No room at the top | 17 June 2009

Political feuds have always been at the heart of politics. The most public of these have occurred when the adversaries were confronting each other across the floor of the House, leaders of different parties bound by their roles to oppose each other on every occasion even when they had scant belief in the superior merits of their cause. Quite as protracted and often still more embittered were the feuds between two politicians who were in theory colleagues but in practice were locked in ferocious rivalry. Campbell describes only two of the first category — Fox and Pitt and Gladstone and Disraeli — but six of the second — Castlereagh and Canning, Asquith and Lloyd George, Bevan and Gaitskell, Macmillan and Butler, Heath and Thatcher and Blair and Brown. It is perhaps a sign of the way politics have changed that five out of the six feuds between colleagues occurred in the 20th century.