The trouble with Michael
Leo McKinstry says that Michael Portillo — scourge of the Tory establishment — has much in common with another political failure, Lord Rosebery If fate had taken a different course, the general election of 2005 could have been Michael Portillo’s shining hour, the moment when he lived up to the brilliance of his promise by leading the Conservatives to victory. Yet instead of taking what once seemed his rightful place at the head of government, Portillo has now shuffled off the political stage. And rather than trying to rally voters to the Conservative cause, he has spent most of the last few months attacking his own party, especially on the issue of immigration. Watching Portillo’s performance in recent weeks, I have been reminded of his similarity to another dashing, charismatic politician who once seemed certain to be a dominant party leader but was effectively finished by the age of 50 and then specialised in condemning the policies of his former colleagues.
In the run-up to the general election of early 1905, the erstwhile prime minister Lord Rosebery caused outrage in his party’s ranks by the ferocity of his verbal assaults on his successor as Liberal leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. While Portillo has not quite reached such levels of vituperation, his newspaper columns have continually demonstrated a repugnance at Howard’s brand of Toryism. But a sense of failure, of destiny unfulfilled, lurks behind Portillo’s lofty criticism of those still trying to fight the political battles, just as was the case with Rosebery.
Indeed, having spent several years researching a biography of the enigmatic, often exasperating Lord Rosebery, who was briefly prime minister in the 1890s, I have been continually struck by the parallels between his career and that of Michael Portillo. Like Portillo, Rosebery was a superb public performer, with a sense of star quality and gifts of melodrama and oratory. Just as Portillo rose to prominence in the 1980s as a standard-bearer for the radical creed of Thatcherism, so Lord Rosebery, a wealthy Scottish aristocrat, began his career in the vanguard of advanced Gladstonian liberalism, organising the Grand Old Man’s triumphant Midlothian campaign of 1880. Yet later they both rejected the hard-line orthodoxies of their mentors, Portillo through his advocacy of Conservative ‘modernisation’ which ran against everything that robust Thatcherism stood for, Rosebery through his support for Liberal Imperialism, an ideology that the aging Gladstone found abhorrent because of his suspicion of Empire. In fact, to their critics, both Portillo and Rosebery, in their eagerness to embrace new thinking, rejected the central tenets of the parties they claimed to serve. Their subsequent attacks on party policy provided some justification to the charge.
Because of their combination of grandeur and personal charm, both men attracted an army of passionate followers, often characterised more by the hysteria of their devotion than the effectiveness of their judgment. Just as the Portillistas gathered around modernising groups such as Xchange, so Rosebery had his own internal organisation known as the Liberal League, founded in 1902 ostensibly to promote the pro-Empire wing of the Liberal party but in reality little more than a Rosebery fan club. Domestically, both men liked to emphasise the compassion of their social policies, though their detractors saw them as hypocritical and opportunistic. Portillo has been on the television experiencing life as a single parent, which contrasts with his own affluent existence as husband of a City headhunter. Similarly, Rosebery was the first chairman of the London County Council and later served on that body as a left-wing progressive, yet he owned a string of racehorses and stately homes across the country, as well as a villa in Italy.
For all the sense of privilege they exuded, both had a sense of being outsiders at Westminster, Portillo as the son of a Spanish Republican, Rosebery as a Scot who caused great controversy in London society in 1878 by marrying a Jewess, Hannah Rothschild, of the famous European banking family. Both men were connoisseurs of the arts, Rosebery renowned for his literary interests — he is the only prime minister since Disraeli to have been a successful writer, specialising in historical biography — and Portillo for his love of opera. Even more intriguingly, the shadow of homosexuality hung over both their lives. Through fear of exposure, Portillo confessed to a long-term gay affair which began at Cambridge. Throughout his life Rosebery was the subject of whispered gossip about his sexuality, despite the fact that his marriage, which ended prematurely in 1890 on the death of his wife, produced four children. These rumours reached their peak in 1895, when the trial of Oscar Wilde took place towards the end of his premiership. It was said that the government had to hound Wilde into prison because Lord Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, was allegedly threatening to expose Rosebery as a homosexual unless harsh action were taken against Wilde. In fact, there is no evidence to support the idea of an official coverup, and Rosebery was almost certainly heterosexual. He had affairs with a princess, an American actress and the socialistic Countess of Warwick.
Rosebery reached the highest office as Gladstone’s successor in 1894 and also enjoyed two short spells as foreign secretary. In that way, he was perhaps more conventionally successful than Portillo. But, in truth, both men were always deeply ambivalent about politics, and their careers were filled with hesitations and withdrawals. Rosebery often had to be begged by colleagues to take office, while Portillo notoriously aborted his leadership bid against John Major in 1995. Both were drawn to men of action — Portillo’s famous speech at the Tory conference when he invoked the name of the SAS to win applause from the party faithful was paralleled by Rosebery’s fondness for Victorian imperial pioneers such as Kitchener and Rhodes. But when faced with their own political challenges, they shrank from the single-minded courage and iron will they admired in others. In George Bernard Shaw’s words, Rosebery never missed a chance of missing an opportunity.
As a politician, Portillo was perhaps less erratic than Rosebery, who suffered all his life from crippling insomnia — as prime minister he once went through a harrowing spell of almost three weeks without sleep, prompting his doctor to fear that he might die. But both men were perhaps too sensitive, too thin-skinned for politics, prone to suffer from wounded pride, bad tempers and pessimism. Unlike some lesser figures, they had no real relish for the fight. They wanted the leadership on their terms or not at all. When they did not get their way, they retired hurt. Rosebery resigned the Liberal leadership in 1896. For the next 20 years, there were urgent calls for his return to the national stage; even in 1916, Lloyd George offered him a seat in his war government, knowing that the lustre of the Rosebery name would add prestige to his troubled administration. Typically, Rosebery refused. And now Michael Portillo, modern Britain’s answer to the strange, colourful exotic Rosebery, has left a generation wondering what might have been if he had only acted differently.
Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil by Leo McKinstry is published on 23 May by John Murray at £25.
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