THE PRIME MINISTER Read Free

highest office in the land, but in the course of the novel he articulates some of the author’s own political views, as ‘an advanced, but still a conservative Liberal’, and as we find them also expressedin
An Autobiography
. 6 Trollope tells us that he had particularly exacting ambitions in relation to the character of Palliser, which he intended as a study of how far the realities of political life are compatible with a high sense of personal integrity. In his
Autobiography
, he describes the run-of-the-mill politicians whom he had hitherto foregrounded:
    [T]he Brocks, De Terriers, Monks, Greshams,and Daubeneys – had been more or less portraits, not of living men, but of living political characters. The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the Government or of the Opposition, had been very easy to describe… [A]s a rule, the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools… and can generally bear to be changed from this box into theother, without, at any rate, the appearance of much personal suffering. Four-and-twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole, and work for one purpose, having each of them to set aside his own idiosyncrasy, and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve their country or theirown ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply, – as to whom I never cease to wonder that stones of such strong calibre should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles.
    Plantagenet Palliser was to be something quite outstanding as a political character:
    a Statesman of a different nature… a man who should be insomething perhaps superior, but in very much inferior, to these men… one who could not become a pebble, having too strong an identity of his own…. He should have rank, and intellect, and parliamentary habits by which to bind him to the service of thecountry, – and he should also have unblemished, unextinguishable, inexhaustible love of country… as the ruling principle of his life; and it shouldso rule him that all other things should be made to give way to it But he should be scrupulous, and, as being scrupulous, weak. 7
    The proposition that the office of Prime Minister cannot be filled with complete success by a morally scrupulous person – and in Trollope’s view ‘Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, is a perfect gentleman’ 8 – is perhaps not very original, but it effectively disturbsany too easy assumptions we may make as to the morality of British public life, and of the constitutional compromise celebrated by Walter Bagehot. After all, the British system was intended to be run by gentlemen for gentlemen, and not by professional politicians for their like. If the office of Prime Minister could not be filled by such a one as Plantagenet Palliser, then by whom should it befilled? And if the highest office in the land was morally equivocal in this way, what of lesser institutions? From an idealist’s point of view, the Britishness – or rather the Englishness – which the novel celebrates temporizes dangerously with worldly values. This, of course, would come as no surprise to the generations of the English rulers who knew that their constitution was founded in just thissort of compromise. Victorian statesmen held it as dogma that the pragmatic English way was superior to French rhetoric and idealism, and the tyranny and bloodshed to which the latter were believed inevitably to lead. It was clearly better, in this view, to be ruled by gentlemen than by professional politicians. The Duke of St Bungay has a typically robust view of a gentleman’s need to overcomehis finer scruples and accept power, upbraiding the Duke of Omnium over the latter’s dislike of dealing in politics with dishonest men: ‘According to that the