Biography: William Hague has produced an excellent study of one of Britain's great prime ministers.
Pleasant the scholar's life! William Hague when researching his study of William Pitt was given access to letters in private hands, the reading of which was "enlivened by gastronomic and alcoholic refreshment of which Pitt would have heartily approved". Again, purely in the interests of research, of course, the well-known wine merchants "Berry Brothers and Rudd held a convivial lunch for me at which Hugh Johnson's great knowledge of the history of wine was thoroughly tapped and the capacity of eighteenth-century bottles examined". Even that pompous snob, the late Lord Jenkins rowed in, giving advice, and entertaining Hague in the appropriate surroundings of Brooks's Club. It's a wonder the book got written. But then, for a "14-pints-a-day" man writing about a "three-bottle-a-day" man, such conviviality could be taken in one's stride.
The attraction of author to subject is obvious. William Pitt, variously styled "Honest Billy", "Master Billy" and "the infant Hercules", was the youngest ever prime minister of Great Britain; he was also the longest-serving prime minister (a month shy of 19 years); and he was the longest-serving war-time prime minister. William Hague, by contrast, at 36 years old, was the youngest leader of the Conservatives, and could on precedent legitimately expect high office, but because of his strange appearance (he was devastatingly dubbed "the Fighting Foetus") that baseball cap, and his bragging about drinking, it all went disastrously wrong, and Hague entered the record books as the first leader of the Conservative party not to become prime minister, hardly an enviable distinction, though he has since been joined by Iain Duncan Smith in what promises to be a growing club.
Youth, and ambition, are what bind the two Williams, biographer and subject, together. Pitt was something of a child prodigy: he was, cooed one contemporary, "not eight years old and really the cleverest child I ever saw": Hague at 14 was ordering Hansard from his local newsagent, and at 16, famously, was lecturing the Tory party conference, and ticking off Mrs Thatcher to boot.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell who is speaking: "He was young, but he had known no other life and had prepared from infancy to lead the political life of the nation". Or: "He must have known, looking around him in the House of Commons that he merited high office and that he was one of the very few people actually capable of governing the country". Or: "This strange-looking young man was the principal opposition to the government". They are all references to Pitt, but they could easily fit Hague himself.
Pitt's intellect and eloquence make him Hague's hero, and in his biography he does justice to both without being blind to Pitt's many shortcomings. In particular, Hague's comments on Pitt's political career are valuable precisely because we have here one politician writing about another and interpreting their actions.
For examples, when a politician knocks an opponent down, his first thought is to find "some means to prevent him getting up again"; or, magnaminity in politics is to be shown "only when it is either inconsequential or positively hurtful" (Ouch!); or, Pitt had no interest in monitoring his own finances and "this is a common fault among politicians" (C.J.Haughey take a bow); and lastly "the real power of politicians always depends not on the station they presently hold but on the general expectation of their future influence" (photocall for the entire cabinet).
These insights are the highlights of a well-researched, and carefully-crafted biography of a great peace-time prime minister who led Britain to recovery after the disaster of the American war but who stayed on too long and proved a disastrous war-time leader.
Economics and finance were Pitt's strongpoints; strategy and war were emphatically not: by the time of his death in 1806, Pitt could be regarded as the major obstacle to Britain's eventual triumph in the war against Napoleonic France.
The writing is generally workmanlike, though there are a few lapses: Pitt's reputation was now "reaching the stratosphere"; the government was "tottering to its doom"; "the die was cast" (twice); and, a personal favourite, "he had dipped his toe into the vicious whirlpool that his personal finances would become". But such slips are made up for by the brilliant discussion of the reasons for Pitt's refusal to ruin his arch-enemy, Charles James Fox, in the late 1780s, and of the reasons for Pitt's resignation in 1801.
Irish affairs are treated perfunctorily throughout, with rather too much emphasis on the "buy and sale" aspect of the Union negotiations of 1799, and there is the inevitable modish discussion of Pitt's sexuality (aged 37 Pitt had still had no intimacy with the opposite sex - does anyone care about this?).
Overall, this is an excellent account of Pitt's public and private career, but it will not supercede the existing volumes on Pitt such as those by John Ehrman and others.
It is a political biography by a political insider who brings much personal, painful, and convivial experience to the task. Apparently Pitt's three bottles of port would barely count as two bottles of wine nowadays. Time spent in Berry Brothers and Rudd is rarely wasted.
William Pitt the Younger By William Hague, Harper Collins, 652 pp, £25
Thomas Bartlett is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD. His latest book is Revolutionary Dublin 1795-1801 (Four Courts Press)