1 - Utilitarian or Neo-Foxite Whig? Robert Lowe as Chancellor of the Exchequer

Summary

Peter Clarke's first book Lancashire and the New Liberalism luxuriated in the grassroots of politics, but insofar as it acknowledged any individual heroes they were a present and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. These two were pioneers of the progressive policies that were the subject of Clarke's second book, Liberals and Social Democrats. His third book, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, took for its context the policies of Churchill and the man who succeeded him as Chancellor, Philip Snowden. Finally The Cripps Version, Clarke's sixth and most recent book, is the biography of a politician best remembered as the ‘austerity Chancellor’. This chapter, on two other one-time residents of 11 Downing Street, William Gladstone and Robert Lowe, is also relevant to Clarke's fourth book, A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher, because along with Disraeli these were the first two ‘political’ Chancellors in the sense of enjoying a prestige independent of the Prime Minister of the day. Furthermore, their ambiguous relationship illustrates one of the main themes of Clarke's oeuvre, and also of the present volume: the way in which agreements over economic theory and policy can often mask – just as disagreements can often reflect – philosophical differences that have nothing directly to do with economics.