Biography:Context in politics is often everything. In another age, it is easy to imagine that William Hague might have established himself in the pantheon of Britain's greatest politicians.
The most talented Conservative of his generation, he was the "baby" of the last Tory cabinet and in 1997 became the youngest leader of his party since William Pitt. He is generally regarded as the best debater in the House of Commons. Yet his leadership ended in a landslide election defeat, making him one of only two 20th-century Tory leaders not to become prime minister.
Unkind judgments on Hague - "such a prat," said the conservative commentator, Simon Heffer - were often based on personal characteristics that militated against him in the television age but would hardly have mattered in earlier times. Churchill and Attlee were bald, yet the former led Britain in its "finest hour" during the second World War and the latter delivered a post-war "people's peace". Sir Robert Peel had broad northern vowels, but converted Britain to free trade and globalisation. Gladstone was a political "nerd" and policy wonk, but it did not stop him going on to be, well, Gladstone. Perhaps the Conservative leader whom Hague most closely resembles is Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby. He was scholarly, brilliant in debate, a keen sportsman (Hague has a black belt in judo) and wealthy (Hague made more than £1 million in freelance earnings last year), but it was thought, because he was acerbically funny, that he lacked gravitas. It did not stop Derby becoming prime minister three times.
Hague is a throwback to another age in other ways too. In 1976, when he burst on to the scene as a precocious 15-year-old in a speech to the Conservative party conference, there were three (Labour) cabinet ministers who had published serious works of historical biography. Home secretary Roy Jenkins had already written on Asquith and would go on to complete lives of Gladstone and Churchill; Michael Foot, leader of the House of Commons, was the author of a two-volume life of Aneurin Bevan, and Roy Hattersley, secretary of state for prices, had written a popular study of Nelson. Opposite them on the Tory benches were the likes of Robert Rhodes James, an eminent biographer of Churchill. This was the last generation before the professionalisation of politics. Many politicians now turn to history after they leave the Commons - Douglas Hurd's intelligent and amusing biography of Peel is a recent example - but the days when scholarship, history and politics not only combined but were thought integral to each other have long gone. Historian- politicians, such as Martin Mansergh in the Dáil and Hague in the Commons, have become rare birds.
Hague has already written on William Pitt; this life of Wilberforce is in many ways a companion volume, recounting the life of Pitt's best friend. If ever there was an example of how friendship can have an impact on global events, this book provides it. Together the men drafted a motion for the abolition of the slave trade in 1789. It began a campaign that would last almost half a century, first ending the slave trade 200 years ago this year and then abolishing slavery in 1833. Pitt would die the year before parliament banned the slave trade, but Wilberforce in his last few months lived to see slavery abolished throughout the British empire. "Blessing and honour are upon his head," wrote Gladstone, then a young MP, after visiting "old Mr Wilberforce" just days before his death.
UNSURPRISINGLY FOR A book written by a parliamentarian, this biography puts politics to the foreground. It canters nicely over the ground of Wilberforce's personal life - his religious convictions, his unpopular wife, the physical ailments treated by opium that led to addiction - but does not dwell on them or look to make psychological assessments. The story of Wilberforce, for Hague, is essentially one about how change is effected. In that sense, his is a classic biography in the Whig tradition, examining how progressive reform can be brought about within a hostile political environment.
The most dramatic moments come when Hague brings his own political skill to bear in analysing that of Wilberforce. The 1806 Foreign Slave Trade Bill - "one of the most masterly exercises in laying smoke in the long annals of parliamentary manoeuvres," writes Hague - is itself a masterclass in writing political history: the dramatic, cunning and courageous strategy is revealed layer after layer so that it becomes gradually apparent that the reader is being given a tutorial in modern politics as much as that of Georgian England.
Hague's biography of Pitt was a bestseller (it sold 70,000 copies) and no doubt this new life of Wilberforce will follow suit. He has described himself as "the youngest ex-everything" in British politics. Yet Hague has kept true to that other historian-politician Churchill's essential maxim - "keep buggering on" - and, as this well written and immensely enjoyable book demonstrates, is doing so with some style.
Richard Aldous is head of history at UCD. His new book, Great Irish Speeches, and the paperback edition of his biography of Gladstone and Disraeli, The Lion and the Unicorn, are both published this month
William Wilberforce: the Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner By William Hague Harper Press, 582pp. £25