How Britain needs a leader of Gladstone’s stature now: the tax-cutting
reformer who makes Brown and Cameron look like pygmies
By Dominic Sandbrook
The Mail on Sunday/UK
26th December 2009
He was a man who spent his evenings walking the streets in search of
fallen women, struggled with an addiction to pornography, and recorded
in his diary episodes of violent self-flagellation.
He was also one of the most accomplished, courageous and influential
leaders in our history: an anti-imperialist, a passionate supporter of
the underdog, a parliamentary reformer and a tax-cutter, who served
four terms as Prime Minister and is synonymous with the Victorian age.
On Tuesday, it will be 200 years since William Ewart Gladstone, one of
the greatest statesmen this country has ever produced, was born in
Liverpool.
Reformer: ‘Grand Old Man’ William Gladstone in 1893
And at a time when the economy remains in the doldrums, public debt
has risen to record levels and corrupt MPs have dragged our democracy
into the gutter, we should pay a birthday tribute to a great man who
never failed to put country before party.
Thanks to the appalling neglect of our national history, generations
of British teenagers leave school today without knowing the story of
this genuinely inspirational man.
And yet by any standards, Gladstone’s career overflowed with colour
and incident.
Born on December 29, 1809, the son of a merchant, Gladstone was
extraordinarily precocious even as a child.
Dominic Sandbrook
One of his earliest memories was being made to stand on a table and
say ‘Ladies and gentlemen . . .’ to a large audience – probably at a
Liverpool rally in support of Tory MP George Canning. Gladstone was
just three years old at the time.
Hardy surprising, then, that from the outset he enjoyed a glittering
career. At Oxford, he was president of the Union and gained a Double
First in Classics and Mathematics.
After his oral exam, he characteristically complained that it had been
too easy. When the examiner tried to change topics, Gladstone
exclaimed: ‘No sir, if you please, we will not leave it yet’ and
carried on talking.
But unlike today’s spoiled politicians, Gladstone never took his
advantages for granted.
He may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he may
have gone to Eton, but he was driven by a fierce sense of Christian
mission – albeit one that sometimes manifested itself in alarmingly
peculiar ways.
In the late 1840s, after he had already enjoyed one spell as a
minister under the Tory Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone took up a hobby
that now sounds downright bizarre: walking the streets at night to
find ‘fallen women’ and encourage them to mend their ways.
To his friends, he insisted that his interest in London’s prostitutes
was purely charitable. But the evidence of his diaries tells a
different story.
Despite having eight children and a very happy marriage, Gladstone was
a man of irrepressible sexual drive. Tormented by his longings for
these women, and by his fascination with pornography, he punished
himself for his sins, recording in his diary that he had whipped
himself.
Today, it is hard to imagine a politician chastising himself for the
‘sin of impurity’, especially if the sin was only in the imagination.
But Gladstone took Biblical teachings very seriously – and his
self-flagellation was essentially an exercise in moral
self-discipline.
Meanwhile, Gladstone had embarked on a political journey the like of
which Britain had never seen.
Gordon Brown makes a point as he delivers his speech in the plenary of
the UN Climate Summit After beginning his ministerial career as a
Tory, he left the party in 1846 after Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws –
which protected the price of British crops from cheaper foreign
imports – had split the party.
>From this point on, Free Trade would be one of Gladstone’s political
touchstones. By sticking so firmly to his principles, he helped to
make Victorian Britain the workshop of the world.
A dazzlingly eloquent and ruth-lessly tax-cutting Chancellor in the
1850s and 1860s, he became leader of the new free-market Liberal Party
in 1867 and was elected Prime Minister in 1868.
In four separate terms in Downing Street, from 1868 to 1894 –
alternating with his hated Tory rival Benjamin Disraeli, Gladstone put
together a stunning record of reform and modernisation. Indeed, it
would be no exaggeration to call William Gladstone the architect not
just of Victorian Britain, but of modern Britain, too.
It was in his first term as Prime Minister, for example, that the
government introduced competitive exams for entrance into the Civil
Service, replacing the old corrupt patronage system.
It was Gladstone who abolished religious tests for university
applicants, and it was Gladstone who introduced the secret ballot in
general elections.
David Cameron delivers his keynote speech to delegates on the last
day of the 2009 Conservative Conference
He also reformed the British Army, abolishing the hideously wasteful
practice of selling officers’ commissions to emptyheaded aristocrats,
and turning it into a professional fighting machine.
The crucial thing about these reforms – and the ultimate tribute to
Gladstone’s vision – is that they lasted. These were not spin-driven
PR gimmicks: for Gladstone, the idea of tailoring his policies to win
admiring headlines would have been anathema.
For Gladstone was a man of immense intellectual seriousness. In an age
when many MPs vault straight from Oxbridge to Westminster without
experiencing anything of the real world, and when others can barely
string a sentence together, it is almost embarrassing to recall that
we once had a Prime Minister who spent his spare time writing learned
commentaries on the Greek poet Homer, and who reportedly read no fewer
than 21,000 books.
