After discussing his relative success with a moderately liberal programme in England last time, in this episode we talk about Palmerston’s far greater difficulties abroad. There was another Opium War in China, as Britain fought to enforce the East India Company’s right to push drugs there, and then an uprising in India, which Brits still like to think of as a mutiny though many Indians see it as a War of Independence.

Both events involved extensive brutality, most of it by Britain, but Palmerston did just fine in the debates on both. The stumbling block proved to be something far less significant: a terrorist outrage in Paris by a man who’d had some connection with England. The French demanded that Palmerston take action, and he responded by proposing new legislation. That had seemed to many like kowtowing to the French, and the Opposition in parliament was able to engineer a victory in a vote against his government’s behaviour.

Oddly, that was on the very night after his victory over military action in India. One evening, he was victorious, the next he was out. Events, you see, events are the real killers in a statesman’s existence.