Sorry to go all British history on you but Charles James Fox is one of my polical heroes and something of an interesting character. Therefore I thought that you lot might want to know about him.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1754375,00.htmlThis decline in the status of the dominant English public figure of the late 18th century is not easy to explain. Admittedly, the age of Fox is less taught in schools than it once was, but then the same is true of several other eras of British history. But, even if Fox's politics no longer resonated, and the only things that mattered any longer were the entertainment value of his life and character, it would still be a rip-roaring tale. Did anyone ever combine licentiousness and industriousness quite so completely as Fox? He did nothing by halves and must have been impossible (and dangerous) to keep up with. As a gambler and follower of the turf, Fox was in the Kerry Packer bracket. When his father paid off Fox's gambling debts in 1774, the sum came to £140,000 - roughly equivalent to £12.5m today. And you think Wayne Rooney has a problem?
And yet, not just for these reasons, it is hard to imagine anyone more lively, more interesting or more companionable than Fox. Though we rightly think of him as fat, as hundreds of the finest cartoons in our history bear witness, he was also quite a dandy - he often wore a feather in his hat in the Commons - as well as a great cricketer and walker. His long relationship with his eventual wife, Elizabeth Armistead, was faithful and charming - it amazed their friends that the pair used to enjoy shopping together for crockery. And Fox's dying words to her - "It don't signify, my dearest, dearest Liz" - are characteristically out of the top drawer.
Even so, it is the politics that matter most. And what matters most in the politics - and makes the modern decline in Fox's renown the more troubling - is the love of liberty. As in everything to do with Fox, this was not entirely consistent. Early in his career, for instance, he opposed John Wilkes's attempts to remain an MP. For the most part, though, his career reads like a roll of honour. Faced with a succession of the largest issues of the pre-democratic age, Fox repeatedly took his stand on what would now be called the liberal side.
He stood for the American colonists in their long battle with the British crown. What should unite the two peoples were trade and common values, he said. If the choice was between conquering and abandoning the Americans, he was for abandoning them. He stood, with Edmund Burke and his fellow Whigs, for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India, and for the principle, also at the heart of his unsuccessful India bill of 1783, that parliament must take responsibility and set the rules under which the British empire was ruled. And he stood, this time almost alone in his consistency, in opposition to the war against the French revolution. In 1789 he famously greeted the fall of the Bastille with the words: "How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world. And how much the best."
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