BOOKS
Lord Randolph Churchill
By ROBERT BLAKE
THE 1880s are surely one of the most fascinat- ing decades in recent British political history. Think of its events—the invasion of Egypt, the Phcenix Park murders, the Bradlaugh case, the Home Rule crisis, the Pigott forgeries, the Dilke scandal. Or think of its characters: at what other place or time would one be able to inspect such a strange and incongruous collection of portraits —Mr. Gladstone and Queen Victoria, Joseph Chamberlain and General Gordon, Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill?
It was not merely the surface of politics which presented so intriguing an aspect. Below that sur- face profound and powerful currents were moving. Democracy was on the march. The Reform Act of 1867 by enfranchising the urban householder had created a new mass electorate, which was to be doubled in 1884 by extension to the counties. But in 1880 the newly enfran- chised masses were still curiously inarticulate. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli had fully under- stood the new demands which lay below the sur- face of politics. Gladstone's first government did indeed pass a great number of reforms, but they were essentially middle-class anti-aristocratic re- forms largely irrelevant to the needs of the urban proletariat. As soon as he did something which really touched their interests he blundered. His Licensing Act was a godsend to the Tories, and he lost the election of 1874, borne down, as he sadly admitted, 'by a torrent of gin and beer.'
Disraeli was more acute, but he was old and ill, his policy of social reform was not pushed far enough, and, although he shrewdly saw that chauvinism could appeal to the masses as well as to the classes, his forward policy in Asia and Africa ended in military disaster. With jingoism nothing fails like failure. By 1880 Gladstone was back again, but more out of tune than ever with the bread-and-butter demands of the masses. Thus, with the Tory Party demoralised by Dis- raeli's death and its leadership in abeyance between Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford North- cote, there was no one at the top in politics who really understood the key to electoral success in the new conditions. There was an opportunity, and two people seized it : on the Liberal side the man of the hour was Joseph Chamberlain, on the Tory side Lord Randolph Churchill.
In attempting a fresh biography of that extra- ordinary figure, Mr. Rhodes James* has under- taken a bold task. For inevitably he finds himself writing in the long shadow, as of some vast yet finely moulded obelisk, cast by one of the greatest Political biographies ever written—Sir Winston's famous life of his father, first published in 1906. Much new material is available now, and much can be said now that could not be said then. (There are, indeed, some things, well enough known, about Lord Randolph's life, which cannot bc printed even today.) Nevertheless, Mr. James cannot by the nature of things avoid.retelling a great deal that has been told before, and told in a magnificent manner which is bound to make corn-
* LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. By Robert Rhodes James. (Weidenfeld and Nieolson, 36s.)
parisons odious. This k not to disparage the new book. It contains a mass of fresh information; Mr. James is careful, scholarly and sensible; and he writes with vigour and clarity.
lt was clear from Sir Winston's account that the crucial event in his father's life was a quarrel with 'a great personage.' This resulted in his temporary social ostracism and gave him that very large chip on his shoulder which explains so much of his contempt for the Establishment and his deter- mination to rivet the attention of the world that had cut him. Since the personage was the Prince of Wales, and the quarrel involved a threat on Lord Randolph's part to publish the Prince's love letters, it was clearly not a story that Sir• Winston could relate in 1906. Even Mr. James seems—or is this mere imagination?—unduly dis- creet. Nevertheless, he tells us far more than has ever been revealed before : how there was nearly a duel; how Lord Randolph had to sign an apology drafted by the Queen and the Lord Chancellor; how his father the Duke, like an inverted Lord Lundy, was obliged, taking Lord Randolph as his Secretary, to go out and govern —Ireland.
It is one of the ironies of history that the decade which saw the first effective assertion of working- class aspirations should have ended with the defeat of the two men who most effectively ex- pressed them. Neither Sir Winston nor Mr. James has fully analysed Tory democracy. It is im- portant to realise that the obstacles in . Lord Randolph's way were far greater than those con- fronting Chamberlain in his curiously similar en- deavours. The latter could afford to press a real radical programme because he did not mind if he split the Liberal Party and drove out the Whigs. To him Lord Hartington and his friends were an antediluvian survival, ccelacanths whose presence in the ranks of modern Liberalism was totally irrelevant and eccentric. The party would be stronger without them. There was on the face of it, nothing self-contradictory or unattainable in Chamberlain's aims. What dished him was the fact that democracy was on the march in Ireland as well as in England. Home Rule gave Gladstone the unexpected trump card to play to Chamber- lain's ace of social reform. The party was indeed split, with Chamberlain among the 'outs' instead of the 'ins,' an ally of Hartington, the very man whom he wished to drive out of the party.
Lord Randolph's position was from the start very different to Chamberlain's. Aristocracy was an integral part of Toryism. To alienate the great landlords would have been to disrupt the whole basis of the party. It was quite impracticable for a Conservative Minister to press a genuine radical attack on what were then regarded as the rights of property. Lord Randolph could laugh at W. H. Smith and Cross as 'Marshall and SnelgrOve,' he could fulminate against Northcote and 'the Goats,' he could groan at 'the old men crooning round the fires of the Carlton Club.' But he could not—and probably never really wished to—assert a policy whose content, as opposed to its dema- gogic form, was truly radical. This is the reason why, for example, his famous Dartford programme seems such a Milk-and- water affair compared with Chamberlain's 'un- authorised programme' of a year earlier. There was, indeed, one popular cry open to a Tory demagogue—imperialism. But it so happened that this was anathema to Churchill, who had made a great name for himself earlier by attacking the Liberals for overthrowing that early prototype of Colonel Nasser, the unlucky Arabi Pasha. Even Lord Randolph's famous resignation was on an issue which would have pleased Gladstone rather than Disraeli, Treasury economy as against ex- penditure on armaments.
It is no doubt true that, although he could never have radicalised the Tory Party, he might, if he had been endowed with a different tempera- ment, have moved it gradually Leftwards. Then perhaps the long rule • of the Cecil§ might have been tempered by something slightly less negative than opposition to Home Rule and hostility to the Boers. But Lord Randolph's temperament was his weakness as well as his strength. The same ambitious, neurotic egotism which had pushed him in six years from an obscure back-bencher to the second man in the government made him an insufferable colleague. Mr. James makes a good case against those (among thein the author of this review) who have maintained that his resig- nation was a direct bid for the leadership of the party. It is clear that he did not expect it to be accepted, and that the Prime Minister seized the opportunity to get rid of him. Even so, a trial of strength would surely have come some time. Equally surely Lord Salisbury, that slow-moving, heavy-bearded, cool and silent figure, would have won.
Nine years later Lord Randolph was dead. The disease of his brain gained on him slowly, and there is something profoundly pathetic about the dying man rising with his vast bundle of notes and delivering speech after speech of mumbling in- coherence to a half-empty House, Gladstone, almost alone of the great figures of the day, treat- ing the man who had been his deadliest political enemy with unfailing courtesy and attention. The Old Guard of the two parties remained at the top. Had Churchill or Chamberlain suc- ceeded, who knows whether the Labour Party in its present form would ever, have come into existence? For good or ill the great struggles of the Eighties have shaped the political pattern ever since, and anything which elucidates the motives and characters of the combatants remains a matter of perennial fascination to the student of modern history.
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