So cross that he postponed his bath...

 I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). 
  I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Apostle', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it?
  Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good.  
  Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both.