6:54pm Friday 15th January 2010
By Stephen Lewis
EDWARD Pearce understands politicians.
After 30 years writing for some of Britain’s top national newspapers, many of them spent as a Commons sketch writer and columnist, he should do.
What is refreshing, however, is that he doesn’t think they’re all just in it for themselves, snouts in trough.
There is something deeply unhealthy about the public disdain in which politicians are held today, he says. “I don’t start from this point of view that all politicians are b******s.”
He once went out on the campaign trail with a decent, hard-working Conservative politician. “He knocked on a door, and started talking, and this old man said: ‘All you politicians are in it for yourselves.’ But I’ve got a lot more sympathy for politicians than that. There are plenty of very, very good people who do a proper job and don’t get the credit they deserve. And the burden carried by MPs today is much greater than it used to be.”
Even so, during his days as Commons sketch writer for newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, he was famed for his piercing wit. Many a politician must have hung their head in shame after reading one of his pieces.
This elder statesman of sketch writers is now semi-retired, and living peacefully with his wife near Easingwold. There, he writes serious biographies of serious politicians – Denis Healey and Britain’s first prime Minister Robert Walpole among them.
His new book is a comprehensive demolition of a man who has somehow gone down in history as one of our greatest ever leaders: William Pitt the Elder.
Pitt has a towering reputation even today, at least in non-academic circles, Mr Pearce says.
He is seen as the man who won the Seven Years War with France, and who paved the way for the British Empire to dominate the world. He is remembered as a military and political genius who was also a true liberal, in love with the ideals of justice and equality.
All rubbish, Mr Pearce says.
Pitt was in fact a hysterical egotist with an “eye like a diamond” and so dictatorial there was “something of the South American balcony” about him, Mr Pearce says. He was constantly on the edge of mental collapse, and far from being a liberal champion of equality, was deeply implicated in the slave trade.
So why the reputation?
Because he was a charismatic, memorable character with a gift for a ‘ranting sort of oratory’. And because, above all, he was a master self-publicist. There was something of the Peter Mandelson about him, Mr Pearce says. “He didn’t do anything – but he was wonderful at taking credit for everything.”
Pitt The Elder: Man Of War opens at the dawn of the British Empire, with the defeat of a French fleet intended for the 1759 invasion of Britain. It takes the reader right through Pitt’s career to his death in 1778, still raging against the hated French, and being read to on his deathbed the account of the death of Hector from The Iliad.
Anyone who used to enjoy Mr Pearce’s columns will delight in the witty, needle-sharp elegance of his language, and the sheer thoroughness with which he sets about Pitt’s reputation.
Love him or loathe him, Pitt was a memorable man. And this will prove to be a memorable book.
Pitt The Elder: Man Of War is published by The Bodley Head, priced £25
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