As the second Gladstone government approached its end, it had little enough to point to as major successes. Some measures had been passed to try to pacify Ireland, but that sad country was still far from reconciled to British rule. There’d been colonial disasters in South Africa and Sudan. There’d been the Labouchère amendment, not perhaps seen as all that significant at the time, but something that would open the doors for eighty years of shameful treatment of gays, leading to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and Alan Turing’s suicide.

Then, at last, the government came up with one really major achievement. That was the 1884 Reform Act, which added nearly three million new voters to the electorate. They were all men and still only 60% of them, but it was still a significant advance.

Lord Salisbury, who’d got his fingers burned in the painful and ultimately failed campaign to block the Arrears Act for Ireland, this time adopted a cannier approach and worked hard to stiffen up his support. He took the line of refusing to let Reform through the House of Lords, where the Conservatives had a built-in majority, unless it was accompanied by Commons seat redistribution, to mitigate the damaging effect on his party’s electoral chances. This time he was successful, reversing the damage to his standing caused by the earlier failure, and putting him in a strong position to become sole leader of the Conservatives when the existing dual leadership with Stafford Northcote ended.

Reform had proved successful for both main party leaders.

Illustration: Cover of the Reform Act 1884. © ParliamentaryArchive
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.