Pitt boss.(Book Review)

William Hague William Pitt the Younger. Knopf, 576 pages, $35

William Pitt the Younger was, along with Winston Churchill, Britain's greatest Prime Minister. Unlike Churchill, however, he was as successful in peacetime as in war. He was the savior of his country in the most perilous moments of the Napoleonic Wars, when invasion of the British Isles was a serious and daily threat. In his astonishing eighteen years and eleven months in office--only exceeded in length by two other premiers, Sir Robert Walpole and Pitt's own lieutenant Lord Liverpool--Pitt piled achievement upon achievement, yet there has not been a truly fine, full-scale one-volume life written of him--until now.

The reason for this is that Professor John Ehrman wrote a superb three-volume life of Pitt that is completely definitive. He started in the mid-1960s and ended in 1995, thus taking longer to research and write his masterpiece than Pitt himself took to be born, educated, enter parliament, and become Prime Minister. Some short biographies, such as that published by Michael Turner in 2003 (called Pitt the Younger: A Life) have been good, too, but the need for a distinguished, readable single-volume work has long been recognized.

William Hague has now triumphantly filled this historiographical gap in a way that will make professional political biographers thankful that he spent his first forty-three years of life becoming Leader of the Opposition rather than muscling in on their territory. For this book is heavily researched (while paying all due obeisance to Ehrman's pathbreaking work), very well written, and narrated with a finely attuned sense of the politically dramatic. When he was thirty-six, in 1997 Hague became the youngest leader of the British Conservative party since Pitt himself, a via dolorosa he trod until 2001, so he is well placed to write about Toryism, child prodigies, and the inner life of a Westminster political system that has changed remarkably little in the past two centuries.

The life of Pitt was nothing if not dramatic. Take the single year 1797, for example, when the Bank of England had to suspend cash payments due to a massive run on the pound sterling, French armies chased the Austrians out of Italy, two Royal Navy, fleets mutinied at Spithead and the Note, a coup d'etat was crushed in Paris, and Napoleon Bonaparte--the greatest captain of his age--was appointed to command the huge army being specially mustered at Boulogne for the invasion of England. The British Prime Minister was still in his thirties when he had to face these multifarious threats; he was drinking heavily and had to rely for his political future on a king who was constantly slipping in and out of periods of barking lunacy.

Fortunately, Britain had found a war leader equal to absolutely anything. Pitt was able to respond "with the rapidity of lightning" in debate. He had turned the tables on his lifelong rival Charles James Fox back in 1788 over the question of the powers of the Prince of Wales's regency, rightly prophesying to friends: "I'll unwhig him for the rest of his life." As an orator he shone, even in a House of Commons that boasted the speaking abilities of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Lord North, and Fox himself. No mean parliamentary debater himself in his day, and a talented former president of the Oxford Union, the author conveys the excitement of those glory days of political rhetoric.

Furthermore there was Pitt's reputation for incorruptibility, his capacity for mastering minute detail, his ability to spot coming men of talent such ...