Williamm Ewart Gladstone

Part of my dissertation for my degree was on the Victorian Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and yet I cannot remember very much about him… it’s as if all that remains in my brain is a bullet-pointed list:

• he was a Liberal
• he was prime minister several times
• he and Queen Victoria hated each other
• his big rival was the flamboyant Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory,  who Queen Victoria liked
• he was a very moral and upright man but there is some dispute about his actual motives for going out into the dark streets of Victorian London to save ‘fallen women’
• he was determined but failed to solve what was called ‘the Irish question’
• he lived to a great age

He was born in 1809 and he died in 1898, and he was in parliament from 1832… a tremendously long career during which he was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, and he was also Prime Minister four times. He was the oldest Prime Minister there has ever been, or ever likely to be, in Britain, being 84 when he finally resigned. We have secret voting entrenched in our election system thanks to Gladstone.  Having brought in the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in his first years as Prime Minister, he later proposed Home Rule for Ireland in 1886… how different Ireland would have been if the process of independence had begun then, how many lives saved?

He was known as GOM, the Grand Old Man, and even his political enemies respected him. A statue of him now stands in Albert Square in Manchester.