William Pitt the Younger: A Biography
Page 80
Sir Lewis Namier is quoted in your book as saying that eighteenth-century politicians ‘no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it’. Are politicians in the twenty-first century any different or are they careerists too?
I may be biased, but I think the motives of politicians have improved somewhat since the late eighteenth century. There are plenty of politicians in all parties who have a genuine desire to serve the public, although this is mixed in with the motivations of strong egos and jealousies in a way which often makes it difficult to discern!
You didn’t go to a public school, unlike many of your political contemporaries. Do you think this was a disadvantage or did it give you more insight into the electorate? Do you think it’s a negative that so many politicians are seen, by their very backgrounds (public school, Oxbridge, the Bar), to be out of touch?
If anything, it was an advantage: my education at a comprehensive school has always made it easy for me to mix with people of all backgrounds. It is certainly a negative that most politicians are seen as being out of touch, but remember that Pitt never went to school at all and did not mix with the general mass of the people but was nevertheless very sensitive to their concerns.
What were the highs of public office? And the lows?
The highs of public office include achieving something enduring: in my case, the legislative achievement of passing the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995. The low feeling is when you are not achieving much at all. As John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, explained to me when I became Leader of the Opposition: ‘You will find the first year very frustrating, and then the second, and then the third …’
Pitt had no family of his own and you recently mentioned that you and Ffion are planning to start one. Do you think that now as then the demands of political office are incompatible with those of a family?
They are not incompatible, but I think they are a stretch. I will hope to provide a definitive answer in a few years’ time!
Many would say that you, like Pitt, lived and breathed politics from a very young age. What’s your oxygen now?
I find writing enormously satisfying. I love receiving letters from people telling me that I have got them interested in a period of history they thought was boring. After years of only relating to people in the political sense, it is a great feeling to talk and correspond with different people without needing to take any interest in how they are going to vote.
* * *
‘I find writing enormously satisfying. I love receiving letters from people telling me that I have got them interested in a period of history they thought was boring.’
* * *
Early on Pitt received the advice that may have in part killed him: to drink a lot of port. Have you ever been given any advice that was as significant for you, whether professionally or personally?
When I made a famous speech as a 16-year-old, Sir Keith Joseph said to me: ‘You need a bit of obscurity now.’ I do not think I would have become an MP without following his advice.
Pitt rode, drank and spent time with his friends in order to relax: what did you do to relax when you were Leader and have those activities changed since you left?
I took up judo, and spent at least three hours of every week entirely focused on fitness and fighting. On the day I stood down as Leader I added playing the piano, which I started from scratch without being previously familiar with a note of music. This has switched on a whole part of my brain which evidently had not been connected before.
* * *
‘After years of only relating to people in the political sense, it is a great feeling to talk and correspond with different people without needing to take any interest in how they are going to vote.’
* * *
Caricaturists of Pitt’s day satirised him as the ‘Infant Hercules’ and being satirised is part of a prominent politician’s daily life. What does it feel like?
It is quite flattering really. Many politicians, like me, have a large collection of cartoons stretching up their staircase, depicting the disasters as well as the successes of their careers. The real fear of a politician is not being caricatured at all.
What were the most enjoyable and most difficult parts of writing the book and how did it feel to finish it?
The most enjoyable part was leafing through Pitt’s letters and trying to get inside his mind. The most difficult part was stopping the book from becoming too long. I felt no elation in finishing it: it was a sad thing to bury him having lived in his mind for some time.
Who are your favourite writers?
My favourite writer is Robert A. Caro, who is currently working on the fourth volume of his monumental work: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
What are you writing next?
At some stage I would love to write about Pitt the Elder, William Wilberforce, and the real nitty-gritty of eighteenth-century elections. It remains to be seen when and in what order these subjects will emerge!
