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  Artists such as Knapton and Hogarth portrayed Dashwood as a debauched drunkard, but that did not stop him being made Chancellor by the Earl of Bute. It was a dreadful choice and Dashwood survived only a year in the job. He presented the first Budget to follow the Seven Years’ War but his confused statement was listened to with derision in the House of Commons. According to Horace Walpole, he ‘performed so awkwardly, with so little intelligence or clearness, in so vulgar a tone and in such mean language, that he, who had been esteemed a plain country gentleman of good sense, said himself afterward: “People will point at me, and cry: There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared!”’5 His Budget also caused popular uproar because it put up taxes on cider, the staple drink of rural England.

  By now, salacious stories about the revelry at West Wycombe were beginning to circulate and the fantasy world Dashwood had created quickly crumbled. But the hard drinking indulged in by Dashwood and the brothers was of its time. It was an age of indulgence, conversational conviviality and gout, in which government ministers thought nothing of drinking until dawn. Many were known as ‘three-bottle men’, a reference to how much booze they could consume in a single session. They led lives of reckless extravagance, none more so than Charles James Fox, the most prominent Whig of the late 1700s. His drunkenness was on such a scale that it was commented on in the press and caricatured in cartoons.6 This at a time when Britain had lost its colony in North America and revolution in France was provoking political turmoil in Westminster.

  For much of the eighteenth century the state had been good at raising taxes and borrowing money to fight wars but little else. But Parliament’s importance had grown steadily and by the 1770s the words of MPs in the Commons were beginning to be relayed through the press to the public, with great orators like Fox and Edmund Burke the lead actors in the House of Commons theatre. In a letter written to his wife in January 1788, the MP Sir Gilbert Elliot captures the drinking habits of the late eighteenth century’s star politicians:

  The men of all ages drink abominably. How the men of business and the great orators of the House of Commons, contrive to reconcile it with their public exertions I cannot conceive. Fox drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his companions, Sheridan excessively, and Grey more than any of them; but it is a much more gentleman-like way than our Scottish drunkards, and is always accompanied with clever lively conversations on subjects of importance. Pitt, I am told, drinks as much as anybody.7

  But Fox did not care how his gambling, womanising and drinking was judged by people outside Westminster, and inside Parliament he was in good company. One of his great friends was the Whig playwright, theatre impresario and politician Richard Sheridan, another hearty drinker. His biographer, Thomas Moore, said that Sheridan drank for inspiration: ‘If the thought (he would say) is slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages it, and when it does come, a glass of good wine rewards it.’8

  Sheridan was a close adviser to the Prince of Wales and held a number of ministerial jobs. Another of his biographers, Oscar Sherwin, describes the drinks consumed by these colourful Cabinet ministers:

  The business of Great Britain is transacted over oceans of liquor and continents of food … Fox champagne and burgundy; Sheridan, first claret, then port, latterly rack-punch, hot negus, brandy, and eventually back to port again. Wilkes alone drinks hock, and Burke, who begins with a modicum of claret, ends by copious draughts of hot water, though in earlier days he once assured the Speaker, ‘I am not well. I eat too much, I drink too much, and I sleep very little.’9

  To the Liberal MP and Cabinet minister George Trevelyan, looking back from the more puritanical Victorian period a hundred years later, it was a wonder that any of them could function properly in office:

  A statesman of the Georgian era was sailing on a sea of claret from one comfortable official haven to another, at a period of life when a political apprentice in the reign of Victoria is not yet out of his indentures. No one can study the public or personal history of the eighteenth century without being impressed by the truly immense space which drinking occupied in the mental horizon of the young, and the consequences of drinking in that of the old.10

  At this time, and into the nineteenth century, alcohol played a crucial role in parliamentary elections too. The eighteenth century saw party labels start to harden and constituency elections become much more vigorously fought. Of course, before the Reform Act of 1832 the electorate was tiny (and it remained only a little less so afterwards). There were different property requirements between voters in counties and boroughs; and the rotten and pocket boroughs returned MPs to Parliament despite having few or no electors, while seats were often passed from one member of a family to another. Voting was done in public and newer towns had no representation at all.

  This ramshackle system was wide open to corruption and, irrespective of party label, it was beer that candidates used to bribe constituents. An example is the election of Jacob Houblon, a Tory MP for Colchester and a close relation of the first governor of the Bank of England. The Daily Gazetteer newspaper described his nomination on 14 September 1736: ‘Most of the gentlemen within 15 or 20 miles of Mr Houblon’s seat in Essex were present, and most of the common people within 4 or 5 miles were made so welcome that they lay in heaps round his house dead drunk.’

