The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

Ever since I first read ‘The Warden’ on holiday with my family in France as a teenager in 1981, I have gained hours and hours of pleasure through my life from reading the novels of Anthony Trollope.

The number left for me to read for the first time is now not so many, so I now read just one each summer. I sank happily into this splendid 650 page tome these past few weeks and emerged very satisfied last weekend, saddened only by the knowledge that I now have just one further Palliser novel to go – and as it happens just one further Barchester novel too.

I chose this because it was first published as a book (rather than in monthly magazine instalments) in June 1876, a hundred and fifty years ago this summer.

It is beautifully constructed with two distinct sets of characters with their own stories that entwine just enough to give the whole thing an elegant coherence.

On the one hand we have a fairly conventional love triangle story involving a well-brought up girl (Emily Wharton) who has to choose between a rather dull, but virtuous chap who she has known since childhood and her family rather expect her to marry (Arthur Fletcher), and the much more exciting prospect of a charming and good looking ‘adventurer’ with an exotic background (Ferdinand Lopez).

On the other, we have a continuation of the Palliser story from the previous four novels in the series. Plantagenet Palliser has now succeeded his uncle and become the Duke of Omnium which, together with his general decency and successful past term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, makes him the ideal candidate to become Prime Minister, presiding over a somewhat fractious and unstable coalition government.

The two stories proceed separately in the main, but start to overlap quite early on when both Arthur Fletcher and Ferdinand Lopez, not content with fighting one another for the same bride, end up competing in a by-election to become the MP for the Silverbridge constituency over which the Palliser family has long had very considerable influence. The Prime Minister, wisely, decides not to get involved. But his wife the Duchess – the splendidly drawn Glencora Palliser - who we already know so well from the previous novels in the series, does get involved. And the narrative unspools elegantly from there.

As in his 1875 novel, ‘The Way We Live Now’, Trollope is here gently satirising aspects of British life, and the two stories have quite a lot in common. Both have at their centre a foreign fellow who lives in London and is not quite ‘a gentleman’, but whereas Augustus Melmotte is already rich and powerful when ‘The Way We Live Now’ starts, in ‘The Prime Minister’ Ferdinand Lopez is a young man on the make.

The prose is, as always luscious and unmistakably Trollope. The way he introduces characters is always so effective, but he is also good at evoking place too. This passage is a lovely example, successfully romanticising what most of us know as the very unromantic Willesden Junction railway station in north-west London:

It is quite unnecessary to describe the Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it. From this spot, some six or seven miles distant from London, lines diverge east, west, and north, north-east and north-west, round the metropolis in every direction, and with direct communication with every other line in and out of London. It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them. The space occupied by the divergent rails seems to be sufficient for a large farm. And these rails run into one another with sloping points, and cross passages, and mysterious meandering sidings, till it seems to the thoughtful stranger to be impossible that the best-trained engine should know its own line. Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with closely packed oxen, and other furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes without a train going here or there, some rushing by without noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of substantial lightening, and others stopping, disgorging and taking up passengers by the hundreds. Men and women – especially the men, for the women knowing their ignorance are generally willing to trust the pundits of the place, - look doubtful, uneasy, and bewildered. But they all do get properly placed and unplaced, so that the spectator acknowledges that over all this apparent chaos there is presiding a great genius of order. From dusky morn to dark night, and indeed almost throughout the night, the air is loaded with a succession of shrieks. The theory goes that each separate shriek – if thee can be any separation where the sound is so continuous, - is a separate notice to separate ears of the coming or going of a separate train. The stranger, as he speculates on these pandemoniac noises, is able to realise the idea that were they discontinued the excitement necessary for the minds of the pundits might be lowered, and that activity might be lessened, and evil results might follow. But he cannot bring himself to credit that theory of individual noises.

The book is long and quite languid. Nothing much happens for dozens if pages at a time, but the story nonetheless proceeds at a fast enough pace to keep the pages turning. About two thirds the way through a major character is killed off quite suddenly, and the gear then shifts upwards for the denouement.

Aside from the elegance of the writing, the clever plotting and the compelling characters, the other aspect that I enjoyed was the politics. Westminster in the 1870s had little in common with the way things operate now, but there are nonetheless similarities. Things were gentler then, but not so different in substance. Here, Plantagenet Palliser (as Prime Minister) rages about some of the treatment he receives from journalists:

Nothing strikes me so much in all this as the ill-nature of the world at large. When they used to bait a bear tied to a stake, every one around would cheer the dogs and help to torment the helpless animal. It is much the same now, only they have a man instead of a bear for their pleasure.

Indeed, the final chapters here were all uncannily familiar, particularly as I was reading them during days leading up to the forced and very reluctant resignation of Sir Keir Starmer. They are largely concerned with attempts being made by Members of Parliament to oust a perfectly decent Prime Minister and reconstruct the ministry with a different ministerial line up which may or may not include him. Can a Caesar ever agree to serve under a Pompey?

Palliser’s problem is that the coalition he presides over does not have the power to carry any major pieces of legislation and loses support whenever it tries to do so. Here, his old fiend the duke of St Bungay, a senior cabinet minister, comes to let the Prime Minister know that his game will soon be up:

‘It is the first large measure that we have tried to carry’

‘We did not come in to carry large measures, my friend. Look back and see how may large measures Pitt carried; - but he took the country safely through its most dangerous crisis.’

‘What have we done?’

‘Carried on the Queen’s government prosperously for three years. Is that nothing for a minister to do? I have never been a friend of great measures, knowing that when they come fast, one after another, more is broken in the rattle than is repaired by the reform. We have done what parliament and the country expected us to do, and to my poor judgement we have done it well.’.

So graceful, so Trollopian and so wise.