The greasy pole to Downing Street: climb it and weep
GIMSON’S PRIME MINISTERS by Andrew Gimson (Square Peg £10.99)
Who, in their right mind, would want to be Prime Minister? We blame them for things that are not their fault. When they do get things right, we rarely give them credit. And every idle drinker in pubs across the land thinks he can do the job better than they can.
Yet, ambitious politicians have always competed furiously to climb what Disraeli called ‘the greasy pole’ to the top.
This entertaining book by former parliamentary sketch writer Andrew Gimson sums up the careers of the 52 men and two women who made it.
Some always seemed marked out for greatness. In 1900, a young Englishman visited America. The author Mark Twain introduced him to an audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I have the honour to introduce Winston Churchill: hero of five wars, author of six books, and future Prime Minister of England.’ Twain was right, although 40 years passed before his prophecy finally came true.
others were thrust into office almost by accident. Lord Goderich, who was briefly Prime Minister in the 1820s, couldn’t stand the strain. he had an unfortunate tendency to burst into tears in a crisis. George IV called him ‘ a damned, snivelling, blubbering blockhead’.
Earlier prime ministers seem to have had a surprising penchant for fighting duels. In 1780, Lord Shelburne, who became Prime Minister two years later, crossed swords with an opponent in hyde Park. he was wounded slightly in the groin.
‘I don’t think Lady Shelburne will be any the worse for it,’ he confided to his second as he was carried from the field.
The Duke of Wellington, PM between 1828 and 1830, even indulged in pistols at ten paces while he was in office. Incensed by insults in the house of Lords, he squared up to Lord Winchilsea in what is now Battersea Park.
Wellington fired first and missed. Winchilsea shot into the air and apologised for his remarks. Wellington touched his hat, said ‘Good morning’ and rode back to Westminster.
Wellington’s fame was so great that a city in New Zealand, a tree (the Wellingtonia), a dish (beef Wellington), a regiment, a school and a boot were named after him.
Just as famous were the great 19thcentury rivals Disraeli and Gladstone. Gimson calls the former ‘ the most improbable Prime Minister in this book’.
Disraeli’s father was a man of letters — the author of six volumes of Curiosities of Literature — and his grandfather had emigrated from Italy to London and prospered as an importer of straw hats.
Most prime ministers of the 19th century had been to Eton or harrow and then gone on to oxford or Cambridge. Disraeli had been educated in Walthamstow.
Gladstone was a man of prodigious energies. A classical scholar, estimated to
have read the Iliad 36 times in the original Greek during his lifetime, he was also deeply religious.
As Gimson puts it, he ‘ turned politics into a morality play starring himself as God’s right-hand man’. Disraeli, even more succinctly, once said of him: ‘He has not a single redeeming defect.’
The fame of other prime ministers from the past has faded.
Who now knows much about Lord Aberdeen, prime minister at the outbreak of the Crimean War? He kept a diary in Latin to chronicle his late wife’s ghostly visits to him, and later married a woman he had once described as ‘ one of the most stupid persons I have ever met with’.
Andrew Gimson has written a book that is very useful for answering (or devising) pub quiz questions.
Who was the only PM to die in 10 Downing Street? (Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1908.) Who was the shortest of all PMs? (Spencer Perceval, who barely made it to 5ft tall). Perceval was also, of course, the only PM to be assassinated. He was shot in the heart in the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a ruined businessman who unaccountably blamed the government for his imprisonment for debt in Russia. Who was the only PM to play first- class cricket? ( Sir Alec Douglas- Home, who turned out for Middlesex twice in the Twenties.) But the book is also much more than that. It is a painless, highly readable introduction to nearly three centuries of British political history, and to the odd assortment of individuals who have scrambled up that greasy pole.