He made 30 major speeches, many of them in the open air, in 15 days – addressing (by his own careful calculation) 86,930 people Often he spoke for several hours But Jenkins deals in quality as well as quantity “He never pandered or talked down to his audience. His flattery lay in assuming their seriousness and judgemental capacity.”Gladstone knew that he would win the Midlothian election. So “while it was magnificent [it] was not therefore electorally bold. The purpose for which it was necessary was the re-imposition of Gladstone’s authority on the political scene and the sending out of beams of Liberal enthusiasm.” It is comment which gives life to detail.Very occasionally, the achievement is under-rated. The First Irish Land Bill (1870) is dismissed as a “dead letter” because its reference to “exorbitant rents” (rather than “excessive” as Gladstone first intended) “enabled the courts to interpret the protection narrowly.” Certainly, the Land Bill of 1881 brought more relief to peasant farmers than the earlier measure.

But the 1870 legislation, as well as helping the worst treated tenants, changed history. It was the first acknowledgment that the demand for Home Rule was based as much on the need for bread as on the hope of independence. And it established the notion that the state has a duty to regulate “free” contracts when the power of the rival parties is so disproportionate that the will of one is imposed on the other. The philosopher, TH Green, thought it an early example of parliamentary socialism.Gladstone was (at least until the last years of his life) not even a radical. The reforms of his First Administration – including the Great Education Act of 1870 – were the achievements of his Ministers, not their leader.

He told John Ruskin in 1878 that he was a “firm believer in the aristocratic principle – the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inegalitarian.” Jenkins concludes that “what he liked best was an austere duke of large fortune.” But he also liked scholars, poets, theologians and philosophers. He was by far the most conscientiously intellectual Prime Minister in British history and certainly the most genuinely pious.Jenkins illuminates Gladstone’s complex character in a series of vignettes which add colour to the careful narrative. And the full supporting cast, no less than the star, is painted in vivid colours. General Gordon “was temperamentally unsuited to be the agent of a cautious policy.

He was the prototype of a Boy’s Own Paper hero, with an additional capacity to seize the attention and attract the admiration of many who had passed the age of boyhood.” Parnell, until destroyed by the divorce, seemed set upon a classic path, “an organiser of intransigence who, after a qualifying period in gaol, became a moderate, even a conservative founder of a new party.”The moderate, even conservative party that Jenkins helped to found in 1981 was, as we now know, a staging post on his journey to his natural home amongst the Liberals. And, in consequence, we can make one real comparison between the politics of author and subject Some Liberals move left as they grow older Some do not.Gladstone by Roy Jenkins, Macmillan, pounds 20. Sabbath’s Theatre

by Philip Roth
Cape, pounds 15.99To say the least, Philip Roth’s new book begins as it means to go on. “Either forswear fucking others,” the hero, Mickey Sabbath, is warned, “or the affair is over”. It is a bold ultimatum, coming as it does from a woman who glories in sleeping with four different men in a day (while Sabbath listens on the phone).