Peter Clarke

He was famously (to use LRB-speak) a 14th earl, and this he essentially remained. He had inherited the title from his father, the 13th Earl, and lived at the ancestral family seat, the Hirsel, near Coldstream, to his death at the age of 92; whereupon he was duly succeeded by his son as 15th earl. Indeed, had the Peerage Bill of 1963 not been amended so as to provide that a hereditary peerage itself was not extinguished if the current peer decided to disclaim the title, the 14th Earl of Home would not have agreed to avail himself of the new procedure, even to become prime minister of the United Kingdom. There was too much at stake. The family’s old motto said it all: ‘A Home, a Home, a Home.’ Brought up to believe that there’s no place like it, no race like it, Alec would hardly have let the family down, amid the hubbub of a leadership contest which turned the coroneted head of another contender, the once and future Lord Hailsham, by unmasking him as nothing more than a professional politician out of the chorus line in Iolanthe.

There is no time like the present for looking at the history of socialism. In Britain, the Labour Party stands poised to win office, maybe this year rather than next, and with a credible prospect of an electoral landslide on the scale of 1906 or 1945. Is it bliss to be alive in such a dawn? Is it very heaven to be a socialist? Not many avowed socialists behave like it. Of course they want to get the Tories out at long last, of course they want to be rid of the weak and wily Major, of course they would prefer to see Blair as prime minister. But this is the politics of pis aller, the grim strategy of the better ’ole, the weary realism of second-best options. The point hardly needs labouring that the old-time religion of socialism, which was good enough for generations of true believers, no longer seems quite good enough today. Of course, as in most faiths, there was always plenty of sectarian strife about the doctrine itself, with followers of different prophets passionately denouncing each other for backsliding and apostasy. Today, however, not only in Britain but throughout Western Europe, parties of the Left that once claimed the inspiration of a socialist vision have settled for the politics of accommodation as the price of survival. The mythology of the red flag has been replaced by the iconography of the rose in both France and Britain, while the Italian socialists settled on the carnation as the symbol of their reincarnation.

The most eminent of Victorians has at last received a biography which makes his extraordinary life accessible and comprehensible. It is, inevitably, a post-Stracheyan view of the Victorian era, marvelling at how different its assumptions were from those of the 20th century. But there is no snide debunking in Roy Jenkins’s biography. The Gladstone who emerges – temperamentally commanding, conversationally charming, intellectually erudite, theologically obsessed, morally priggish, sexually tormented, socially hierarchical, politically populist, administratively meticulous, oratorically thrilling, physically energetic, medically valetudinarian – is a remarkable man, as Jenkins affirms more than once. When Lloyd George once tried to convey to Clemenceau that Gladstone was simply a very great man, Bonar Law chipped in with the even simpler Tory view: ‘He was a very great humbug.’ Though Jenkins is wry and penetrating in peeling the Gladstonian onion of its infoliated layers of self-righteousness and self-deception, this is not an exercise in diminishing the Grand Old Man to a silly old man (or even a dirty old man).’

The troubles at the LSE go back a long way. Perhaps they began on the day in July 1894 when Henry Hutchinson shot himself, thus activating the terms of the will that he had made. A loyal if morose member of the Fabian Society from Derby, Hutchinson had stipulated that the bulk of his sizeable fortune – say a million in today’s money – should be applied by his executors ‘to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism’. What he could hardly have anticipated was that Sidney Webb would use his position as an executor to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian hyperbole. His incredulity at the Fabians’ supine acceptance of some token Hutchinson Lectures, duly propagating socialism, at the price of Webb being allowed ‘to commit an atrocious malversation of the rest of the bequest’, was hardly unreasonable. But, as Beatrice Webb’s diary records, Sidney was already irrevocably committed to his own scheme: ‘His vision is to found, slowly and quietly, a “London School of Economics and Political Science” – a centre not only of lectures on special subjects, but an association of students who would be directed and supported in doing original work.’’

Whatever you think of Hardy, you have to admit that Jude the Obscure is one of the most gripping books ever written about university entrance requirements. For a novel about an equally unpromising subject, ‘the drama of English local government’, Winifred Holtby did pretty well with her bestseller South Riding in 1936. The prologue depicts a novice reporter in the press gallery: ‘His heart beat and his eyes dilated. Here, he told himself, was the source of reputations, of sanitoria, bridges, feuds, scandals, of remedies for broken ambitions or foot-and-mouth disease, of bans on sex novels in public libraries, of educational scholarships, blighted hopes and drainage systems.’ It’s an acquired taste, of course; but acquired early in life, it might lead anywhere. Look what happened to the daughter of Councillor Alfred Roberts of Grantham.