Man with a mission | 14 July 2007

There has not been an abler or more decent prime minister than Sir Robert Peel, and peacetime has not produced a more courageous one. Perhaps none has assembled a more gifted ministry or commanded Cabinet more effectively. Before and during his premiership he made huge choices and implemented them with skill and resolve. Like Attlee or Thatcher he stamped the future. Yet what chance would he have stood before our feral media, or with the public which indulges them? Viewer-friendliness would have been beyond him. ‘Such a cold, odd man’, Queen Victoria found him. He won her round, but such adjectives as ‘chilly’, ‘frosty’ and ‘frigid’ have adhered to him from his time to ours. Confronted by mutinous backbenchers, he shunned the affectation of sympathy and eschewed the lubricating arts of tact and emollience. A conviction politician who reversed his convictions, his inconsistencies would nowadays have crippled his government. He was the first prime minister to be brought to office by a general election rather than by brokerage within the establishment. Yet in the five years from 1841 he gradually tied his premiership to the breaking of Tory election pledges. The divisions wrought by his epic achievement, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, destroyed his party for a generation.

Politicians, by absorbing the pressures of their time, take on its character and change with it. Peel, the son of a wealthy cotton manufacturer, adjusted to the transformations and crises of the industrial age. His northern vowels did not preclude his education at Harrow and Christ Church. In his early career something of the 18th century lived on in him. As a young man, in the era before frock-coated severity prevailed, he powdered his face in the evenings.