A British Minister, When in His Prime

“Ireland, Ireland. That cloud in the West, that coming storm, the vehicle of God’s retribution.” William Ewart Gladstone could out-thunder, out-preach, out-face, outwork, out-weary and outlast any other public figure in 19th century Britain. (When Disraeli or Lord Palmerston did get the best of him, it was by quiet wit or patrician deafness, respectively.) He could also out-prophesy them.

It was in the 1840s that he wrote those words about Ireland. It was the start of his career and nearly half a century before the Irish question would wear him down, split his Liberal Party and take a long chokehold on Britain’s politics; one that nothing, from repression to concession, has ever quite loosened nor ever will, in all likelihood, until the British themselves rise up and declare their independence.

The Irish question occupies the last quarter of “Gladstone,” a personal and political biography by Roy Jenkins. Gladstone’s efforts to solve it, even though they abjectly failed, were in many ways the finest thing he attempted in his long life. They are also the finest thing in Jenkins’ long “Life,” an account of its subject’s efforts to establish Home Rule 30 years before it was finally granted--and conceivably, before it was too late.

The author was formerly a Cabinet minister and leader of the moderate faction of the British Labor Party, later a founder of the Liberal Democrats and, more recently, the author of a first-rate political memoir. Except for the Irish section, “Gladstone” is not first-rate.

It follows its subject’s life and career, month by month, as assiduously as if it were the diary that Gladstone obsessively kept.

Gladstone’s career lasted more than 60 years and he died at 89--and for the most part Jenkins is content to take them as they come, giving full accounts of the man’s immensely complex political battles and maneuvers, along with details about his speeches, family, health, travels, quirks and a great deal more. What is lacking is a thematic structure, an instigating thesis, an overarching view.

The details, on the other hand, are excellent, and they nourish the puzzle that Gladstone provided to his contemporaries and to generations since. He was a great man, undoubtedly. He was also an excessive, a comic, even a ridiculous man, and it is these three last qualities that Jenkins best captures.

He amazed with his unstoppable energy, battering-ram conviction and incessant speech. He was insatiably curious, and read and wrote continually. He was a polymath, but it was not enough to learn things; for Gladstone a thing was not learned until it was hammered into everyone else. He voraciously attended dinner parties where he gobbled up, not the food, but the conversation.

As long as Prince Albert, himself a hungry polymath, was there as a screen, Queen Victoria managed to tolerate her volubly didactic prime minister. As a widow, she could barely stand him. She preferred Disraeli’s witty gossip, and allowed him to sit when they talked privately. (Disraeli replaced the chair before he left so her courtiers would not know.) Gladstone was kept standing, which may partly account for her complaint that he addressed her like a public meeting.

Jenkins writes about the battles and maneuvers that saw Gladstone move over the decades from the Conservative Party to the Liberals. The politics are set out meticulously; the issues they were fought over are sometimes confusingly scanted.

The author recounts Gladstone’s practice, for a dozen years or so, of going out at night to talk to prostitutes. The purpose was reform, but Gladstone admitted in his diary to carnal temptation, perhaps more.

Jenkins excludes the charge of hypocrisy. There was genuine moral force in the man, and to present-day readers it comes across most clearly in his remarkable stand against his country’s chauvinist and imperial ventures. Some of his finest eloquence is directed against British pride. In one great speech, he assails:

” . . . That vain conception that we, forsooth, have a mission to be the censors of vice and folly, of abuse and imperfection among the other countries of the world; that we are to be the universal schoolmasters; and that all those who hesitate to recognize our office, can be governed only by prejudice or personal animosity, and should have the blind war of diplomacy forthwith declared against them.”