Gladstone’s intellect was matched only by his phenomenal physical
energy. One of his great enthusiasms was chopping down trees – a
slightly bizarre hobby he pursued into great old age.
Queen Victoria, who preferred the flattery of Disraeli, complained
that Gladstone ‘speaks to me as if I was a public meeting’. But to
millions of her subjects, Gladstone’s earnestness and eloquence were
hugely admirable.
William Gladstone, 19th century Liberal Prime Minister
In 1880, when he made one of his many political comebacks, a
staggering 86,930 people came to hear him speak – something that
would be unimaginable today.
And why so many ordinary people loved the ‘Grand Old Man’ is not hard
to discern. In an age of patrician politicians, he was a genuine
democrat, who trusted the people and had faith in their good sense.
He was no socialist: indeed, he spoke out often ‘on behalf of
individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed
Collectivism’. But at a time when millions were more prosperous and
better educated than ever, Gladstone recognised the desire for change.
‘The principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only
qualified by prudence,’ he said. Indeed, today’s legislators could
take a leaf from Gladstone’s book where parliamentary reform is
concerned.
Although, like most men of his generation, he drew the line at votes
for women, it was Gladstone who passed the Reform Act of 1884, giving
town and countryside the same voting rights for the first time
(previously, many rural dwellers had been denied the vote), sending
the electorate above five million and inaugurating a new age of mass
politics.
And Gladstone’s trust in the common man was not confined to mainland
Britain. In Ireland, he believed the only recipe for peace was to
grant Home Rule under the British crown – a solution that, had it
not been for the intransigence of the Lords and the Tories, might have
avoided the bloodshed of the last century.
Unlike most of his political colleagues, he was never carried away by
the false, fleeting glamour of jingoistic wars.
‘You should avoid needless and entangling engagements,’ he told an
audience in 1879. ‘You may boast about them, you may brag about them,
you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. But what
does all this come to, gentlemen?
‘If you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you
diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the Empire
and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its
duties.’
Wise words, and ones that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown should have
heeded when they sent our troops into foreign battlefields without the
resources to keep them safe. But then if Gladstone were somehow to
reawaken in 21st-century Britain, I suspect he would be appalled by
the record of his successors.
To the greatest Chancellor in our history, who boasted of saving money
on ‘candle-ends and cheese-parings’ and insisted that ‘economy is the
first and great article in my financial creed’, our level of public
debt – predicted to reach a staggering 77 per cent of our national
wealth in 2014 – would seem truly horrifying.
And as a staunch believer in tax cuts and balanced budgets, Gladstone
would be aghast at Gordon Brown’s profligate record. In his very first
Budget as Chancellor, he eliminated 123 duties and reduced 133 more.
During his second spell at the Treasury, he cut income tax from 9d to
4d in the pound, saying he wanted to let money ‘fructify in the
pockets of the people’.
Meanwhile, for all his concern for the poor, Gladstone would be
horrified by the modern welfare state. ‘We live at a time when there
is a disposition to think that the Government ought to do this and
that, and that the Government ought to do everything,’ he remarked in
1889.
‘If the Government takes into its hands that which the man ought to do
for himself, it will inflict upon him greater mischiefs than all the
benefits he will have received.’
The object of Liberalism, he explained, was ‘that the spirit of
self-reliance, the spirit of true and genuine manly independence,
should be preserved in the minds of the people’.
And ‘nothing should be done by the State’, he wrote in the Liberal
manifesto of 1885, ‘which can be done better or as well done by
voluntary effort’.
Above all, though, Gladstone was a man of supreme moral courage. He
preached the gospel of free trade and low taxes not because it was
convenient, but because he believed it was right.
And even when his principles clashed with his self-interest, he stuck
to his guns – for instance in 1886, when his belief in Irish Home
Rule split the Liberal Party and sent him into opposition.
By the time he retired as Prime Minister in 1894, he left Britain as
the world’s richest and most dynamic power, with its parliamentary
system and national finances the envy of the world – a far cry from
its position today.
As his friend John Morley recalled, it was entirely characteristic of
the Grand Old Man that in his final Cabinet, his ministers burst into
tears at the news of his resignation, while he ‘sat quite composed and
still’.
And it was even more characteristic that he spent the last four years
of his life writing scholarly articles and campaigning on behalf of
the persecuted Armenians under the Ottoman Empire – a painful
contrast with the shameless, sleazy money-grubbing of Tony and Cherie
Blair.
But then Gladstone belonged to a more serious age, in which duty,
virtue and responsibility were more than empty buzzwords. When he died
in 1898, thousands of ordinary Britons – Liberal and Tory alike –
filed past his body in Westminster Hall, in solemn recognition of what
they owed to the Grand Old Man.
He had his quirks and his failings, to be sure, and he would cut a
very peculiar figure in today’s House of Commons. But how we could do
with Gladstone’s courage and seriousness today.