Coming only a week after a descendant of Earl Grey – prime minister 1830-1834 – defeated a descendant of David Lloyd George – prime minister 1916-1922 – to a hereditary peerage in the House of Lords, British politics has perhaps never felt more a product of its long and tangled history. Yet for all its eccentricities, our parliamentary history has more to tell us than we often care to see.
Take this: a new prime minister faced with crushingly inauspicious odds, his only previous experience a brief stint as chancellor of the exchequer; the country at a low ebb after a national trauma that has left the economy shot; a public fed up with the corruption of its politics and the immorality of politicians who are ‘all the same’.
That was December 1783. Pitt the Younger had accepted George III’s invitation to form a government, only weeks after the shattering loss of Britain’s American colonies in the American War of Independence. Britain’s relations with her European neighbours were at best strained, while an expansionist Russia was of growing concern in the east.
Pitt’s solution was to attempt to personify competence and incorruptibility. He conspicuously refused sinecures, excluded former prime ministers from his first cabinet and earned himself the moniker ‘Honest Billy’. He patched up international relationships, set about tackling the nation’s finances, and cast himself as the antithesis of his gifted but deeply flawed nemesis, the libidinous Charles James Fox.
It’s true that history only resonates so far. Pitt was able to rely on the staunch support of a monarch happy to dispense patronage at will, and democracy itself was still in its germinal stages. There is less corruption nowadays, MPs do work harder, and the expectations of those in public life are higher.
But on the most fundamental level things haven’t really changed – and nor can they. Because for all the moral and technological advances in the intervening 200 years, we are still every bit as human as our Georgian forebears, and just as prone to weakness, and failure. Scandals are not an abnormality in British politics, and what to do with those who fail to meet our expectations is a conundrum as old as politics itself.
We forget this too easily, and need to be wiser to the fact that our 21st-century politics isn’t uniquely grubby. We and our leaders are still human. This is not to say that we should just shrug our shoulders and meekly accept our politicians’ faults and indiscretions. But it is to recognise that hoping for a scandal-free politics will only lead to disappointment.
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