Corruption and the morality of public life

This essay provides an overview of the ways corruption featured in British politics from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. It does so by examining three core areas of public life: the administration of the state; the culture of elections; and party politics and the conduct of ministers, MPs, and councillors. The overall picture is a complex one. A medley of reforms introduced from the early nineteenth century attacked longstanding sources of aristocratic privilege and monopoly, making for a state that was more professional, accountable, inclusive, and efficient. By the 1890s, electoral corruption had largely been eliminated. The closing decades of the century, however, witnessed the birth of a new politics of corruption focused on the malign influence of rich capitalists (‘plutocrats’) and the conduct of ministers, MPs, and parties. It concludes by suggesting that it would be wrong to speak of a linear or cumulative process of purification and reform.

Introduction

The problem of corruption was central to British politics during the long nineteenth century. Allegations of corruption animated all areas of public life, from central and local government through to the conduct of elections and Parliament. Meanwhile, empire, imperial trade, and colonial business ventures were routinely posited as sources of corruption at home. Major scandals erupted now and then, and were immediately elevated into symptoms of a deeper rot in the body politic and systemic injustices in the distribution of power. It is tempting to see the enduring centrality of the problem as the product of a battle that has long been waged between the forces of oligarchy and democracy, the few and the many – between vested interests and unscrupulous individuals on the one hand, and principled upholders of the public good and accountable government on the other. To some extent, it was. Public office has always been inhabited by individuals and groups willing to abuse their positions of power for their own financial or partisan gain. Nineteenth-century Britain was no exception. Some officeholders were more virtuous than others; some were quite venal. But the history of corruption extends much beyond the probity of particular individuals and groups. It is also the history of institutional reform and of shifting standards and expectations about what constitutes good conduct in public life and how this is best secured and expressed. In other words, we can also write the history of corruption in terms of broader, structural changes to the functioning and legitimacy of public office, and how power is wielded and for whom. The problem of corruption in public life was just as urgent in the Edwardian period as it was at the close of the eighteenth century, but the kinds of corruption at stake had changed considerably. We can trace this history by examining three areas of public life.

Old Corruption and the state

The first of these we might loosely call ‘the state’. At the end of the eighteenth century, the British state was at once Anglican, propertied, ‘fiscal-military’, and imperial (Brewer 1990; O’Gorman 1997). It had been forged over the previous hundred or so years. The constitutional settlement that had emerged in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) accorded a privileged place to Parliament, which was now subject to regular elections, but it was also a highly exclusive, hierarchical, and sectarian settlement. The franchise was severely restricted; Dissenters and Catholics were barred from public life; and the monarch and his or her court retained extensive powers of patronage, not least when it came to appointing peers and MPs to public office and awarding government contracts. At the same time, recurrent warfare – from which Britain mostly emerged victorious – led to the development of sophisticated forms of government borrowing via the Bank of England and a highly developed fiscal bureaucracy for collecting taxes. Just as importantly, Britain’s empire continued to prosper. Although Britain endured the traumatic loss of the American colonies in the 1780s, the East India Company consolidated its hold on the Indian subcontinent following the Battle of Plassey in 1757, while the imperial economy expanded prodigiously. The slave trade, for instance, boomed, with annual shipments of slaves by British traders tripling over the century, peaking at some 40,000 in the 1790s.

What bound this otherwise composite state together was a belief not just in Britain’s superiority as a Protestant nation, but in the authority that flowed from the ownership of property, and most of all landed property (Langford 1991). Governing was principally the pursuit of the wealthy and those of ‘independent’ means, who, according to the logic of the time, were more likely to act in a virtuous and disinterested fashion because they were less beholden to others. Salaries were not uncommon, notably in the Customs and Excise services, but there was no culture of systematic or formal remuneration in public administration (Chester 1981, 12–57). Instead, public service was discharged voluntarily, especially at the local level, or was rewarded via the fees that might be earned from holding or leasing public offices, some of which had become redundant (so-called ‘sinecures’). Pensions were also granted by the monarch via the Civil List.

