Cultivating the fourth estate

Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of the press. He was the first prime minister to grasp that dealing with journalists was all about pragmatic negotiation and buttering people up. The deal between Palmerston and the newspapers was: ‘I’ll tell you something no one knows if you give me your support and a favourable report.’ It still works like that today.

Most historians assume that Palmerston was the only Victorian prime minister to cultivate the fourth estate. Balfour loftily boasted that he never read the newspapers. But this was an affectation. As Paul Brighton shows in this new study, 19th-century prime ministers all had contacts with the press. We just don’t know about them.

The shady nature of the relationship meant that much of the communication between politicians and the press was not written down, and the evidence is patchy. Journalism in the 19th century enjoyed a far lower status than it does today. Salisbury made his living out of articles for the reviews in the early part of his career, but he wrote anonymously, and he kept it secret. As prime minister he played the part of an absent-minded patrician who disdained the press, but behind the scenes he managed it pretty skilfully.

The official biographers of eminent Victorians treated journalism like a bad smell and left it out of their tombstone Lives and Letters. This was ironic in a way, as many of the great political biographers — Mony-penny and Buckle on Disraeli or John Morley on Gladstone — were themselves journalists by profession, as indeed is Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore.

The main reason why historians have skated over the relationship of Victorian PMs with the press is that they haven’t been looking for it.