BILL CASH, a Conservative British backbench politician, has written a book about another backbench politician, who also happens to be an ancestor. Mr Cash frets that his great-grandfather's cousin has been forgotten, but he hasn't really. No historian doubts the importance of John Bright; it is just that he has slipped out of the popular consciousness.
So, for the layman, who was he? The very question, Mr Cash tells us, would have flabbergasted anyone in the 19th century. In 1878 Punch published a series of cartoons of the three Britons whom they deemed to be the greatest statesmen of the age—Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and Bright. Born in 1811 and with a political career spanning nearly 50 years as a member of parliament for Durham, Manchester and Birmingham, Bright would be “the one contemporary statesman whose fame and accomplishments transcended the age,” according to Walter Bagehot, this newspaper's editor from 1860-77. A biography by G.M. Trevelyan, which came out in 1913, described him as “a rare example of the hero as politician”.
A Quaker born in Rochdale, Bright made his name campaigning for the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, distinguishing himself, as Karl Marx testified, as “one of the most gifted orators that England has ever produced”. He was inspiring as well as courageous, and his passion for free trade was allied to his passion for democracy. He crusaded against monopoly, aristocracy, slavery and more. It was Bright who said that “England is the mother of Parliaments”, a phrase that has passed into idiom. He fought tirelessly for the Reform Act of 1867 which gave the vote to working-class men. A radical as well as a nonconformist, Bright was vocal in his opposition to the Crimean war, which he believed to be un-Christian, a stance that eventually lost him his parliamentary seat.
Whether you rated him a hero or a villain depended on your point of view. His pugnacity fascinated and repelled people in equal measure. Early tales include a furious quarrel with a local Anglican vicar, both of them hollering from tombstones in the parish churchyard. He was, says Mr Cash, “an independent Radical by principle, with a persistent strain of innate conservatism. He was in the Liberal Party as it evolved but not always of, or even with, the Liberal Party”. His relationships with Gladstone and Disraeli were complex. He loathed Lord Palmerston, a former prime minister, and the feeling was mutual.
Mr Cash is a lawyer by training and a politician by profession. He has a sharp eye for detail and he presents a strong case. What he does not explain is how Bright slipped out of view. His own interest, he tells the reader, has increased “in inverse proportion to the decline in the vibrancy, accountability and sovereignty of our Parliament”. But the underlying lament, that Bright has been censored out by fashion “as people became cynical of moral and political certainties” is too marbled with nostalgia to be believable.
Bright was a political force, but he never held high office, so he was rather like a midfielder who forever sets up the strikers: assists don't count as much as goals. A full- scale revival of his reputation would have to rouse the reader's imagination. Mr Cash quotes Bright's dictum that “my life is in my speeches”, many of which are rhetorical masterpieces; but the reader wants more of the man, more of the life outside the speeches. Bright believed that biographies “are soon forgotten, and of no influence in the future”. Historians will enjoy this fine political portrait, but it is unlikely to make Bright famous again.