The Georgian state had not escaped accusations of corruption before, notably during Robert Walpole’s long tenure as prime minister (1721–42), when members of the ‘Country party’ attacked his management – or bribery, as they saw it – of MPs and his own personal enrichment while in office (Woodfine 2006). From the 1780s, however, and still more from the early 1800s, this criticism intensified at the hands of an emergent culture of popular radicalism, which attacked not just particular practices but the entire fabric of propertied, Anglican rule and fiscal-military administration (Thompson 1980; Gilmartin 1996). The elite enjoyment of domestic and colonial sinecures; Church of England privileges; ‘closed’, self-selecting municipal corporations; high taxes and a bulging national debt; lucrative government contracts; the profits of imperial trading companies; as well as the limited franchise – all were part of what the pugnacious radical campaigner William Cobbett dubbed ‘Old Corruption’, or, more commonly, ‘the Thing’.

This wide-ranging critique partly reflected new ideals. Drawing on various currents of thought, among them Paineite theories of natural rights, ancient constitutionalism, and Benthamite utilitarianism, radicalism advanced a broadly democratic agenda of reform, one which aimed to secure more inclusive, accountable, and efficient government. But the radical critique was also a response to the growth of the fiscal-military state during the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Harling 1996). Remarkably, net public spending almost quadrupled in real terms over the course of the wars, and at the height of the conflict with Napoleon the government was consuming over 30 per cent of national income. High-profile corruption scandals involving the Treasurer of the Navy, Viscount Melville, in 1805 and the Duke of York in 1809 were grist to the radical mill, proof that the system as a whole was fundamentally unjust and geared towards furthering the interests of the elites at the expense of the people. The critique was total, combining florid invective and masses of evidence. In 1820, the radical utilitarian John Wade published the first of many editions of his widely read Black Book: or, Corruption Unmasked! The 1832 edition ran to almost 700 pages of dense textual commentary and statistics (Wade 1832).

The fortunes of radicalism waxed and waned in the period up to the demise of the Chartist platform in the mid-nineteenth century. New demands were added along the way, such as factory reform, and common causes emerged with the urban-industrial middle classes, in particular fiscal reform and the abolition of protective tariffs on wheat, otherwise known as the Corn Laws, which were introduced in 1815. Although deeply suspicious of one another, radicals and members of the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in 1839, were united in seeing these ‘bread taxes’ as yet another state-sponsored form of institutionalised corruption that privileged the interests of the landed elites over the people (Gurney 2009). In general terms, however, the radical diagnosis remained the same, as did the solution they elevated above all others: parliamentary reform and the granting of universal male suffrage. Ultimately, as most radicals saw it, this was the only way purity in public life could be restored and a fairer and more just society created.

The ministerial and parliamentary elites rejected this particular facet of the radical critique, fiercely resisting calls for universal manhood suffrage. They were more sensitive to charges of elite excess, administrative inefficiency, fiscal unfairness, and religious intolerance (Harling 1996). Many appreciated the need to restore popular trust in government, and they were variously inspired by different forms of political economy, a resurgent Christian evangelicalism, and a desire to rein in the executive and restore some balance to the constitution. ‘Public opinion’, too, emerged as a recognised source of authority, sharpening the sense that public office had to be exercised in a way that was open and accountable, even if ‘democracy’ remained a source of elite suspicion. The result was different styles of reform among the two chief party formations that held office. Crudely, liberal Tories emphasised fiscal retrenchment, Whigs and ‘reformers’ constitutional innovation; but both embraced administrative reform, albeit in more interventionist, social forms in the case of the Whigs and their allies.

As historians have suggested, slowly but surely, amid various changes of government, mass petitioning, and no little popular and sometimes violent protest, a cleaner, more ‘disinterested’ state was pieced together (Harling 2001, 73–88). Building on administrative reforms introduced by Tory-Pittite ministries during the 1790s and early 1800s, the period after 1815 in particular witnessed a varied assault on Old Corruption. By 1835, the number of sinecures in central government had been reduced to ten, from roughly 600 in 1780. The annual cost of pensions drawn from the Civil List was pruned, from almost £200,000 in 1809 to £75,000 in 1830. By the 1850s, strict terms of service, payment, and superannuation applied to almost all centrally appointed posts. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored privileges of the Church of England were eroded. In 1828 and 1829, political disqualifications relating to Dissenters and then Catholics were lifted; in 1836, the system of paying Church tithes was rendered less burdensome. More broadly, public spending was cut, as balanced budgets were pursued and the tax burden was rebalanced toward direct taxes, so that it fell more fairly on the affluent and the rich (e.g. the income tax was reintroduced in 1842). Free trade was embraced, with hundreds of tariffs on popular items of consumption either cut or abolished, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Finally, many of the injustices associated with empire were attacked. The most iconic of the corrupt practices associated with empire, the slave trade, was abolished in 1807, followed by slavery in 1833, albeit at the cost of lavishly compensating British slave owners (Peterson 2010). The governance of the East India Company, another potent symbol of the rottenness of empire, was reformed (Dirks 2006). Acts in 1773 and 1784 had already brought the Company under closer government control. This was followed by a series of reforms in the early nineteenth century that replaced the patronage enjoyed by Company directors with more merit-based forms of appointment, before the Company was abolished in 1858.

