A Professional in Politics

By ROBERT BLAKE

PALMERSTON has been ill served by his bio- graphers, and a definitive work based on his papers remains to be written yet. Dr. South- gate's study* is, however, the best that has appeared so far, and he has placed all students of history in his debt by this sensible, balanced and detailed assessment of the man and his policies.

Palmerston died a hundred years ago last October, just before his eighty-first birthday. No English statesman has had a longer period in office, and only two major figures, Gladstone and Churchill, have sat longer in the House of Commons. Palmerston, an Irish viscount deter- mined never to accept a UK peerage, was an MP for fifty-eight years, with one brief interlude. He spent forty-eight of them on the Treasury Bench, and he held the Foreign Office for longer than anyone else in our history—fifteen and a half years.

He was pre-eminently a government man, a member of the 'Official Corps' if ever there was one. It was not only that the income was useful to him, for he had little ready cash, though he owned large estates. He was essentially an administrator, one of those politicians who went into politics to do things, to carry on the King's government, not to engage in the drama and histrionics of an opposition which still in his early days suffered under the opprobrium of teing factious, even unpatriotic. In his youth the Majority party was the Tory party, but power Slid from its hands through a series of blunders and follies, and from 1830 for the rest of his life a Whig-Liberal coalition constituted the nor- mal ruling group. It was wholly natural, there- fore, that at exactly that time Palmerston became a Whig. He was, indeed, never really accepted by the true-blue Whigs. There was something about him which they did not like, and the Tories always hoped to get him back into the fold. They never succeeded. He was not going to to so foolish as to take second place in a Con- servative government under Derby, with Disraeli as a colleague, if he could obtain the leadership Of the majority party by playing his cards

Correctly. .

He was what schoolmasters call a late de- veloper. Too much can be made of his refusing Spencer Perceval's offer of the Chancellorship

tf the Exchequer when he was only twenty-four. t was normal in those days for a Prime Minister in the House of Commons to double the position With his own and, although the office carried cabinet rank, it had no real importance unless the Prime Minister was in the Lords. At all events, Palmerston knew his limitations. He was Content for nearly twenty years to perform con- scientiously the dull duties of Secretary at War in five successive administrations. He was a poor speaker and scarcely uttered except when intro- ducing or defending the Army Estimates. It was not till 1827 that he received cabinet rank, from Canning who, nevertheless, had no very high opinion of him. Palmerston, he once said, had reached 'the summit of mediocrity.' That part of his life which was not occupied by his unexacting official duties was largely spent in philandering. As a young man he was remark- ably good-looking, and the nickname 'Lord * 'THE MOST ENGLISH MINISTER . . : THE POLICIES AND POLITICS OF PALMERSTON. By Donald Southgate. (Macmillan, 63s.)

Cupid' was not bestowed for nothing. Eventu- ally, after numerous affairs, he settled down to a steady liaison with Emily Lamb, Lady Cowper. He was thus Melbourne's brother-in-law in all but name—a relationship which was certainly no obstacle in his advancement, and may have helped it. He married her in 1839 after Lord Cowper's death.

Palmerston's interest in foreign policy began with his entry into the cabinet. He remained in office after Canning's death, through Goderich's `transient and embarrassed' administration, into the Duke of Wellington's. Along with the `Canningites,' he resigned in May 1828, and just over a year later he first struck out for himself with a fierce attack on the Duke's foreign policy in a speech which he arranged to have printed and circulated. It was a bid for power. He was now clearly a candidate for office in a Whig cabinet, but he was far from being Grey's first choice as Foreign Secretary. It was only after two grand Whigs of unimpeachable in- tellectual and genealogical pedigree, Lords Holland and Lansdowne, had refused it that Palmerston received the coveted prize. He was to dominate English foreign policy, with occasional interludes, for the next thirty-five years.

