind of centre left of centre party of opposition to the conservatives. They get eclipsed by the Labour Party, which starts to grow in this period and by 1924 gets into government, albeit in an unsatisfactory way. Why do the Liberals lose out in this battle to become the other pole in the British bipolar system? I think it's hard to exaggerate the effect of the First World War on the Liberal Party, that the party formally split in 1916

when Asquith became Liberal leader in exile and Lloyd George was leading a coalition government. And that meant that in 1918 you had rival Liberal candidates running against each other in the same constituency. If you were a Liberal voter you had to choose were you an Asquith Liberal or were you a Lloyd George Liberal. The party was on its knees organisationally. Lots of local organisations simply shut up shop because they simply couldn't hold together their rival factions. And so at exactly the moment when you've passed the 1918 Reform Act, when you've got millions of new voters, millions of women voters coming onto the electorate for the first time, the Liberal Party simply wasn't there. So it misses that crucial historical moment and the Labour Party is able to establish itself

instead as the alternative to the Lloyd George Conservative-dominated coalition. And then you get the 1920s, I guess it must be a perfect storm of national, international, turbulent ideas, politics, economics, with a multi-party parliament and an electoral system that just is unable to cope with that. So you get these crazy swings, Bonalor, Baldwin and Macdonald, all in the first half of the 1920s. None of them administrations more than a year. Wild swings of voting. It's kind of difficult to understand, really. Yes, and there's an analogy here with the period after the Napoleonic Wars, in that there was real anxiety among a lot of politicians in the 1920s about whether democracy could work. They had just passed universal suffrage for men

and a substantial female electorate, and the result of this appeared to be an electorate that didn't know its mind from one minute to the next. So there are three general elections in consecutive years, 1922, 1923, and 1924. 1922 is a Tory landslide, 1923 is a hung parliament from which a minority Labour government merges, and 1924 is a Tory landslide. Now this isn't an electoral swing, this is electoral drunk driving. And so one of the reasons why we see so many coalitions in this period is because a lot of politicians wanted almost to neutralize the electorate by lifting government above that very turbulent electoral sea then weirdly you get stanley baldwin with a crushing majority in 1924 and then that takes us up to presumably the Great Depression in 1929 is a

landmark and undermines the argument that conservatives are a safe pair of hands. Yes, well, Baldwin really projected himself as the teacher of British democracy. His pitch was, we have conducted a great experiment in government, and he always used that term, democracy is an experiment, and it is our responsibility as statesmen to make it work. So he represents himself as the anti-Lloyd George. If Lloyd George is all about flash and dazzle, Baldwin is about safety first, to use one of his slogans. And it's about a calm teaching of the electorate and a careful management of public affairs. Now he loses in 1929 before the Wall Street crash, partly because the electorate seems to be tiring of that kind of rather dull bank manager style politics. But when you then get the Wall Street

crash and the implosion of the Labour Party, That then becomes very attractive again in the 1930s. Yeah, Labour takes the helm in 1939, an almost impossible situation they face. And then Labour is torn apart. Ramsay Donald interestingly ends up in coalition, basically propped up by the Tories in the kind of national interest. Is this a sort of tragic figure, do you think, at this point? I think Macdonald is the most tragic of all British prime ministers, in that this was the man who had, more than anybody else, more even than Keir Hardie, had built the Labour Party, had taken it from a small meeting room in Farringdon to a party of government, the first man to become Labour prime minister. And yet he ends his career expelled from the Labour Party, a hate figure for decades after his death on the left, and really trapped in, rather than

leading, a coalition dominated by the Conservative Party. And his diary entries from the 1930s, they're like looking into the abyss. the sense of a man whose whole mind and sense of himself has collapsed because everything he stood for in politics has broken down. Oh God, who'd be a politician? I'll tell you what. The Tories end up with very solid majorities into the 1930s, don't they? And we've got Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, a lot on their plates, really. How important do you think the rise of Germany and Japan in Asia are? Or are they also obsessed with domestic politics within Britain still dealing with the fallout of this gigantic dislocation of the late 1920s, early

1930s? I think if we want to understand appeasement, we have to recognise that these governments felt themselves to be walking a tightrope both at home and abroad. So one of the really interesting things about 1930s politics is that Tories had massive majorities from 1931 onwards. They could have governed on their own. They didn't. They governed in a national government, a coalition. And until 1935, they governed under a Labour Prime Minister. And that says something about their lack of confidence, the sense of wanting to shelter behind a Labour figure, and to try in some ways to share the blame across parties for the really difficult things that they were going to have to do economically in response to the Great Depression and to mass unemployment. So it's a party that had a real sense that political collapse was possible at