A number of radical grievances remained, it should be emphasised, ranging from the much-reduced Civil List to the brute fact of Britain’s still expanding empire and the considerable military and administrative costs that went with it. Patronage also continued to attract cries of corruption. Indeed, as far as radicals were concerned, the problem of ‘jobbery’ had only become worse during the 1830s and 1840s as a result of various Whig-sponsored social reforms that had entailed the party-based appointment of central inspectors and official commissioners (e.g. in the arenas of the poor laws, factories, and public health). Although a report published in 1854 – the Northcote–Trevelyan Report – recommended recruiting civil servants via exam-based, open competition, it was not until the 1870s that anything of the sort was introduced comprehensively. Even then, deep pockets of patronage would remain, as in the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service (Bourne 1986). Nonetheless, from an administrative point of view, the key features of Old Corruption had been either dismantled or severely diminished by the 1850s. On the one hand, systemic fiscal and denominational biases – that is, toward Anglicans and landowners – had largely been eradicated and replaced by a state which entertained an expansive conception of the public good and served a plurality of interests and groups. On the other hand, although public life remained largely the preserve of the propertied, especially at the ministerial level, public offices were no longer regarded as a form of private property, while nepotism and patronage were becoming more and more marginal. In short, new norms had arisen which dictated a more professional and accountable culture of administration, and drew a sharper distinction between the public duties of officeholders and their private interests, financial or familial.

Elections and electoral ‘influence’

The second area of public life where corruption was called into question was the very means via which MPs secured public office and, increasingly, parties secured parliamentary majorities and thus their authority to govern – elections and the electoral system. As noted above, this, too, was a core part of the radical diagnosis of Old Corruption. It was not just the restrictive, property-based franchise that attracted their indignation. Another target was so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ containing tiny electorates, which were effectively under the control of a wealthy local patron or landowner, who could thus determine who would become the constituency’s MPs. These were judged all the more corrupt because emerging industrial centres such as Manchester and Leeds had no representation at all. More generally, radicals objected to the conduct of elections. Although in theory the propertied nature of the franchise secured an ‘independent’, virtuous electorate, in practice this was often subverted. Since votes were cast publicly, and then often published in ‘poll books’, electors were routinely intimidated by other electors and non-electors, threatened by their employers or landlords, bribed with cash, or ‘treated’ with free beer, food, and entertainment, into voting for particular candidates. To be sure, few members of the elite seem to have actively relished elections, given the violence and bribery, not to mention the personal financial expense, they entailed – hence the efforts to avoid a contest. Even so, for the established elites, as for many of the electors, exercising this kind of electoral ‘influence’ was simply part of the customary order of things, the social expression of the power and authority that naturally attended substantial property ownership (O’Gorman 1989).

The Whig-sponsored Reform Act of 1832 addressed some of these problems. It abolished and redistributed the seats of the most notorious rotten boroughs such as Old Sarum, Dunwich, and around 50 more; granted seats to hitherto unrepresented towns; modestly expanded the franchise so it embraced 18 per cent of adult males, an increase from roughly 14 per cent; and reduced the polling period to two days, from two weeks (presaging a reduction to only one day in all constituencies by 1853). For some among the elites, this amounted to a huge concession to reformers, and it was followed by another significant act that also attacked the institutional fabric of Old Corruption, this time at the local level: the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, which rendered all borough councils electorally accountable by introducing a uniform ratepayer franchise and annual contests (Parry 1993, 72–89, 116–9). Yet, for radicals, as for an increasing number of independent and reformist MPs, the 1832 Act came as a bitter disappointment and helped to fuel the emergence of Chartism in the late 1830s (Chase 2007). This was principally because it left intact so much of the earlier ‘unreformed’ system and, as radicals saw it, the corruption it was so intimately bound up with. Not only did intimidation, treating, and bribery persist, thereby corrupting the integrity of the voter as a free, independent citizen, but by continuing to exclude the vast bulk of adult males, the 1832 Act did nothing to secure a popular check on the elite’s ‘parasitical’ tendencies and their abuses of the resources of the state.

