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Friday 5 December 2008

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby

A chilly professional

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, by Angus Hawkins

Who was the 14th Earl of Derby? He was three times Conservative prime minister, but few people have heard of him today. He became leader of the Tory rump after Peel smashed the Conservative party in 1846, and he remained leader until ill health forced him to resign some 22 years later. He was immensely rich, with estates in Lancashire yielding a princely income of £100,000. He was clever and a swashbuckling orator — the ‘Rupert of debate’, Bulwer-Lytton called him. He was also a gifted classical scholar. Confined to his bed by an attack of gout, he spent the time composing an acclaimed translation of Homer’s Iliad. In spite of all this, he has been forgotten.

Rightly so, some might say. Though he held office three times, he never won an election. He was in power for less than four years all told. Being prime minister of minority governments meant that he was never able to push through a legislative programme. Derby stands accused of having no political ideas. He was aloof and reclusive. He rarely entertained in his mansion in St James’s Square, and his wife’s parties were famed for being as dreary as the London fog. Whenever he could, he escaped to his Knowsley estates, where he succumbed to depression and gout. He was a dedicated shot, and he was passionate about racing. To his lifelong regret he never managed to win the Derby, the race founded by his grandfather the 12th earl. He had a bluff ‘Newmarket manner’ which people found off-putting and frivolous, and this made it hard for him to be taken seriously as a political heavyweight.

It was Derby’s misfortune to be eclipsed by Disraeli. Disraeli was Derby’s number two, the leader of the Tory party in the Commons. Beside Disraeli, the flashy novelist and metrosexual, Derby seems a dim aristocrat akin to an 18th-century prime minister such as Rockingham who owed his office entirely to inherited privilege. This perception has been reinforced by Disraeli’s many biographers. Since the classic life by Monypenny and Buckle in the 1910s, Disraeli has been the subject of a thriving biographical industry. Derby has been ignored. Lord Blake, who wrote what is still the best biography of Disraeli, also undertook to write the life of Lord Derby. For many years, the Derby archive was loaned to the historian, but the long-awaited volume never appeared. I have a vivid memory of an Oxford graduate seminar in the 1970s when Blake gave a paper on Lord Derby, and it was embarrassingly clear that he had written nothing at all. Perhaps Blake was right. Derby was a dull dog, and it is impossible to make his life interesting.

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