Top Ten
Pieces of Music
1. ‘Cry Me a River’
Gene Harris with the Ray Brown Trio
2. Concerto in D minor for 2 violins (second movement)
Bach
3. Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 (first movement)
Rachmaninov
4. ‘Wade in the Water’
Eva Cassidy
5. Nimrod from the Enigma Variations
Elgar
6. ‘Black Velvet’
Scott Hamilton
7. ‘The Great Divide’
Jim Stolz
8. Welsh National Anthem
Bryn Terfel
9. Sanctus Domine
Mozart
10. Prelude in E minor
Chopin
A Saturday in the Life of William Hague
7.00 am
Wake up abruptly with a vague recollection of the speech given at a constituency event the night before. Breakfast on a large bowl of porridge and take a bath.
8.00 am
Read all the newspapers, consult notes, and think hard about what to write in the weekly column in the News of the World.
9.30 am
Turn on the Computer, make a large pot of coffee, sit down, write furiously, ignore the door bell and speak frostily to anyone who telephones.
12 noon
E-mail the column to the newspaper, find Ffion and take a walk round the garden, followed by a light lunch and a short nap.
2.00 pm
Put on a jacket and tie and go out on constituency business: opening a shop, visiting a farm, viewing a conservation project, meeting local councillors or presenting prizes at a fair.
4.00 pm
Return, go for a run, or use the gym.
5.00 pm
Sit in a favourite chair and read a book, preferably history, while listening to music, preferably Bach or Chopin.
6.00 pm
Think of a speech for the evening and then play the piano.
7.00 pm
Put on a suit and go out to a constituency event: a local organisation, a charity fundraiser or a Conservative Party function. Be nice to everyone and give an after-dinner speech.
10.30 pm
Arrive home, open a bottle of wine and be thankful it is Sunday tomorrow – no work allowed.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Immortal Memory
by William Hague
LIKE MOST PEOPLE in Britain, I was not taught anything about William Pitt the Younger in my history course at school. When I had the alarming experience, at 16 years old, of Margaret Thatcher standing me next to her in front of a hushed press corps and announcing: ‘We may be standing here with another young Mr Pitt!’, it was necessary for me to hurry off to the library the following week to find out what on earth she was talking about. William Pitt, or ‘Honest Billy’, may have been a legend to the generation who knew him but has somehow slipped from the popular memory in the nearl
y two centuries since his death.
Twenty years later, as Leader of the Conservative Party, I felt I knew enough about him to place his portrait firmly on the wall of the Shadow Cabinet. Ever more intrigued by his astonishing youthful success, I hoped, forlornly as it turned out, that I and my colleagues might be inspired to victory with his example always before us.
My failure to repeat his political triumphs nevertheless opened up a new opportunity: to seek to understand and explain his extraordinary career to the twenty-first-century reader. Resisting invitations to write about my own experiences, which seemed a ludicrous proposition at the age of 40, I embarked instead on a fresh account of the far more tumultuous life of Pitt the Younger, albeit a life tragically concluded at the age of 46.
I have no doubt that my own youthful zest for politics helped me to identify with my subject. People who are driven by political causes or ambitions tend to find in politics their all-encompassing interest in life, with other matters – social, financial, or cultural – seeming frivolous or grey. I can see this in my own past – though not in the present – and I can see it in Pitt. The merging of personal ambition with the desire to serve was another trait I could recognise, and so was a youthful earnestness for fashionable reform, tempered over the years by the sad experience of human failings and the pressure of events.
Perhaps most of all I could identify with the rather shy boy whose personality was only fully displayed when he rose to speak, feeling the strange satisfaction that comes from speaking in the House of Commons and being entirely at home there. For these and many other reasons, I felt I could get to know Pitt better than most. The fact that my own experiences eventually parted company with those of Pitt, in the form of marriage and the loss of political office, only made it easier to understand the similarities which had gone before.
* * *
‘I had the alarming experience, at 16 years old, of Margaret Thatcher standing me next to her in front of a hushed press corps and announcing: “We may be standing here with another young Mr Pitt!”’
* * *
Yet there are limits, of course, to the parallels which can be drawn between eighteenth- and twentieth-century politics. It is still hard for any of us today to transport ourselves mentally into the time of a man who had never seen a car, a telephone or even a train. I had no idea when I began how necessary it would be to go to see, feel and just absorb anything that was left of Pitt’s life in physical form. Such pilgrimages may not be strictly necessary for the writing of a biography, but I would not have been happy without going on them.
