Eton College has furnished us (the British) with twenty prime ministers. Two of them have been pretty good, on the whole – Gladstone and the 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury. Most of the rest have been rubbish. 

One of the most rubbish was the 5^th Earl of Rosebery, prime minister from March 1894 to June 1895. He was a ‘Liberal Imperialist’, but also projected himself as a social reformer. He had ‘charisma’, and a – sometimes confusing – way with words. His ambition was always to be prime minster; but before that he served as Chairman of the new London County Council, and then as a not very distinguished Foreign Secretary. When he eventually became PM – succeeding Gladstone – he turned out to be hopeless. Contemporaries said that this was because he didn’t put the work into it. As one of them put it: he wanted the accolade without the effort – ‘the palm without the dust’. 

Remind you of anyone?