home. And at the same time, Britain's position was disintegrating overseas. Because it was a principle of British foreign policy that Britain could not fight a war at the same time against Germany and Europe, against Japan in the Pacific, and against Italy in the Mediterranean. And yet that was the scenario that seemed to be building at a time when the United States was receding from politics, when France was politically unstable, and Russia was off the map because of its own revolution. Exhausting, exhausting. That brings us up to the outbreak of war in 1939 and about Neville Chamberlain's ill-fated wartime administration, we need say no more. While I've got you here, because you are not just a brilliant historian,

but an extraordinary commentator on contemporary politics, the office of prime minister seems to have changed even quite a lot recently. We talked on previous podcasts about the kind of presidential prime minister. How unmoored from this period, the long 19th century, do you now feel that the modern office is? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to

conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I think the change in the premiership from the 18th century to the present is comparable to the change from someone who drives a coach and horses to someone who flies a jet plane. The basic job description is the same, you're still a travel worker, but the skill set you need, the context in which you're operating, the technology around you is fundamentally different. In the 19th century,

you had to be a parliamentarian to be a successful prime minister. You had to be a good public speaker. You had to be able to win over a sceptical House of Commons. You had to manage a genuinely independent parliament. Until quite late in the century, you didn't really need to be able to engage with the public. Lord John Russell would have been a hopeless figure on question time, or bake-off, or whatever it is that prime ministers nowadays are expected to do. So today, a prime minister has to build their authority mostly on their engagement with the public, which is one of the things that fell to Theresa May. In the 19th century, you had to

build it on your relationship with Parliament. And of course, the kind of things that government does, the scope of government activity, the range of things for which a prime minister is responsible, has changed beyond recognition. Isn't that interesting for constitutional scholars like you? Because why? Surely the office of prime minister should be circumscribed by the laws that we've passed, by precedent. If the office of prime minister changes radically because of things like technology and access to Twitter and the media and fashion, then do we need to update our laws and protocols to reflect that? In which case, that means that lawmaking inevitably just chases around. Surely the lawmaking should set the

reality rather than belatedly accepting that the nature of this new reality well i think the danger then is that you freeze the premiership at a particular moment in time and if we think about the term itself to be prime minister is simply to be the first person in government and so we would expect that role to change as government changes. No one in the 19th century thought it was the responsibility of government to run the economy. In fact, they didn't even have a word for the economy. That wasn't a 19th century term that existed. Nobody thought that it was a responsibility of government to look after the health of their population. There's a poster from the Edwardian period which looks a

bit like a poster for The Exorcist and it's Lloyd George sitting next to the bed of a sick worker nursing him back to health. If you had shown that to Gladstone when he was Chancellor he'd have thought that was nothing to do with the job of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. So I think it's just a function of the fact that what government is what we want to govern constantly changes and the role will evolve with it the role seems to change rather radically and yet the methods we have of scrutinizing the role or ensuring accountability or ensuring that laws are still passed in the way that we wish to pass them the prime minister can change really fast but the other bits are really, really difficult to change.

Well, the process of lawmaking remains much the same. Although, of course, Prime Ministers can usually now command very disciplined party majorities. So a Prime Minister who has a majority can assume that they will pass their legislation in a way that a Gladstone or a Palmerston never could. But the way in which we appoint prime ministers has changed. They're now elected by party members rather than emerging from discussions among party elites. The way in which prime ministers are scrutinised has changed. Gladstone never had to do a TV interview. He never really did a newspaper interview in the modern sense. Most people never saw their prime minister.

If they read a speech by them, then it was reproduced word for word, stretching across pages and pages of newspapers. So the day-to-day life and the kind of informal constitutional architecture of the premiership, I think, has changed more than might immediately appear. Yeah, it feels that the individuals enjoy an agility that the rest of the system doesn't. So for example building a tradition in which people resign when they've been found to make a grievous error that took 100 years to build that tradition and people seem to have decided quite recently overnight that they don't have to abide by anymore. So how do we as citizens build the next institutions of accountability when inevitably it's going to be so much slower?

I think you could argue that the great strength of the British constitution is that it's highly flexible, that it can change very rapidly and adapt to new circumstances. You could also argue that the great weakness of the British constitution is that it's highly flexible and that it can be abused and manipulated very easily by a new prime minister with a majority. But ultimately it comes down to where does accountability really lie? In the 19th century it lay in the House of Commons and it could perform that function of holding prime ministers to account very effectively. Now it rests broadly with the public,

with the electorate, not just at general elections, but in the way that we respond to politics as it's happening, in the feedback that government is constantly getting from opinion polls and the like. And that means that accountability is more diffuse, but in a sense that's the price of democracy. And ultimately, I think there's a limit to how far it is useful to criticise our political leaders. Because actually, the buck comes back to us. And the prime ministers, even now, can only get away with what we the electorate will allow them to. Completely agree. Thank you very much. Great place to finish. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure pleasure thanks for having me

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone

and finished hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast most of you are probably asleep so I'm talking to your snoring forms but anyone who's awake it would be great if you could do me a quick favor head over to wherever you get your podcasts

and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review it makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do madness I know but them's the rules then we go further up the charts more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.