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WSWS : Book Review

A lesson from history regarding Mr. Blair

Edward Pearce’s The Great Man, Sir Robert Walpole

By Ann Talbot
20 March 2007

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Edward Pearce The Great Man, Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) 352 pp.

A prime minister has drawn unprecedented power into his own hands. Exploiting fear to maintain his hold on the government, democratic rights are curtailed by punitive legislation. There is corruption in high places—the sale of honours is rumoured and financial chicanery is rife, speculative bubbles threaten the stability of the state and economy, and are covered up. A rich elite compete for power and wealth while the majority of the population are excluded from political power...

It all sounds so familiar, but this is eighteenth century Britain and the prime minister in question is Robert Walpole, not Tony Blair. Edward Pearce’s new book is an account of the life and career of Britain’s first prime minister who held power from 1721 to 1742. Strangely, this is the first full-scale biography of Walpole since J.H. Plumb began the task, but gave up after the first volume.

Walpole has been credited with keeping Britain out of foreign wars and laying the basis of the Hanoverian stability on which Britain’s world hegemony was founded in the nineteenth century, but historians and biographers have been curiously reluctant to portray the man. For Pearce, Walpole’s contempt for war is his sole virtue—“more evident to our age than his.” What he objects to most strongly in his subject is that “Walpole was about power—acquisition of power, keeping of power and getting rich by power.... Walpole did not invent English political corruption, but he turned it into a public company.”

Perhaps it is because Walpole’s life and career accord so badly with the self-constructed image of Britain as the home of parliamentary democracy that no other biography of the man who was satirised by Henry Fielding as Jonathan Wild, the Great Man, by John Gay as Mr. Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera, by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels and also attacked by Alexander Pope has ever been completed. A prime minister who could survey the members of the House of Commons and say that every man had his price because he had paid it and bought their loyalty is not an inspiring figure, but nonetheless, it is to Walpole that we can trace many of the features of the modern British political system.

Walpole was the first prime minister to live at 10 Downing Street. He did not do so as prime minister, since such an office was considered to be inconsistent with the constitution. The title was only ever applied to him as an insult. It was one of many epithets he acquired in his long career. His official position was that of First Lord of the Treasury and that is still the title on the door of Number 10. Walpole bequeathed the house to his successors as their official residence.

More fundamentally, Walpole was the first leading minister of the crown who maintained his position by his ability to dominate the House of Commons, rather than through the favour of the monarch. Unlike previous leading ministers, Walpole remained in the House of Commons and exercised political power through his own efforts to secure a majority. He only accepted a peerage when he fell from power. While he still retained some ability to manipulate events from behind the scenes in that role, his career essentially reflects the emergence of the House of Commons as the dominant political institution in British political life.

British politics has undergone many transformations between Walpole and Blair. In Walpole’s day, the rotten borough and the pocket borough were common and parliamentary seats often went uncontested because they were effectively in the gift of leading landowners. With the emergence of the working class in the nineteenth century, it became necessary to widen the franchise and reform the electoral system. Early in the twentieth century, the Labour Party emerged as the party of the trade unions with mass working class support. Yet despite these major social and political changes, one of the consistent themes of British political life in the intervening centuries has been the way in which the office of prime minister has been strengthened to an extent that would be thought unusual and unwise in any other representative democracy.

There are few formal checks and balances on the powers of the British prime minister who, so long as he or she can maintain the loyalty of his cabinet and a majority in Parliament, exercises many of the prerogatives once accorded to the monarch.

Indeed the office of prime minister was strengthened as the British state came under greater challenge from the working class and class tensions were sharpened by revolutionary upheavals abroad. The first time the title was officially used was in 1905, and the first time it was used in an Act of Parliament was in 1917. Although the political parties, the electorate and the electoral system have changed, the institution of prime minister has retained a remarkably similar position in the body politic since Walpole first began to create it in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Seen from that historical perspective, the contradictory reality of the present situation, in which Blair exercises immense power and seems able to ignore criticism and yet is, at one and the same time, in an undeniable crisis, becomes more comprehensible. Blair has all the powers that his predecessors accrued for the office of prime minister. In certain crucial respects these are even greater because the informal checks on prime ministerial powers that were once exercised by the cabinet, senior back bench colleagues, former ministers ensconced in the House of Lords, the parliamentary opposition and, not least in the case of a Labour prime minister, by the leaders of the major trade unions, have all diminished in importance.

It is as though we see two ends of a political trajectory. At one end is Walpole when the means of parliamentary management were rough and venal. At the other is Blair under conditions in which the more subtle mechanisms that were introduced to mediate the class struggle have all but disintegrated. What is left is an unnervingly eighteenth century scene of patronage and jobbery that threatens to expose the essentially undemocratic nature of a system of parliamentary government constructed to further the interests of a young and aggressive capitalist class. In its senility, the British political elite seem to be re-enacting the patterns of behaviour characteristic of their youth in a series of diseased convulsive movements.

Edward Pearce’s book has a contemporary relevance and is valuable for acquiring some historical perspective on current politics in Britain. Pearce has had a long career as a journalist. He was a leader writer for the Daily Express, a Daily Telegraph parliamentary sketch writer, a columnist for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Yorkshire Post. The style of the book is that of an enthusiast rather than a professional historian who has been schooled in the writing of dry journal articles.

The downside is that the language is often elliptical and at times impenetrable. One likes to think it was written on an old fashioned typewriter. Its individual approach to syntax would certainly have sent a grammar checker into an overdrive of wiggly green lines. The language is colloquial and at times quaintly dated—dukedoms are “traded like cigarette cards”—but if the reader goes with the flow rather than attempting to pin down every statement it produces a rich impression of eighteenth century England and its rulers.

It is a book written with obvious relish and a sense of mischief and should be read in the same way. It is probably best teamed with Jeremy Black’s Walpole in Power, J.H. Plumb’s Walpole for a more formal appraisal of the period, and E.P. Thompson’s essential Whigs and Hunters. For an impression of the style of the period, a trip to Walpole’s home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk is all that is required. The main state rooms remain largely as they were in the Great Man’s day. Although to see the collection of old master paintings that he acquired it is necessary to go the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, since Walpole’s grandson sold them to Catherine the Great.

The image of an ageing journalist tapping away on a Remington is probably one we should dispense with, however, because Pearce is an inveterate blogger; and most of his electronic output seems to be aimed at Tony Blair. “Blair has two clear positions,” he writes to the London Review of Books, “centralisation of power in his own hands and indifference, verging on contempt, for poorer people.” On the Guardian “Comment is Free” site we find, “You might consider him [Walpole] a detestable prime minister, but at least he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.”

For Pearce, this is an essential difference between Walpole and Blair. Walpole is reputed to have said, “Fifty thousand men dead in Europe last year and not one Englishman.” He knows that Walpole’s avoidance of war did not stem from humanitarianism. He explains that Walpole introduced an extraordinary range of capital offences, notably the Black Act of 1723, in defence of property. But nonetheless as a biographer, and because of his hostility to Blair’s warmongering, he seems to want to find some higher quality in Walpole.

In comparison to Blair’s reckless invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which has shown complete disregard for the lives of either soldiers or civilians, Walpole had a far more measured and rational approach to British foreign affairs. It is not so much a redeeming feature of the man, however, as an expression of the stage of development through which British capitalism was then passing.