Bellamy's Veal Pies

Books read this week: William Pitt the Younger 6/10 (William Hague)

Caesar read a life of Alexander the Great and wept because he was 30, and by 30 Alexander the Great had conquered the known world. One gets the impression, reading Hague's life of Pitt, that more than anything else, Hague would have liked to be William Pitt the Younger. This is not a problem: to write a truly first class biography, one must sympathise with one's subject. I think this is why so many of the good political biographies I have read were written by politicians: Jenkins' Gladstone and Hattersley's Lloyd George immendiately spring to mind. Longford's Wellington is also a favourite of mine, and although Longford was not herself a politician, she came from a family of politicians (specifically, Lloyd George's). The exception is Blake's Disraeli, and that had the advantage that Disraeli was a truly fascinating individual.

Unfortunately, William Pitt the Younger is not a fascinating individual. Raised from birth to be a politician, he seems to have all the faults you see today in people who go straight into full time politics from university, just magnified: above all, he was incredibly dull. He never had an intimate relationship with a woman or a man, he never had a friend outside politics and he never had a life outside politics: he spent his life alternately politicking and drinking himself into a stupor (consuming 3 bottles of port a day: something else which endears him to "16 Pints A Night" Hague). He was phenomenally good at gaining power (Prime Minister at 24): unfortunately, he didn't really know what to do with it. As Hague continually points out, Pitt's first instinct when confronted with a short term political problem was to conceive some enormous, intricate and complicated permanent solution, which would promptly fall apart once it encountered the real world, leaving everyone no better off than before (Exhibit A: Ireland). The net result of this is that for all the effort Pitt put into being Prime Minister, his actually achievements were fairly minimal.

The other problem Hague has in maintaining our sympathies with Pitt is that the causes he was defending were fundamentally bankrupt: Pitt died shortly after Napoleon rose to power, and so he spent years fighting the French Revolution: he was responsible for the last suspension of habeas corpus in British history in order to deal with the London Corresponding Society, and their evil demands for universal suffrage and free speech (those bastards!). Of course, Wellington was a similarly reactionary figure, but he possessed enough of a life outside politics (and enough of a sense of humour) that one can sympathise with him, despite disagreeing with his politics (also, Longford's life of Wellington is superb): Pitt had no life outside politics. In many ways, this was a personal tragedy for him, and it's probably ultimately why he drank himself into an early grave. His only longstanding attachment appears to have been to his niece, who appears to have been a thoroughly unpleasant woman: the only example of her cutting wit we are given is mocking an elderly lord for his limp.

My ultimate verdict on the book is this: it is as good a biography as could be expected about a very dull figure in the middle of some extremely interesting politics. I'd be interested to see what Hague makes of a life with more life in it, and I'm going to try and track down his life of Wilberforce.