Douglas Hurd's new biography of Robert Peel and Gordon Brown's Courage: Eight Portraits show the appeal of the ethically minded biography to the political mind. Both authors have a high sense of public duty, and the moral sense that comes alive on their pages revolves around the drama of choices that have to be made, of issues that need resolving. Hurd's prose has the equipoise of the moderate Anglican - a type of judiciousness that has almost disappeared from intellectual life. He's particularly good on Peel's religious faith and the premier's awareness of an inscrutable providence shaping human fortunes. Brown's words evoke the intensity of the Presbyterian conscience as it plots its path through life.
Both books and authors are thoroughly Protestant in their seriousness about the assessment of character and are inconceivable without the deep influence of the Reformation on the people of Britain. Social forces and economic trends pale into insignificance compared to the high drama of individual nobility, which is what really engages Hurd and Brown. Peel's stiffness of manner and dry personality makes him an unpromising candidate for this approach. But Hurd turns him into a prophet, the prime minister who really understood what the 19th century meant for Britain - free trade and economic vigour, but also moral buoyancy and optimism about reform.
Brown's series of studies in 20th-century history deals with heroes who saw further and thought deeper. He avoids the cliches that tend to cluster around Mandela and writes movingly of the courage involved in Aung San Suu Kyi's self-imposed isolation. Robert Kennedy is rescued from the clutches of gangster connection and Democratic party boss politics. He becomes a visionary who smashed the orthodoxies and identified with the outcasts of America's underclass. The chapter on Dietrich Bonhoeffer blends theological understanding with political appreciation to magnificent effect. Bonhoeffer's anti-fascism means that he is the last hero of German Protestantism, but Brown's portrayal of his character makes him live as a human being rather than the icon he became so soon after his death.
The politician-historian can undoubtedly be a preachy type - especially if there's not enough distance preserved between the author's own time and the past. Different periods' challenges mean different ministries are incommensurable, and Hurd makes too swift an analogy between Peel's battles and the Tory traumas of the 90s when he was foreign secretary. There will always be, he suggests, a reactionary element within his party, some of whom "appeal to the prejudices and cruelty which are part of human nature". This is a fair enough description of some early 19th-century Anglican Tories who hated the reforms enabling Catholics and dissenters to hold public office. But those who opposed the repeal of the protectionist corn laws were not all bigots. They were simply defending their economic self interest.
Similarly, not all the Eurosceptics of the 90s were simplistic reactionaries; most were motivated by a combination of vanity, self-interest and principle. It's too cosy to suppose that all virtue belongs to the "one nation" Conservatives who eventually emerged out of the mid-19th-century Tory crisis, and there's no reason why Peel should be enrolled among their number retrospectively. He was socially awkward, had a doctrinaire attachment to free trade, and sacrificed his party's unity on the altar of economic doctrine - with the result that it took a generation for the Tories to return to power. If we have to make analogies, then Margaret Thatcher is surely the heir to Robert Peel.