Robert Peel: A Biography

Abstract

It was one of the grandees of the Cambridge History Faculty in which Douglas Hurd was once a student, Herbert Butterfield, who wrote that ‘The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history’. Butterfield's denunciations of teleology can have left little mark on Hurd, whose ambition here is partly to recover the administrative genius, and partly the founding role in the Conservative party, of Robert Peel. Given Hurd's political experience, much is inevitably made by the publishers of the symmetry between biographer and subject. But there is surprisingly little of the reflection and analogising which, for example, Roy Jenkins brought to his political biographies, and which can be the only real justification for anyone writing or reading this genre of books. Moreover, when Hurd does so it is often awkward and problematic, such as his conjecture that Peel ‘would have congratulated … Gordon Brown when he transferred interest rate decisions from suspect politicians to an independent Bank of England’ (p. 52). It can also be unwittingly comic, as when he writes of Althorp—depressive, pious, hair-shirted, philanthropic—that ‘The closest we have come to Althorp in recent years was … Willie Whitelaw’ (p. 154).