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Hello, this is the Webbox Podcast. I'm Matt Cholli, bringing you a bonus episode of you having a

lovely Jubilee weekend, draped in flags and trifles. Now, every week on my time to show

on a Monday, we speak to the political story Nigel Fletcher from the centre of opposition

studies counting down each of the leaders of the opposition and every month we pass them up

and give you them as a bonus episode of the podcast. So this month, we kick off with Sir William

Harcourt.

Well, it's quite a long life, so I'm going to have to sort of gab on my way through it because he's

quite a significant figure from the Victorian era. And once again, we've got a politician whose time

as leader is vastly overshadowed by his other career highlights and he did come very close to

becoming Prime Minister and indeed was widely expected to do so. He was a leading figure of the

age. He earned the nickname The Great Gladiator, although I'm always a bit suspicious of sort of

flattering nicknames like that, which sounds as though he probably gave it to himself. Later on in

his career, he was rather more unflatteringly known as Jumbo on account of having put on considerable

amounts of weight. But his grandfather was Archbishop of York and his father was a vicar, so he came from

quite a religious background. And they were related to several of the noble families of the age,

which became something of a joke amongst his political opponents during his career because he was

rather a grand figure and somewhat arrogant. But they were certainly a wealthy family and later

on he inherited the family seat and was worth around 21 million pounds in today's prices. So he

...