Ever since the dangerous left-wing movement, Black Lives Matter, started making wild allegations about various people in the past, William Gladstone has been subject to grave slurs about his attitude to slavery. Alistair Lexden responded to the most recent of them in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 22 August.
SIR - “Decolonisation training experts” in Wales (report, August 20) will find nothing in Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden to shock them as they go about the absurd work of persecuting the dead over their links with slavery.
In 1833, put up to it by his father, the 24-year-old William Gladstone, then a Tory MP, spoke in defence of the owners of sugar plantations in the West Indies—of which his father was one.
He soon repented of his folly over “this awful and solemn question”, seeking forgiveness from William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner, shortly before the latter’s death in July 1833.
In 1839 Gladstone became one of the founders of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilisation of Africa. Later he denounced slavery in the American confederate states as “detestable.” The “training experts” should train themselves by doing some basic historical research.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
