13. The Duke’s Conception of a Cabinet (3)
As to the art of Cabinet government and the perversity of political colleagues, the Duke has left a very amusing obiter dictum, which may be found in the diary of Lady Salisbury, for many years one of the two women with whom he condescended to talk politics. “One man in the Cabinet wants one thing, and one another: they agree to what I may say in the morning, and then in the evening up they start with some crotchet which deranges the whole plan. I have not been used to that in the earlier part of my life. I have been accustomed to carry on things in quite a different way. I assembled my officers and laid down my plan, and it was carried into effect without any more words.” In short, the Duke’s conception of the organization of a Cabinet was that the prime minister should give orders, and the rest should obey them without discussion.
It is curious to note that many years before, as far back as 1812, when his brother, Wellesley, threw up his position in Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet because his proposals were often overruled, Wellington wrote to him in sympathetic terms that “the republic of a cabinet is but little suited to any man of taste or of large views”. At that same crisis Liverpool had thought well to explain to Wellington what he, as a prime minister, considered to be the working of a Cabinet. “Lord Wellesley says that he has not the weight in the Government that he expected when he accepted office. But government through a Cabinet is necessarily inter pares, in which each member must expect to have his opinions and his dispatches canvassed. And their previous friendly canvass of opinions and measures appears necessary, under a Constitution where all public acts of ministers will be hostilely debated in Parliament.”
It is easy to see why Lord Liverpool held the premiership for fifteen continuous years, and why Wellington smashed up his Cabinet and his party in three. No body of ministers will consent for long to have their policy dictated to them in the form of military orders, criticism of which is regarded as insubordination, if not as mutiny. More especially will this be the case when the prime minister suddenly makes a volte-face in policy, and takes up measures which his colleagues regard as contravening the fundamental creed of their party. Such was the fate of Sir Robert Peel and of Mr. Gladstone in later years.
But I think that even Mr. Gladstone, who was a man obstinately convinced of the righteousness of his own most unexpected and inexplicable mental processes, was less shocked and less surprised at the conduct of his colleagues than was Wellington under similar conditions. “What’s the meaning of a party if they don’t follow their leaders?” he exclaimed to Lord Salisbury. “Damn ‘em: let them go.” He was not the man who could talk or think of “educating his party”. Conscious of his own great ability, still more conscious of the want of ability in the great mass of his supporters, he thought that they owed him military obedience—“theirs not to reason why”. Like Mr. Gilbert’s soldier in Iolanthe, he felt that the sight of a group of dull M.P.s in close proximity, each one trying to think for himself, was enough to disturb any man’s equanimity. His ideal colleague would have been Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., in another of Mr. Gilbert’s immortal works:
Who always voted at his party’s call,
And never thought of thinking for himself at all.
What an ideal First Lord of the Admiralty for a Wellington Cabinet! But the Duke might perhaps have objected to what he would have called the vulgar origins of a petti-fogging attorney.
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