That Palmerston was a great Foreign Secretary is generally agreed. There is less agreement as to why. He was, in the first place, a supreme professional. He worked unremittingly, read every dispatch, kept the Foreign Office lights burning late at night, to the discomfiture of the clerks, who found him a hard taskmaster. He knew his subject as no one else did, and was perhaps too much inclined to assume that, since no one else knew as much as he, no one else had opinions worth considering. His object, like that of most English statesmen, was to uphold the interests of England as a great nation and to preserve the peace. Dr. Southgate is right to point out the error of those who attribute to Palmerston belief in some kind of Wilsonian national self-determination and abuse him for betraying the principle. It is much more plausible' to suppose that he never believed in a principle which could so easily disturb the balance of power.

Palmerston's opposition to Metternich and the legitimist proponents of absolutism is easily mis- construed, and was at the time. He did not wish to spread the principles of revolutionary liberal- ism all over Europe. He wished to save the dynasties despite themselves by persuading them to make concessions to popular forces before it was too late. Naturally the rulers of Europe did not relish this advice, any more than Dr. Verwoerd or Mr. Smith does today. 'It has always,' Palmerston said in his famous Civis Romanus speech, 'been the fate of advocates of temperate reform and of constitutional improve- ment to be run at as the fomenters of revolution.'

But there are revolutionists of another kind; blind-minded men who animated by antiquated prejudices and daunted by ignorant apprehen- sions dam up the current of human improvement until the irresistible pressure of accumulated dis- content breaks down the opposing barriers and overthrows and levels to the ground those very institutions which a timely application of reno- vating means would have rendered strong and lasting. Such revolutionists as these are the men who call us revolutionists.

It was because the Tories seemed dominated by 'blind-minded' men and the Whigs seemed more likely to apply 'renovating means' to the English constitution that Palmerston had switched parties. Whig policy after 1830 was the model which he believed most nations could with ad- vantage copy, and which would best preserve the balance of power and peace in Europe.

Palmerston was not a war-monger. Had he been in control of affairs he would almost cer- tainly have averted the Crimean War by saying what he meant, whereas Aberdeen drifted into it through apathy and ambiguity. But he did at times adopt a bellicose tone which gave needless offence at crucial moments. The credit side of this otherwise undesirable style was the immense popularity which it drew upon him throughout England. And he needed this more than most statesmen, if he was to avoid dismissal.

For he was an insufferable colleague. In the 'thirties, Lord Holland, who was in the cabinet, complained that he could only find out what the government's foreign policy was by reading the newspapers. The row with the Queen and the Prince Consort is famous and, however priggish they may have been, the fact must be faced that they were largely in the right. But Palmer- ston recovered even from this setback. In 1855 the Crimean War made him the 'man of the hour,' like Lloyd George in 1916 and Churchill in 1940, and once he was in he could not easily be got out.

It is fashionable nowadays to talk of a `consensus.' Presumably this means, in a party system, that the head of the party in power is accepted by the other party as someone who, though naturally to be opposed, does not excite real detestation, who in fact commands the sup- port of that uncommitted centre which so often makes and breaks ministries. Peel, Salisbury and Baldwin all held such a position—for a time. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli ever held it. Their opponents hated them too much. But Palmerston achieved, through conservatism, longevity, gaiety and a brisk empirical jingoism, just such a con- sensus. The left-wing Liberals were powerless, though they did not approve. The Conservatives could find no real basis for opposition.

It looked at times as if he was immortal. In his eightieth year he consumed nine dishes of meat for dinner. Shortly before that he was „threatened with an action for 'criminal conver- sation' with a Mrs. Cane. It was a piece of blackmail, and Disraeli may have been right in thinking it made him more popular than ever. `She is certainly Cain,' ran the current joke, 'but can he be Abel?' In 1865 he won a crushing victory at the general election. But the end was near. The day before his death he insisted upon the Belgian Treaty being read to him rather than the Gospels, and when he died there was a half-finished letter before him and an open dispatch box by his side.