In the event, the reforms to the state noted above helped to undercut much of this critique, playing a part, as historians have argued, in channelling radicalism into the more respectable forces of parliamentary liberalism and the Liberal Party (Stedman Jones 1983). From mid-century, the expansion of the suffrage was thus pursued in a gradual fashion, resulting in the 1867 Reform Act and then the 1884 Reform Act, which enfranchised roughly two-thirds of adult males. The remaining third, as well as the population of adult females, would, of course, be enfranchised in the early twentieth century in 1918 and 1928. Haltingly, Britain overcame what, for radicals and Chartists, and later socialists, was a profound source of systemic injustice and corruption.

The decades up to the 1884 Act, however, did witness substantive reforms to the conduct of elections. Voting in parliamentary and municipal elections was rendered secret in 1872, with the introduction of uniform ballot papers marked with an ‘X’ and individual polling compartments, finally putting paid to the tradition of voting openly. An act passed in 1883 – the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act, which built on an earlier statute of 1854 – ended the practice of candidates and their patrons spending colossal sums financing their own local election campaigns and ways of influencing voters. Among other things, the 1883 Act increased the penalties for bribing electors; imposed more precise auditing requirements on party agents; and, strikingly, placed strict limits on the amount candidates could spend at elections and circumscribed what the money could be used for (Rix 2008).

This was generated by a growing intolerance of the abuses first highlighted by radicals and liberals. Remarkably, between 1832 and 1868, more than 400 petitions alleging malpractice and corruption in parliamentary elections were tried by special committees of the House of Commons, consuming vast amounts of time in the process (Rix 2022). Yet we should be cautious of interpreting these reforms as a product of growing moral consensus regarding the need for electoral ‘purity’. Just as there remained a dogged attachment to some kind of property or residential qualification for holding the suffrage, so too were MPs and ministers reluctant to accept that voting should be enacted secretly, since this contradicted the idea that the vote was a ‘public trust’ which should be discharged accordingly, in public. Similarly, many regarded the money lavished on constituencies during a contest as the natural expression of elite largesse, as well as a necessary means of electoral mobilisation and fulfilling communal expectations. What seems to have tipped the balance in favour of decisive action were more practical problems linked to the increasing frequency of contests and the expansion of the electorate after 1867: in the case of the secret ballot, the growing violence of elections and fears about the vulnerability of new working-class electors to established forms of intimidation; and in the case of the 1883 Act, the growing cost of local campaigning (Crook & Crook 2007, 457–8; Rix 2008, 70–4). Indeed, it was estimated that at the 1880 general election an eye-watering – and record-breaking – sum of at least £2,000,000 was spent by local candidates, which in today’s terms roughly translates as £130 million. But regardless of quite why these measures were passed, the result was a profound change in electoral culture. Although elections remained boisterous affairs, the act of voting had been privatised and clearer, thicker lines had been drawn between legitimate and illegitimate expenses and forms of influence. Elections in the twentieth century were much cleaner, and an important threshold had been crossed in terms of what was considered good electoral conduct.

Parties and the politics of corruption

The third and final area of public life that was crucial to the transformation of corruption is what we might call the domain of party politics – or, more precisely, political parties and the conduct of ministers, MPs, and councillors. The emergence of an organised, disciplined culture of party conflict, both within and outside Westminster, was a complex and lengthy process. Although the term ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ gained currency in the 1820s, signalling a new appreciation of the utility and morality of parties, it was not until the 1880s that they finally triumphed as the basis of parliamentary authority, kick-starting a new era of what contemporaries sometimes called ‘government by party’. Even so, however slow in the making, parties were a key agent in the demise of Old Corruption.

