By Colin Brown - 31st December 2009
Over the festive season ePolitix.com is publishing some of the best articles and interviews of 2009 from our sister publication The House Magazine.
In May historian Colin Brown shared some tales of Whitehall through the centuries.
Enoch Powell was right. Having researched 500 years of history for my book Whitehall - the Street that Shaped a Nation, I am inclined to support Powell's view that all political careers do seem to end in tears - or to quote him accurately, in failure.
The downfall of Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired, may be the prime example of Powell's law in modern history.
Lady Thatcher may have left lasting changes to Britain which are now more widely praised than they were while she was in office, but she made her departure from Downing Street, choking back the tears.
She left Downing Street barely 200 yards from where another great political figure had made his final exit from Whitehall – Cardinal Wolsey, 461 years earlier.
Winston Churchill also tasted the bitterness of rejection under Powell's law.
Having become Britain's greatest war leader, Churchill addressed the cheering throng on VE Day, 8 May 1945, from the balcony of the Deparrtment of Health (now HM Inland Revenue and Customs) at 100 Whitehall.
'God bless you all,' he said. 'This is your victory!' The crowd roared back: 'No - it is yours!'
Two months later, 'Winnie' was turned out of office, defeated by the democratic system he had fought to defend, in the election of July 1945.
Today's furore over MPs' expenses also has an echo from the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey.
Every schoolboy knows Wolsey was destroyed by his failure to procure a divorce for Henry Vlll to marry Anne Boleyn, but what made him so hated by the public was his enormous wealth gained from the Church and State, a personal fortune reckoned to be the equivalent of £11bn today.
Wolsey's biographer, George Cavendish, a forebear of the Dukes of Devonshire, who had served as the Cardinal's gentleman-usher, gave a remarkably vivid description of Wolsey's surprise at seeing 1,000 boats filled with Londoners on the River Thames in 1529 to witness his depature from his ecclesiastical palace, York Place:
"At the taking of his barge, there were no less than 1,000 boats full of men and women of the City of London, waffeting up and down the Thames, expecting my lord's departing, supposing that he should have gone directly from thence to the Tower. Thereat they rejoiced..."
They were disappointed. Henry allowed his Lord Chancellor to keep his head, but he was stripped of his office and his fine houses, including York Place, which Henry turned into the greatest royal palace in Europe, covering 23 acres.
There are arguments about why it was renamed Whitehall, but Shakespeare attributed the name change to an early example of spin-doctoring to wipe out the memory of Wolsey and the Church's claim to the land.
A broken man, he went to York, but faced a Bill of Attainder by Parliament, over his abuse of high office and his financial greed. He died on his journey back to London.
Cavendish railed against the fickleness of public opinion and warned that those who replace their ministers for being too greedy often find their replacements are greedier still:
" O wavering and new fangled multitude! Is it not a wonder to consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain world!
"The common people always desire alterations and novelties of things simply for the strangeness of the case; which afterwards gives them small profit and commodity… for the inclination and natural disposition of Englishmen is, and has always been, to desire alteration of officers who have been thoroughly fed with sufficient riches and possessions by long holding of their offices.
"And they being put out, then comes another hungry and lean officer in his place, that bites nearer the bone than the old. So people be ever pillaged and despoiled by hungry dogs, through their own desire for change and new officers."
Those words reverberate down four centuries as a warning to others who would gain high office.
I found few ministers know much about the history of the offices in which they work.
It was while researching my biography of John Prescott that I discovered some of the historical gems in Whitehall normally hidden from the public - the Admiralty Board Room with its working wind dial; the suite of rooms in the Scotland Office where the Melbournes entertained Whig celebrities such as Fox and Sheridan, the playwright; the dining room at Admiralty House where Nelson dined twice, before and after the Battle of the Nile, when he treated his wife first with affection and later with contempt, having fallen in love with Emma Hamilton.
I even discovered the bedroom of Lady Caroline Lamb on the top floor of the Scotland Office.
Her affair with Lord Byron made Dover House - then known as Melbourne House - for a time the most notorious address in London.
I found that few of the ministers knew very much about the historic surroundings in which they work, so I found the research an astonishing journey of discovery.
How many who have not been inside the Cabinet Office realise that civil servants daily are walking around the remains of Henry VIII's indoor tennis court?
Or that the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell uses the Tudor cockpit passage every time he needs to go to see the prime minister in Downing Street?
A walk down Whitehall is also a reminder that even national heroes are reviled after a time.
Nelson, the hero of the Nile, was feted over dinner at the Admiralty but was later reviled by Lord St Vincent, the First Lord of the Admiralty, for his pursuit of personal fame and his all-too public affair with Lady Hamilton.
Wellington may have been the hero of Europe who defeated Napoleon finally at Waterloo, but the London mob smashed the windows of his home, Apsley House, in April, 1831 because he opposed the Reform Bill.
Wellington was the rare exception to Powell's law who lived long enough to regain public support, and crowds used to gather at Horse Guards to watch 'Old Nosey' climb on his horse to ride home when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Army from 1842 to 1852.
Colin Brown's book - Whitehall, the Street that Shaped a Nation, is published by Simon and Schuster, price £17.99.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd