What made this truism seem portentous and interesting was a lot of Hegelian dry- ice about the death of the struggle between systematically different social and political systems. In fact, of course, History continued, not least because there is not one capitalist system but many, and the reckoning between them was far from over Trust History. In The End of History and the Last Man, his previous book, he gained a good deal of celebrity by stating the obvious: that the death of Communism had removed the last systematic challenge to the triumph of the capitalist system. I suspect that the editors did not do their duty because they were over- impressed. Fukuyama is a genuine, certified big thinker in America, and big thinkers are allowed to indulge themselves. “He rather splendidly replied that he knew of no precedent and had taken no advice,” writes Jenkins.

So although the Queen outlived the Grand Old Man by two and a half years, Jenkins gives the victory to him, after all, as “the quintessential statesman of her reign, its epitome and, almost as much as herself, its symbol”. The case could hardly be better made.! ‘Gladstone’ by Roy Jenkins is published by Macmillan at pounds 20. THIS is a fat book: it sags and bulges; it waddles about and is short of breath; it perspires and sits down heavily in chairs Its colour and complexion are bad. A decent editor (are there any left?) would have put this one on a celery diet and the exercise machines until it had the sinew and definition to face its readers.

The Queen (“unfailing to the last”) telegraphed to her son to ask what precedent he had followed, and whose advice he had taken. It was also a time when the sovereign sometimes felt threatened, although Gladstone never flirted with republicanism. He contented himself with being closer to the Prince of Wales than the Queen.The Prince of Wales, indeed, chose to be a pall-bearer at Gladstone’s funeral in 1898. It was a time, remarks Jenkins, “when oratory was more popular than football”. “I am convinced from a hundred tokens that she looks forward to the day of my retirement as a day if not of jubilee yet of relief,” he wrote to Dilke, and in his diary, “Received with much civility, had a long audience, but am always outside an iron ring: and without any desire, had I the power, to break it through.”The Queen resented Gladstone’s electioneering meetings, sometimes held too near Balmoral for her liking, because of his appeal to working men, who gathered in their tens of thousands to hear him. Necessary meetings at Balmoral, Windsor and Osborne brought no joy to either.

The flashes of wit become sharper and more frequent, and his evident delight in the man and his story carries the reader along as though on the crest of a rising wave.From Chapter 20 onwards, there is a bonus, for this is when Queen Victoria becomes a principal supporting character, bringing an extra dimension of humour in the frequent clashes recorded by both She was not one of Gladstone’s romances, nor he hers. Add to this his ability to compare and contrast 19th- and 20th-century politics in all their manifestations, and the result is a narrative consistently absorbing and often surprising As it proceeds it gains steadily in interest. His understanding of both the ferocities and the element of playfulness of the House of Commons – often hard for outsiders to fathom – is total. His accounts of the way in which cabinets are made and held together, and weakened and fissured, are detailed and fascinating.