This is partly because they provided a further source of accountability, enhancing the ability of Parliament to scrutinise the executive and augmenting the work of a rapidly expanding newspaper press. Above all, it was because parties provided a means of putting together parliamentary majorities that did not depend on Crown patronage and so-called ‘placemen’ (i.e. MPs and ministers whose loyalty to the monarch and executive was secured by the granting of sinecures, pensions, and government contracts). Estimates suggest that the number of placemen decreased from roughly 200 in 1780 to 60 in 1830, as prime ministers increasingly looked to Parliament for their executive authority, and they, in turn, enjoying the reciprocal confidence of Parliament, came to determine the distribution of ministerial posts (Hawkins 2015, 66–82). By the 1860s, as Walter Bagehot famously observed, the monarchy had largely been reduced to a ‘dignified’, ceremonial part of the constitution (Bagehot 1867). The real ‘business’ of governing was undertaken by the Cabinet, which bound together the executive and a legislature dominated by parties; and these parties, principally the Conservative and Liberal parties, could increasingly lay claim to a popular electoral ‘mandate’ as a result of extensions to the franchise. A similar process occurred at the local level. After 1835, communal ties of elite patronage were gradually displaced by those of elected parties, while councillors were increasingly subject to growing scrutiny from the press and, from the 1880s, the ‘committee system’ of internal, party-based accountability (Moore 2018).

Crucially, however, this emergent culture of popular, party-based scrutiny and executive authority served only to reconfigure the problem of corruption, rather than to eradicate it. There is no question that standards and levels of scrutiny increased. This was most dramatically the case in local government, where there was recourse to statutory codes, just as there had been in the realm of elections. Building on the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, the 1889 Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act specifically criminalised attempts to bribe councillors and employees of local councils. No statutory codes were developed in relation to ministers and MPs. Nonetheless, there was growing concern about the financial interests of parties and what, from the 1880s, were increasingly referred to as ‘conflicts of interest’ between the public duties of MPs and ministers and their private financial concerns (Crook 2022). A crucial threshold was passed in 1892, when the then Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, decreed that his Cabinet ministers should resign any directorships in public companies. The principle lapsed under the Conservative ministries of Salisbury and Balfour, but it was reasserted after 1906, when the Liberal Party returned to power and it remained in place thereafter. Meanwhile, frequent calls were made for all ministers, of whatever rank, to adhere to Gladstone’s rule, and the vexed question of quite how and when the private financial interests of MPs disbarred them from voting in the Commons was revived during the 1880s, prompting the formation of a select committee in 1896 to examine the matter.

These anxieties reflected the novel centrality of parties to the functioning of Parliament and government, as well as their novel financial needs as increasingly professionalised, large-scale organisations operating in the context of a mass electorate. Crucially, whereas previously the costs of fighting elections fell on local candidates, central party offices were now expected to make significant contributions. But they also reflected the evolution of the British economy and empire, and the growing wealth and nefarious power of ‘plutocracy’, as it was termed, as manifested in a new generation of well-connected industrial, commercial, and banking elites and the further ascendancy of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre. The result was a new politics of corruption distinguished by a focus on the interrelations of parties, MPs, and ministers; plutocrats and their lavish lifestyles and hunger for public prestige; and the interests of capital, especially financial capital (Searle 1987).

This politics assumed various forms. For socialists and radicals, including members of a newly formed Labour Party, the very existence of such a powerful class of capitalists, whose vast personal wealth stood in stark contrast to the meagre wages endured by the majority of the working classes, was a sign of the systemic corruption that infected British society. These were more than echoes of the moralised critique of class-based inequality launched by radicals attacking Old Corruption at the start of the century. The basic premise was the same: the corrupting power of the elite extended far and wide. Parliament was one home of plutocratic influence. At the turn of the century, it became common on the left to highlight the number of Liberal and Conservative MPs and peers who were directors of public companies listed on the stock market (Searle 1987, 40–5). Another vector of corruption was the conduct of the British Empire, amid the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century, which entailed fierce competition between European powers, principally in Africa. Although Britain’s settler colonies escaped criticism, radicals and socialists cast a sceptical eye over the complex financial and commercial interests that were linked to other areas of the empire, and the ambitions of new state-sponsored trading companies such as Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, formed in 1889 (Claeys 2010). The South African War (or Second Boer War, 1899–1902) in particular attracted fierce criticism. Many on the left saw the conflict as serving the interests of financial capitalism and its insatiable need, as J. A. Hobson argued in his Imperialism: A Study (1902), to open up new investment opportunities and markets abroad.

These concerns were largely advanced by the left, but the politics of corruption extended to areas of public life that were the object of fierce critique across the ideological spectrum. Two areas in particular gave rise to a kind of rolling culture of scandal, cynical speculation, and partisan recrimination. One of these was the relation between government contractors on the one hand and government ministers on the other. As Colonial Secretary between 1895 and 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, for instance, was the object of multiple allegations of conflicts of interest, notably in 1900 with the so-called ‘Kynoch affair’, which centred on his and his family’s shareholdings in private companies that had benefited from contracts with the War Office and Admiralty. The highpoint of public outrage came in 1912–13, when a series of scandals erupted, the biggest of which was the Marconi affair (Searle 1987, 172–200). This was born of allegations that a number of high-profile Cabinet ministers, including the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, had traded shares in the Marconi company at a time when it was in negotiations with the government to build an empire-wide telegraph network – in effect, had engaged in ‘insider trading’ for personal gain.

The second area of public life that attracted recurrent allegations of corruption was the exercise of party-based patronage and what became known as the ‘trade in honours’. The basic charge was that the Liberal and Conservative parties, hungry for cash to help fund their election campaigns and central offices, were bestowing peerages and baronetcies (‘honours’) in return for party donations from wealthy supporters. These transactions seem to have begun in the late 1880s, before peaking under the Liberal administrations of 1906 onward, when some 102 peerages were created, compared to 82 during the roughly comparable period of two previous Conservative administrations (Hanham 1960). In the absence of public accountability regarding either the award of honours or party finances, it was difficult to prove that any actual deals had taken place (although historians have unearthed correspondence to this effect), but it was impossible to disguise the clear correlation between levels of partisan support from wealthy individuals and their receipt of an honour.

In neither area were there any ministerial resignations or sackings. The reputational damage to public life was immense, however, amid a flood of lurid speculation in the press and accusations of partisan ‘mud-slinging’ and ‘whitewashing’ (Crook 2022). For those on the left, ministerial scandals and the ‘trafficking of honours’ simply furnished further evidence of the corrupting power of plutocracy. But those on the far right were equally enraged, especially during the period of Edwardian Liberal rule, which witnessed an unprecedented assault on the extravagant lifestyles of Liberal ministers and their supporters, and the more general culture of ‘government by party’ (Searle 1979). In 1911, Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton published their Party System (1911), a prolonged assault on what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Liberal and the Conservative parties and their disregard for the traditional ‘independence’ of Parliament. The Marconi scandal prompted still more aggressive denunciations of ‘Radical Plutocracy’ from the same quarters and led to the formation of the short-lived National League for Clean Government. Such criticism may have been largely the preserve of fringe groupings, but even mainstream newspapers and moderate MPs could agree that public life had fallen into disrepute. The consensus was that the new age of mass politics required higher standards if it was to survive unsullied by public distrust and cynicism.

Conclusion

In terms of the long-term history of corruption in public life, the standard interpretation of the nineteenth century is as the graveyard of Old Corruption: as the place where the aristocratic privilege that had been hardwired into the British state and polity for centuries was finally laid to rest. This captures a crucial part of the transformation that occurred in the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that the reforms to the state and the electoral system described above made British public life more open, inclusive, and meritocratic, and in many respects less corrupt. Yet to foreground only this aspect is to neglect not just the persistence of corruption, but above all the advent of new types of corruption, which loomed just as large, and generated just as much outrage, in the public imagination as any of those that had gone before. These centred on newly empowered political parties and the malign influence of a new class of wealthy businessmen and financiers, and it is tempting to see them as only teething problems during a period when Britain’s political elites were adjusting to a more democratic polity. We should avoid such a reading and for one simple reason: honours scandals and those concerning the interests of ministers and MPs and their access to the state persisted throughout the twentieth century and still persist today (Doig 1984; Hine & Peele 2016). In other words, the death of Old Corruption was accompanied by the birth of what we might call the New Corruption. Any balanced historical assessment of the nineteenth century needs to grasp both of these developments.

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