A Christmas Carol,
Being a counterfactual list of Prime Ministers in four staves
1835-1836:
Charles Fezziwig, 1st Earl of Fezziwig (Whig leading Caretaker Ministry)
1836-1838: Charles Fezziwig, 1st Earl of Fezziwig (Whig minority)
1838-1844:
Sir Ebeneezer Scrooge (Whig)
1838 (Minority with Pickwickite support) def. Sir Lester Dedlock (Tory), Conversation Kenge (Pickwickite)
1840 (Majority) def. Samuel Pickwick (Conservative)
Stave I
In the aftermath of the resignation of Samuel Pickwick as Prime Minister over the repeal of the Corn Laws, Charles Fezziwig, (a minor member of the House of Lords from London, ennobled for his services to business and universally respected for his good nature) would become PM. His appointment came under the assumption that Fezziwig's ministry would be a brief caretaker administration, and indeed this was the man's own intentions. For the clique of ambitious young men around the Earl of Fezziwig, however, this was an unparalleled opportunity for advancement. Chief among these were Joseph Marley and Ebeneezer Scrooge. Marley had been elected to parliament some years before, and Scrooge, a long-time protégée of the bumbling Prime Minister and Marley's business partner, quickly found a constituency and entered parliament. These two Svengalis now set about working to convince the Earl to stay on as PM, rather than call an early election. This was no mean feat, and though Fezziwig was eventually persuaded round, getting the party on side was harder. Yet for most Whigs the only other option was rule by the Tories or alliance with the Pickwickites to avoid splitting the pro-Free Trade vote: in the end the party had no choice, and Fezziwig was induced to announce he would stay on until the next election, with Pickwick advising his allies to abstain to keep the Tories out. Marley and Scrooge were rewarded for their work with postings in the cabinet as Chancellor and President of the Board of Trade respectively. Marley would quickly begin his hard-nosed agenda, limiting state welfare commitments and reducing taxation wherever possible. The effects were catastrophic for the poor of England, and having seen the dark effects of his government's policies, Fezziwig resigned just four months before a planned General Election.
This was a nightmare for a party still concerned it was on the verge of being thrown out and replaced by a Tory-Pickwick duopoly, and the search for a new Prime Minister began at once. In many ways Marley was the natural successor, but his policies were not popular with an increasingly rebellious lower class, and besides the uncharismatic money man had literal interest in the office. Instead, the party leaders turned to Scrooge. Fezziwig's erstwhile protégée was now flung into high office just three years after entering parliament as a compromise between the money men and the Old Whig grandees, but in many ways he remained a Marleyite creature. In 1838 Scrooge would manage to cling onto power, and solidified this into a majority in 1840, as the public rejected first the unfeeling Toryism of Dedlock and the bloviating of 'Pidwick's placeman' the flamboyant Conversation Kenge, and then Pickwick's new "Conservative Party". The five years of the First ad Second Scrooge ministries were lean for most of the country as unfettered Marleyism dominated at the exchequer and a radical free trading, imperialist, agenda came to dominate British policy. When deplored once in parliament about the state of poverty in the country by an incensed Tory MP Scrooge is said to have remarked "We can’t afford to make idle people merry. My government helps to support the establishments I have mentioned [debtors prisons and poor houses]: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” To those who saw the early career of old Miserly Mister Scrooge, then, the great twist at the denouement of his political career was, no doubt, a shock beyond belief. Indeed, it is not without cause that it has gone down in history as "the Christmas miracle of '43".
1844-1844:
Sir Ebeneezer Scrooge ('Scroogite Whigs' in coalition with Conservatives)
Stave II
On the night of Christmas Eve 1843, after a day of relentless work as always, Ebeneezer Scrooge went to bed and, by some miracle, returned changed the following day. Where the hard nosed miser of a Prime Minister had been was now a man of tremendous generosity, dedicated above all else to the alleviation of poverty and the spread of good feeling. There has been considerable speculation about why this happened. A certain school of thought has argued that Scrooge, like Fezziwig, was a victim of the "evil advisor" Marley, and that after his death in September 1843 Scrooge had already begun to drift away from Marley's ideology. However few today accept this theory when so many of Scrooge's speeches, letters, diary entries, and other writings endorsed Marleyism. Other scholars have suggested some kind of mental break or possible a stroke, whilst Scrooge himself would later claim that he had received a miraculous revelation. Regardless of the cause of the change, it was apparent that Scrooge would now seek a radical change of policy, abandoning his austere economic approach in favour of one of paternalism welfare, limits on employers ability to underpay and overwork their employees, and the provision of medicine for the young. This did not go down well with the party grandees.
