In the later 1850s, Palmerston was Prime Minister: Gladstone, his Chancellor. It was a successful partnership between two very different characters. As Roy Jenkins used to say, Palmerston’s willingness to put up with Gladstone — never an easy subordinate — proves that he was more that a bombastic Regency rake. At different times, the pair made the two wisest comments ever to emerge from a Liberal (the only two wise comments?). Gladstone: ‘Money is best left to fructify in the pockets of the people.’ Palmerston: ‘Change, change, change: aren’t things bad enough already?’ If modern Liberals talked like that, their party might have some hope of survival.
Palmerston’s trenchancy came back to me while I was on my way to do some trenchering in a western part of England whose beauty is past change. I have friends who live in a wonderful, sprawling, endlessly welcoming house which they liken to a hobbit’s dwelling. Others call it Higgledy-Piggledy Hall. Smials, hobbit-hole, hall or whatever, it has all the necessary ingredients for civilised life: an overflow of bookshelves, a huge kitchen — the megalomphalos — a vaut-le-visite cellar, Montevedi’s Vespers, dogs, hens, donkeys and children.
Nor does change necessarily mean decay. It seems only yesterday that the chatelaine was a scampering hoyden. Now, one sees the lineaments of a future Lord Lieutenant. She is training herself for high office by fearlessness in the hunting field and by her choice of clothing. She used to own a weskit which looked as if it had been stitched together by the local poacher from uncured rabbit skins. Look on that poacher’s works, ye Paris collections, and despair. Never in the history of female apparel, never in all the dreams and creativity and catwalks of the hautest of haut-couturiers, has a garment been so entirely suited to its owner.
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