A single word which survives as a political label for two hundred years must certainly be flexible and will suffer sea-changes. Whiggism was born during the Popish Plot and expired after the Home Rule crisis. It stood for moderate reform—a concept of which most of us would approve but which prompts the question ‘what is moderate’ and ‘what is reform’? This book does not deal with early Whiggism but with that in the later part of George III's reign. One wonders whether Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Hardwicke and the duke of Newcastle would have recognised Charles James Fox and Lord John Russell as whigs at all? Walpole did not believe in flirting with the people, Hardwicke was quite satisfied with the political settlement, and Newcastle was scarcely a libertine. Mitchell's book is a kind of spin-off from his outstanding biography of Lord Melbourne—mature reflections on the nature of Whiggism. It is beautifully written, with a splendid sense of balance, at times the author clearly exasperated with whig self-satisfaction, at others a reluctant admirer. It is a full of piquant asides—the Whigs did not see Jude the Obscure coming. There are of course considerable difficulties in getting the troops into line. Burke was bound to be awkward and perhaps the Portland Whigs—Windham, Spencer and Fitzwilliam—were given too little attention? What of Liverpool, Peel and the liberal Tories who, in Disraeli's celebrated phrase, caught the Whigs bathing and made off with their clothes? And socially, there are difficulties. If the Whigs were essentially salon creatures of London society, bored and restless in the countryside, what do we make of Lord Althorp, who was hardly comfortable out of the saddle, or even of Grey, who could scarcely tear himself away from his Northumberland retreat at Howick? If libertinism was an essential Whig characteristic, how do Tory gentlemen-about-town fit in—the duke of Queensberry, the duke of Leeds, the duke of wellington? Mitchell makes much of the Whigs' lack of patriotism—their buff-and-blue admiration for American rebels, their pitiful naïvety towards Bonaparte, and their unpleasant delight at British setbacks and defeats. Canning's jibe—the friends of every country but their own—was deadly, and finds targets even today. Part of Whig insouciance was perhaps accidental. Many of them were too rich and had too little to do: gambling, drinking and whoring filled up the day. On those rare occasions when they did take office, they sobered up with some speed, Fox discovering in 1806 in a few weeks that Bonaparte was not to be trusted; Lord Melbourne proving to be, at least towards the Tolpuddle martyrs, a determined Home Secretary. G.M. Trevelyan, reared at Wallington in the Whig tradition, believed that they had saved England from revolution. Perhaps. But it is also possible that their appalling self-indulgence helped to discredit that aristocratic rule which they admired so much, and brought about the very crisis with which they had to deal. Even then, as Mitchell points out, they seemed blissfully unaware that they were sawing off the branch they sat on. ‘Finality Reform’ proved to be yet another Whig will-o’-the-wisp. So excellent a book can withstand one tiny quibble. I do not think that Keppel was one of the ‘immortal seven’ who invited in William of Orange in 1688: he was only eighteen and a page of honour. I daresay he would have signed had he been asked.