Why did political giants of the past often end up in debt?

Thomas Jefferson - skint!

Reading Bill Bryson’s excellent At Home: a short history of private life recently,   I was surprised to learn that the American president Thomas Jefferson died    heavily in debt, having spent lavishly on luxuries all his life, including fancy French wines and an enormous (for its time) library of books (which he had to  sell to Congress).

Most of his money went on building an enormous country house, Monticello, which was never finished. When he died, his goods had to be sold at public auction to satisfy his creditors.

This reminded me of the fact that William Pitt the Younger ran up debts of £40,000 (obviously an enormous sum in the 18^th Century), which had to be paid off by parliament. In the same era, the greatest Conservative political thinker in history, Edmund Burke, owed £30,000 when he left parliament at the age of 65: his income was £500 per annum. Oops.

Disraeli ran up enormous debts as a young man by speculating rashly in South American mining shares and a disastrous involvement in the launch of a newspaper, The Representative. Those debts followed him well into middle age, but he married money.

Ulysses S. Grant went bust after leaving office. 

Obviously a large number of businessmen, sportsmen and celebrities have found themselves financially embarrassed, including Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Larry King (twice), Donald Trump (his casino business) and Burt Reynolds. But you sort of expect that – businessmen take risks, and writers and actors have fluctuating careers (and often aren't the most practical of people). 

But there’s something shocking about the people who managed their respective nation’s finances (or, in Burke’s case, gave advice on handling them) not being able to manage their own affairs. It's somehow unsettling.

Pitt is the most puzzling, given that he balanced Britain's disastrously depleted budget (for a time) while spending heavily on rebuilding the navy – a policy which probably saved these islands from invasion by Napoleon. As Pitt spent two decades in office and drank heavily, he may just not have had time to go through his cheque stubs.

As for Burke, how odd that someone who identified the political principles of the classic liberal, free market democracy - which would make Great Britain and America in turn very rich countries - couldn’t make money on his own behalf, or keep his spending in check. (Burke was another victim of the contemporary mania for owning large country houses.)

I suppose what puzzles me about these impecunious political giants  is how they were able to concentrate on the task at hand – i.e. running the country  – while drowning in personal debt. Maybe it was because, as David Cecil maintained in Young Melbourne, the style of the time was set by the Whig aristocracy, who thought nothing of losing everything they possessed during a night's gambling in London. Perhaps worrying about one's debts was seen as cowardly and middle-class.

Fortunately, Tony Blair – whose mismanagement of the country led us to our current dire state – hasn’t found making money a problem. Perhaps having a horribly greedy wife helps.