Like Newman’s troubled journey towards Rome, Gladstone’s agonized change of mind in 1845 over the Maynooth grant for the training of Catholic priests in Ireland is charted in letters that reveal his vulnerability and uncertainty, and a nervousness that is uncannily reflected in the mechanics of the uniform penny post. One of Browning’s letters was left in the Barretts’ letterbox and one of Newman’s was dropped on the road. In Gladstone’s case, heightened tension leads to the blunder of a unsealed ‘secret’ letter being sent to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. And with a blizzard of such correspondence surrounding Gladstone’s concerns about the Maynooth grant, it seems to have been a leaked letter that enabled The Times to report his imminent resignation from the cabinet. This Gladstonian drama is played out in two acts, the first in private, the second in public through printed open letters regarding Maynooth.

A third scandal of 1845 was associated with the poor law, one of the most controversial aspects of the ‘Condition of England Question’. When appalling abuses in a workhouse in rural Hampshire led to a public enquiry, MPs and their constituents alike were riveted by reports in the national press. The poor law was administered from the metropolis through official correspondence that ran to tens of thousands of letters each year. Press reports and a later select committee of the House of Commons revealed that the boundaries between official (semi-public) and private letters were sometimes blurred at critical moments in the Andover story. As in the Mazzini debates in the Commons, however, such letters were often the most solid evidence available. Troubling parallels between all three scandals of 1845 that are under review in this part were used by the Revd Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the most lively contributor of letters to The Times on the subject of the Andover workhouse, thus twisting the tail of Sir James Graham, the beleaguered home secretary of the day.

The scandal associated with the opening of Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters by the Post Office, on the orders of the government, fuelled a series of debates in the cockpit of the House of Commons. Those outside the House relied upon press reports on the debates for information, reports that included accounts of private letters and secret dispatches being brandished as evidence by both the home secretary, Sir James Graham, and his opponents. Two open letters to newspaper editors – Carlyle’s of June 1844 and Mazzini’s of February 1845 – were influential in their commentary upon the central themes of political honour and public morality. And Sir James Graham, leading statesman and devout evangelical, was humiliated when the ‘Grahamizing’ of letters became a craze, encouraged by Punch. But the general public remained on the outside, looking in upon the parliamentary hurly-burly.

As we turn to the acute problem of poverty in Ireland and the dominant figure of Daniel O’Connell, the emphasis remains in the public domain. A series of substantial reports, presented in the form of open letters to the editor of The Times, was commissioned by John Thadeus Delane himself. These open letters generated much heat in Irish newspapers, inspired a brilliant parody in Punch and led to the use of a forged private letter by O’Connell’s son, John, in the propaganda war between the Repeal Association and the British establishment. As in the House of Commons, personal honour was at stake when each side challenged the other with regard to accurate reporting. It was Thomas Campbell Foster’s account of ‘The Condition of the People of Ireland’ in The Times that had the greatest impact on the British reading public and that permanently tarnished Daniel O’Connell’s name.

The chapter singles out two senators, two governors, and four Fox News heavyweights as having played especially important parts among the president’s enablers. The two senators – Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and inveterate Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham – were remarkable for the prominence, persistence, and importance of their fealty. The two governors – Florida’s Mike DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp – were standouts for standing strong in Trump’s corner, no matter the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases in their respective states. And the four Fox News heavyweights – Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity – were striking for their staunch and some would say slavish clinging to the president’s coattails. As with every enabler, most notably those singled out by name in this book, Trump’s presidency, and even his subsequent electoral viability, would not have been possible without them.