So it was that I found myself staring down at the forbidding slab covering the grave of Pitt and his father, glaring a little at the tourists walking carelessly across the now illegible inscription. Equally, I pored over the piles of letters written in his own hand and purchased several which I kept near me as I wrote the book, glancing now and again at the assiduous drafting of his letters down the right-hand side of a page and the reconsiderations which led him to make amendments and additions on the left.
I wandered around his college at Cambridge and sat in his rooms, strolled in his walled garden at Holwood and examined the last shards of the oak under which he sat with Wilberforce. I examined items such as invitations to his funeral which members of the public brought in. I felt closest to him, perhaps, in Walmer Castle, where the panelled landing and the dining room are not dissimilar from how they would have been in his time, and it is possible to imagine him sitting at the head of the table, entertaining military visitors, humouring Lady Hester Stanhope, and going out onto the wide terrace through the French windows to look for signs of activity at sea.
* * *
‘ I placed Pitt’s portrait firmly on the wall of the Shadow Cabinet. Ever more intrigued by his astonishing youthful success, I hoped, forlornly as it turned out, that I and my colleagues might be inspired to victory with his example always before us.’
* * *
In some indefinable way such ramblings help an author to relate to his subject, and they do so much more than I had ever expected. It is a pity that so many of the buildings that must have meant so much to Pitt – the house at Putney, the Wilberforce villa at Wimbledon, the original chamber of the House of Commons itself – have not survived to the present day. Yet sufficient fragments remain to permit an author momentarily to feel the spirit of this remarkable figure, so that now, when I attend the dinners of the London Pitt Club and join in the toast to ‘the Immortal Memory’, it is with a good deal of genuine feeling.
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Find Out More
VISIT
Walmer Castle and Gardens
Pitt became Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1792, for which he received £3000 per year and residence at Walmer Castle. A former coastal artillery fort situated in Kent, it was subsequently occupied by the Duke of Wellington and is now looked after by English Heritage. It is still the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial role, but can be visited throughout the year.
Location: Nr Deal, Kent, UK
Web: www.english-heritage.org.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1304 364288
Sir John Soane’s Museum
A contemporary of Pitt’s, Sir John Soane was a famed architect and art collector. His house, now a museum, is in itself worth a visit as one of the most fascinating in London; but as the architect appointed to make alterations to Holwood House and involved in the first Palace of Westminster, in which Pitt would have served, he is particularly interesting. His drawings for both buildings are part of the museum’s collections.
Location: 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, UK
Web: www.soane.org
Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 2107
Pitt’s Oak/Holwood House
Holwood House is no more (another house was built on the site in the mid- 1820s), but you can still visit his oak and walled garden which are now part of an exclusive housing development, called Holwood.
Location: Keston, Kent, UK
Westminster Abbey
Pitt’s grave, along with that of his father, mother and sister, is in the North Transept of Westminster Abbey.
Location: Westminster, London, UK
Web: www.westminster-abbey.org
Tel: +44 (0)207222 5152
Houses of Parliament
House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA House of Lords, London, SW1A 0PW The House of Commons and the House of Lords are incredibly resonant for anyone interested in British political history. UK residents can book tours through their MP throughout the working year, tourists can go on a pre-booked tour; both can join the queue to sit in the public galleries whenever either House is in session. However, at the time of writing (2005) there were certain restrictions on tours for overseas visitors: please check the website for up-to-date information.
Web: www.parliament.uk/visiting/visiting.cfm
Tel: +44 (0)20 7219 3000
COPYRIGHT
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London w6 8jb
www.harperperennial.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
4
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Canyon Research Ltd 2004
PS section © Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘The Immortal Memory’
by William Hague © Canyon Research Ltd 2005
William Hague asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Map research: Gregory Fremont-Barnes
Artwork: Leslie Robinson
The chronology of Pitt’s life shown on pages xxviii to xxix was written by W. E. Gladstone, who himself went on to serve four times as Prime Minister. He wrote these notes in 1838, as an ambitious but junior Member of Parliament.