Harcourt was undoubtedly a major figure in Victorian Liberalism; he served as Liberal Leader in the Commons from 1895 to 1898 and effectively led the party there during several periods when Gladstone was absent and neglectful of the need for party management. From an ideological perspective he can be seen as the link between the politics of Gladstone and the New Liberalism of Asquith-Lloyd George era. Harcourt’s papers have been available at the Bodleian Library from many years, and those of his contemporaries are plentiful, to put it mildly. Yet he has been remarkably neglected by historians; the only previous biography was by the Liberal journalist, A.G. Gardiner, in 1923.

Despite this neglect, Harcourt makes a fine subject for a biography both as a person and as a public figure. Impulsive, condescending, larger-than-life, he was a brilliant public speaker who enjoyed attacking his own party as much as his opponents. He was unable to resist the temptation to be funny and flippant, and, as with Churchill, his language was often over the top. In fact Harcourt gave the impression of enjoying the game too much, hence the accusations of lawyerly opportunism that followed him throughout his career. That he failed to win the premiership on Gladstone’s retirement in 1894 was obviously due to Queen Victoria’s hostility to him, but must partly be ascribed to his inability to curb his tongue and conciliate his colleagues. His civil servants also found him trying, in the manner of a naughty child; if they pressed him to read a paper he disliked he retaliated by hiding it behind a bookcase.

Harcourt’s family were landowners who came over with William the Conqueror and had lived at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire for centuries. When his elder brother complained that he did not have the right ideas about the land, Harcourt tartly replied: ‘You have the land and may leave the ideas to me.’ After getting elected in Oxford in 1868, he was promoted to Solicitor General in 1873, which meant taking a knighthood. ‘It is horrible vulgar,’ he protested, ‘almost as bad as being a Baronet’. In these early years Harcourt’s fellow Liberal in Parliament disliked him so much that they hoped he would join Disraeli. He certainly played a major part in the disintegration that eventually resulted in the breakdown of Gladstone’s government in 1874. But Harcourt felt happier in opposition, though he found Gladstone infuriating – as, of course, did almost all the GOM’s colleagues. However, although he saw the merits of Lord Hartington as an alternative Liberal leader, Harcourt became more appreciative of Gladstone as the one man capable of unifying the party; as a result – and rather paradoxically – he stayed loyal to Gladstone when he split the party over Home Rule in 1886, even though he did not really support the principle of Home Rule. For his part Gladstone recognized that Harcourt’s energy and forensic talent fully justified keeping him in office or on the front bench, hence his promotion to Home Secretary in 1880 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1892.

It was as the Home Secretary in 1880 that Harcourt became a famous victim of the rule that a minister must vacate his seat and win re-election on his appointment. He had eloquently defended the tradition but now found himself obliged to fight again in the highly marginal and corrupt borough of Oxford. He told the electors it was now ‘my duty to consider the question of a cheap and pure supply of water for the people of London…But how am I to do so when I am kept here by the cheap distribution of more or less beer in Oxford? [Hear, hear and laughter]’. Harcourt lost but promptly moved to Derby, ‘a thoroughly respectable constituency, which is more than can be said for you last place’, Joseph Chamberlain told him.

Was Harcourt at all influenced by the presence of a more organized working class in his new seat? He gave every appearance of being a strict retrenchment Liberal, following Gladstone’s line in holding down expenditure and resisting costly policies of imperial expansion and reform of the armed forces; and he came unstuck in the 1895 election when he focused too much on temperance. Contrast this with Derby’s Labour member after 1906, Jimmy Thomas, whose love of alcohol was legendary. However, we are given little indication of the interactions between Harcourt and his constituents. Derby gets only a brief mention in Patrick Jackson’s book, which is focused almost entirely on high-politics sources.

The result is that in Harcourt and Son, as in many academic biographies, the important questions tend to get swamped by the literary tsunami of private correspondence generated by Victorian politicians. For example, when the author reaches the crisis over parliamentary reform in 1866-67 he plunges into the correspondence without explaining the issues or putting Harcourt into context; for the reader who is not already familiar with the details it is difficult to account.

This failing becomes serious in the remarkably brief treatment of what was surely the peak of Harcourt’s career: his famous budget of 1894. Despite his orthodox past, this had some appearance of a break with Gladstonianism; the GOM certainly didn’t like it. Harcourt adopted several innovatory policies, including a scheme of graduated death duties that reached a peak of 6 per cent payable on estates worth a million pounds. Harcourt also wanted to introduce a graduated income tax. There is certainly a case for seeing this budget as a crucial step on the way to the radical measures implemented by Asquith and Lloyd George after 1906 and as an early manifestation of the ideas of the New Liberalism. But there is little attempt in the book to evaluate his thinking or the evolution of Liberalism in the late-Victorian period. Instead the author presents the 1894 budget largely in terms of the infighting between Rosebery and Harcourt, as revealed in the correspondence. This approach trivializes a crucial theme in both Harcourt’s life and the development of Liberal politics.

It may well be that Harcourt himself failed to see his innovations in terms of their wider significance. When the party lost office in 1895, his work as Leader in the Commons suggested that he had little consistent idea about the direction Liberalism should be taking. As one colleague remarked, Harcourt had ‘always been a hand to mouth man and always will be’. There is clearly something in this comment, but whether it offers a satisfactory perspective on his career remains in doubt.