Scrooge did not care one bit. Combining his old stubbornness with a new dedication to reform and relief, Scrooge refused to resign as Prime Minister, and instead summoned Pickwick to strike a deal. The Conservatives had already drifted to a position supporting Paternalist reforms in opposition to the Whigs' harsh economics, and were happy to accept this reversal, thinking they could have Scrooge out within the year. But Scrooge proved popular with his promise of "A Job for Every Man and a Goose on every table at Christmas", and his popularity extended to Tory MPs as well as the electorate. Instead, by December 1844, Scrooge had been able to reach his next coup de grace: the fusion of the Scroogite Whigs (or 'Liberals' as they were referring to themselves in elections) and sympathetic Conservatives into a new party. Though refusing to stand for parliament again, Scrooge dissolved his government and called an election in 1844: many had expected he might now resign in favour of Pickwick or some other reformer. Instead, raised to the peerage as the Viscount Cornhill, Scrooge would lead the Liberal Conservatives election campaign. The mandate he would return with as Prime Minister was unquestionable. The great remaking of Britain could begin.
1844-1845:
Ebeneezer Scrooge, 1st Viscount Cornhill (Liberal Conservative)
1844 (Majority) def. Edward Murdstone (Whig), Sir Lester Dedlock (Old Tories)
1845-1861:
Fred Scrooge, 2nd Viscount Cornhill (Liberal Conservative)
1847 (Majority) def. Edward Murdstone (Whig), Oliver Brownlow (Radical)
1854 (Majority) def. Oliver Brownlow (Radical), Eugene Wrayburn (Whig)
With the draconian Home Secretary Edward Murdstone and the out of touch old Tory Dedlock his only rivals, Cornhill stood no true chance of losing. His Doctor's Mandate to cure Britain's ills would likely have seen a spate of serious reforms, had the old man not died six months into his fourth ministry. Still gripped by the Scrooge Mircale, the party quickly elevated his newphew, the Second Viscount to the Premiership, but though he was able to deliver easy electoral victories, Fred Scrooge was little more than a steady hand on the tiller. Indeed, it was the undelivered promise of Ebeneezer Scrooge which would prove his newphew's undoing. When it became clear that the agenda promised in 1844 would not be delivered on, the reformist Liberal Conservative MP Oliver Brownlow, the adopted son of the recently ennobled Earl Brownlow, quit the party, determined that no one would have to suffer the hard life he had as an orphan sucked into London's criminal underworld ever again. The solution to that was, of course, the alleviation of poverty. Though Scrooge and Murdstone kept the duopoly going in 1847, the outcry at the Crimean War, and the rapidly growing gap between the richest and poorest bouyed the radicals in the early 1850s. In 1854, with the public revolting against a disaster in Crimea in conjunction with the Emperor of France under the second Darnay dynasty and with unemployment higher even than under Marley, whilst the Whigs floundered on the rakish Wrayburn, Brownlow's Radicals shot up to second place, though vote splitting between anti government voters meant that the government took 397 seats to 143 for the Radicals and 114 for the Whigs.
It was in 1861, however, that Cornhill made a truly fatal mistake. A good spirited and kind, but generally clueless man under the influence of old Tory and Whig magnates in his social circle, he had tried to be a gentle Prime Minister but had found opposition from a neo-Marleyite Treasury as the economy grew worse. His one great prejudice, however, was a profound distaste for America. Describing the Ynited States as the home of "Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; and cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers" and of great immorality and materialism, Cornhill would come out in support for the Confederacy in 1861. This was quite unexpected from a man who had begun his political career as a foppish but kind inheritor of a shining legacy, but as Cornhill had ruled, the old Scoorge misery had gripped him. Now embittered (particularly after the Anglo-French humiliation in Crimea over which his government had nearly fallen), Cornhill wanted a win, and who better to go for than his great enemy, America? For those Liberals on his backbenches, who, like the Radicals, saw the Union as a force crusading for justice and liberty, however, this was a horrific betrayal. Many defected to the radicals, and many more sat as independents in opposition. The War would bring down the government, and in 1861 a new election was called.
Stave III
1861-18
65: Peter Cratchit (Radical)
1861 (Minority) def. Fred Scrooge, 2nd Viscount Cornhill (Liberal Conservative), Bentley Drummle, 3rd Baronet Drummle (Whig)
Stave IV
Britain's first Radical Prime Minister Peter Cratchit (later the Earl Camden) was a man of nearly unparalleled virtue. Having cared, in his youth, for his ailing younger brother Tim and witnessed his death in the hard years of of Marleyite austerity, he had a conviction parallel only to that of the First Viscount Cornhill himself, that the country was on the wrong path. In power at the head of a minority after the fall of the second Viscount, Cratchit began to implement the manifesto promised by Scrooge, a family friend in his later years. Although he would leave office in 1865 without putting a Goose on
quite every table, Cratchit, his Chancellor Brownlow, and the Foreign Secretary Philip Pirrip weee on the ascent. These were the new men whose zeal for reform and general good cheer would dominate in the "happy decade" of the 1870s when Cratchit returned to the Premiership as the Earl Camden. The anti-war government of 1861, therefore, can well and truly be considered the start of Britain's true transformation from a land of misery and inequality to one of peace, cheer, and good will to all men.
As has become a bit of a tradition for me, here's my annual Christmas list
Merry Christmas everyone!