  Even those ineligible to vote would have attended the public nomination ceremony, a riotous fixture of electioneering that survived until the late nineteenth century. Rival candidates were obliged to attend open-air meetings of their constituents and address the crowd, who often pelted their prospective MPs with mud, rotten food and dead animals. Their nominations would then be confirmed with a show of hands, after which there would be a formal poll limited to those allowed to vote. That process could grind on for ages and in 1785 the vote was restricted to a maximum of fifteen days. As Jon Lawrence writes, through these long elections ‘beer would have flowed freely and even the humblest freeman voter would have been conscious of holding the fate of his master in his hand’.11

  It proved a miserable experience for Richard Meyler, a young dandy with a huge inheritance to squander. He stood successfully for Winchester in 1812 but a letter to his lover reveals the alcohol-soaked ordeal of the campaign:

  I had not the smallest idea that it was necessary to kiss so many dirty ugly women and drink so much ale, rum and milk, grog, raisin and elder wine, with porter and cider, all in one day, otherwise I don’t think I would have gone into Parliament; for I have been sick for a fortnight, and then, in this wretched state of stomach, one must get up, and make a speech to one’s constituents, full of lies, about future protection, friendship and God knows what.12

  Meyler was chums with Beau Brummell, but later denounced him after the famous fop failed to honour his gambling debts at White’s. Despite the drinking misery he endured to win his seat, Meyler died young at twenty-six, falling off his horse during a hunt.

  Not only were elections awash with drink but alehouses were used as candidates’ headquarters and polling stations, providing a convenient way to top up wavering voters. In 1755 the artist and satirist William Hogarth published the first in a series of four paintings inspired by the infamous contest for the County of Oxford seat in the 1754 general election. The constituency had sent two Tories to Parliament in uncontested elections since 1710. But two years before the 1754 election the Duke of Marlborough (Blenheim Palace resident and vehement Whig) decided to fight the seat and field two candidates, one for the County and one for the City. There followed an epic campaign of bribery, inducements, meetings, dinners, feasts, fights and boozing. The press picked up on the raucous antics in Oxford and gave Hogarth the material for his series (which can be seen at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London).

  The first scene, ‘An Election Entertainment’, encapsulates the mood of bawdy, drunken corruption. The setting is a room within a pub in the aptly named Guzzletown. The pub has been hired by a candidate
as his headquarters and at two chaotic tables voters are being bribed with money, oysters, plates of lobsters, chops and gallons of drink. Upturned bottles are strewn across the table, while a boy in the foreground pours brandy into a huge tub of punch. While a mob of rival supporters riot outside and a brick is thrown through the window, a decrepit-looking man who has fought with the gang is slumped on the floor drinking gin while his friend pours alcohol onto his wounded head. Around the table, gentlemen of refined appearance rub shoulders with the poor and old, tradesmen and clergymen, and many raise a grateful toast to the free drink.

  In the second of the series, ‘Canvassing for Votes’, the setting is a village street containing three pubs, the Royal Oak, the Crown and the Portobello. The inns are being hired by the parties and outside the Royal Oak the landlady counts her golden coins. In the middle of the road a young farmer is being courted by a Whig waiter from the Crown and the Tory innkeeper from the Royal Oak, both of whom drop money into his hands and thrust dinner invitations at him. After the bribery and blandishments of the campaign, the next two paintings in the series depict the poll and its aftermath as the conquering Tory candidate is paraded through the town in a chaotic, rowdy procession. Barrels of beer have been placed along the street in case anyone was sobering up, and one man has his head wedged in an upturned keg, slurping out the last drops. Hogarth’s paintings capture both the principle-free corruption of the election candidates and the craven bribe-pocketing greed of voters. Above all, they demonstrate how central alcohol was to the theatre of Georgian elections.

  Drink-sodden electioneering continued into the nineteenth century. When Mr Pickwick and his friends arrive in the fictitious constituency of Eatanswill they find a town punch-drunk with election fever. The competing parties – the Blues and the Buffs – have rival mobs of noisy supporters, and Charles Dickens describes the hullabaloo of a campaign full of frenzied skulduggery. The Blues and Buffs seem to have no political principles beyond opposing everything the other party supports. Newspapers, shops, pubs and the pews in church are divided between the two tribes. Mr Pickwick’s first stop is the Town Arms Inn, where the Blue candidate Samuel Slumkey holds meetings every day. His agent, Mr Perker, tells Pickwick that the rival Buff campaign has locked thirty-three of its voters up in the White Hart pub. ‘They keep ’em locked up there, till they want ’em. The effect of that is, you see, to prevent our getting at them,’ Mr Perker explains. ‘And even if we could, it would be of no use, for they keep them very drunk on purpose,’ he says with a nod of admiration to his rival.13

  Some voters are bribed with free parasols; others are dumped in a canal. But it is drink that dominates Mr Pickwick’s account of the election. Free beer is poured down the throats of prospective supporters until they collapse. The barmaid at the Town Arms is bribed to spike the brandy of fourteen voters, sending them to sleep until after the poll. Surveying the scene as Eatanswill votes, Dickens’ satire evokes the drunken exuberance of reform-era electioneering:

