WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER

No Brit (and very few people in the world) have had such a meteoric political career as William Pitt the Younger. First elected as an M.P. at the age of 21, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) at 23, and First Lord of the Treasury, the technical name, then as now, for Prime Minister, at 24, having already turned the top job down the year before. He proceeded to hold the post, other than for a gap of three years, until he died at the beginning of 1806 at the relatively young age of 46. No other British Prime Minister has ever had the job so young, and very few have started it at a younger age than when he finished.

True, Pitt had some decided advantages. Eighteenth century British politics was essentially a family affair, and the Pitts were one of the relatively few families involved. On his mother's side (the Grenvilles), one uncle was in the House of Lords, and two in the House of Commons, one as Prime Minister. Pitt's cousin would be his Foreign Secretary and eventual successor as Prime Minister. On his father's side, his great-grandfather, grandfather and uncle had all been M.P.'s. Most fortunately of all, his father, William Pitt the Elder and First Earl of Chatham, had been the dominant politician of his generation and also Prime Minister. Out of office, the elder Pitt decided to stay aloof from politics and home school his precocious second son, with the result that the younger Pitt went up to Cambridge University at the age of 14. By then he had thoroughly mastered the art of declaiming in Latin and Greek, with the result that giving speeches in the House of Commons, one of the most important aspects of a politician's job at the time, became a bit of a doddle.

Pitt was also favoured by circumstances. Having imbibed politics since he was a baby, he entered public life in the aftermath of the key event of the latter part of the eighteenth century, namely the loss of the American colonies. At that time, the king (George III, who ruled from 1760-1820) played a much more important constitutional role than later, and George felt humiliated by the American debacle. Pitt had the twin advantages of not being involved in the war (even better, his father had opposed it, and that rubbed off on him) and of not being Charles James Fox, the leading opponent of the war, but a man whom George positively loathed and refused to deal with. When George looked round for someone to head his Government, all the other candidates were discredited in his eyes. Pitt alone was not tainted.

But if he was lucky in getting the job so young, Pitt still had to deliver in order to keep it, and here his character shone through. Basically, he was a workaholic. He needed to be, since by modern standards, his workload was extraordinary. Not only was he Prime Minister, but he kept the job of Chancellor. Furthermore, since nearly everyone else in his Cabinets was a peer, he was effectively Leader of the House of Commons as well. And he had to do all three jobs without a civil service as we would know it today, but just a couple of helpers. Although convivial and witty in male company, he never had any relationships with women outside of his family and never married (indeed, he might well have been gay). Basically, his two interests in life were political power and drinking with his political mates, and it was the combination that eventually killed him.

Pitt's essential political philosophy was prosperity through peace. The industrial revolution was beginning to take hold in Great Britain, and he saw the increasing wealth that it provided as the key to everything else. He made major reforms to the nation's finances, sorting out the customs and tax systems, investing heavily in the navy and ordering the national debt. This essentially pragmatic programme underpinned other policies such as the abolition of the slave trade and the union with Ireland. On the first, Pitt was great friends with William Wilberforce, the man behind the movement to abolish the trade (which eventually took place just after Pitt's death)). Yet whereas Wilberforce wanted to abolish it out of religious conviction, Pitt always looked on it as economically inefficient, and was always sensitive to the commercial interests that would be adversely affected by its abolition. On the latter, Pitt firmly believed that the problems of Ireland were caused by economic repression. Uniting Great Britain with Ireland would give the Irish access to a bigger single market; with more wealth, they would eventually stop rebelling.

Adept at getting and retaining power, Pitt was not afraid to use it. He appointed his elder brother to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, but then sacked him when it turned out his brother was no good at the job (one of the most important at the time). Personally uncorrupt by the standards of the age, he turned down titles and sinecures, even though it left him with no money. On his death, Parliament unanimously voted £40,000 to help pay off his debts, a figure equivalent to roughly £2 million in today's money. Yet if he kept his own snout out of the trough, he also used patronage to great effect. The union with Ireland in 1800 required the separate Irish Parliament to abolish itself, and that could only be achieved by a liberal sprinkling of money and new peerages, bribes by any other name.

However, as with Margaret Thatcher two centuries later, the downside of being absolutely sure of the direction you want to take the country, and of having the means to do it, is that you can be derailed by events. Yearning for peace, Pitt ended up being Great Britain's longest ever war Prime Minister, as the French Revolution of 1789 gradually developed into a continent-wide conflict. Meticulous in financial matters, Pitt was forced to invent income tax in order to finance the war effort (it was abolished when the war ended). And in offering the Irish the unstated quid pro quo for the union of Catholic emancipation, he underestimated the unwillingness of George and the Anglican Church to concede anything which (in their eyes) undermined its position as the established religion. This was the issue that led to his resignation in 1801; by the time he returned in 1804, he was already on the path of ill health that would lead to his death.

It would be left to his successors, notably Sir Robert Peel, to finish off the work that Pitt had started. Peel made income tax a permanent feature of the fiscal landscape, and brought about both Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the corn laws, the latter in particular underpinning Britain's prosperity in the nineteenth century. However, even Peel would have recognised that he couldn't have done his work without Pitt's reforms. Pitt was the first Prime Minister to turn the job into leader of the country, as opposed to the nominal figurehead amongst a group of colleagues, and the first leader to make the Treasury the engine of Government. The fact that that remains the case today is tribute to his efforts; he did not achieve all he set out to achieve, but he still achieved a lot.      

Walter Blotscher