  During the whole time of the polling, the town was in a perpetual fever of excitement. Everything was conducted on the most liberal and delightful scale. Exciseable articles were remarkable cheap at all the public-houses; and spring vans paraded the streets for the accommodation of voters who were seized with any temporary dizziness in the head – an epidemic which prevailed among the electors, during the contest, to a most alarming extent, and under the influence of which they might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility.14

  The worst election abuses were outlawed in the 1832 Reform Act, which introduced a uniform property franchise in boroughs, created sixty-seven new constituencies and scrapped the ‘rotten’ seats. Subsequent reforms not only extended the franchise further but also started to clean up elections. The secret ballot was introduced in 1872 and the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act banned parliamentary candidates from treating voters to drinks at the bar in return for their vote. It also made it an offence for an elector to receive such a bribe.

  Edwardian writers reported that free or heavily subsidised beer still sloshed around constituencies at election time and claimed that pub landlords bragged they could mobilise large blocs of votes.15 But elections that doubled as riotous drunken carnivals had gone by the time of the First World War.

  Old Beaujolais

  However, serious ministerial drinking continued into the twentieth century. When government was small and ministers had little to manage, then perhaps it did not matter greatly if they conducted their business through an alcoholic haze. It mattered more when, during the twentieth century, government vastly extended its responsibilities and ministers presided over huge departments. During the Second World War many government ministers ran their departments with a drink close to hand. Even leaving Churchill out of the picture, at least for the moment, other examples make the point. Perhaps the best is provided by Ernest Bevin, the second most important man in Churchill’s wartime government, who as Minister of Labour had the job of mobilising Britain. In 1940 J.B. Priestley described Bevin as a ‘powerful, thick-set, determined figure of a man, a fine lump of England which we all love; one of those men who stand up among the cowardices and treacheries and corruption of this recent world like an oak tree in a swamp’.16 Before the war Bevin had been the leading trade union figure of his generation and after the war he was the driving force behind NATO, insisting that Britain should have the atomic bomb because he was not going to have the country ‘barged about’.

  One of the most formidable politicians of the twentieth century, Bevin had a gigantic ego and colossal stamina. He was also an epic drinker. As his biographer Alan Bullock wrote:

  When he was under pressure, Bevin drank a lot – whisky, champagne, brandy, whatever was to hand. He used alcohol, one of his secretaries said, like a car uses petrol, to keep himself going, and he and his doctor (who certainly watered his whisky) had a running fight on the subject, not least because the effect of drink was to make him truculent.17

  Bevin’s health eventually disintegrated and he died in 1951 aged seventy.

  For the next forty years, it was common for government ministers to continue to drink heavily. But politicians grew increasingly prickly about any suggestion of over-indulgence. The libel lawyers were always ready to pounce, as they did in 1957 when the Spectator magazine published a mischievously comic account of the twenty-third annual congress of the Italian Socialist Party held in Venice. The gathering was attended by three prominent Labour Party politicians from Britain: the former health minister Aneurin Bevan, the party’s general secretary Morgan Phillips and the future Cabinet minister and diarist Richard Crossman. The Spectator piece was written by a political journalist, Jenny Nicholson, and headlined ‘Death in Venice’. Nicholson said that during their occasional appearances, Bevan, Phillips and Crossman

  puzzled the Italians by their capacity to fill themselves like tanks with whisky and coffee, while they (because of their livers and also because they are abstemious by nature) were keeping going on mineral water and an occasional coffee. Although the Italians were never sure the British delegation was sober, they always attributed to them an immense political acumen.18

  The article did not say the men were drunk, but that was the clear inference.

  Within days of its appearance, the Spectator received a complaint of serious libel from the men’s lawyers. After the complainants failed to agree an acceptable form of apology with the Spectator, the case went to court; and all three men swore on oath that they had been sober and denied the accusation of drunkenness. The jury took just twenty-eight minutes to agree with them. The judge, Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice, awarded Crossman, Bevan and Phillips a hefty £2,500 each in damages from the Spectator – a huge sum at the time – plus the £4,000 costs of the two-day hearing.

  The case has been argued about ever since. Were the three men drunk? Did they commit perjury in order to pocket a substantial sum of money? According to Richard Crossman’s biographer, Anth
ony Howard, the Labour MP had never intended to go to court. In part this was because he had worked as a journalist himself, but mainly it was because the accusation of drunkenness against Morgan Phillips was entirely true.

  Crossman would become famous for his political diaries, the first Cabinet minister to reveal what went on behind the scenes during his years in government. The Cabinet diaries were published after his death in the mid-1970s and provoked a huge controversy at the time. In his diary of earlier life on the backbenches, published in 1981, Crossman confirmed that Phillips had hit the bottle in Venice: ‘He [Phillips] drank steadily … with the result he got tiddly by mid-day and soaked by dinner-time.’19