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The First Lord of the Treasury is restricted by precedent to granting these political pensions only to ex-Ministers of his own Party. In 1883 an application was made to Gladstone for a pension for a Conservative ex-Minister. It was refused on the ground “that no political pension has been granted by any Minister during the last fifty years, except to one with whom he stood on terms of general confidence and co-operation.” The Prime Minister went on to say, “the examination of private circumstances, such as I consider the Act to require, is, for its nature, difficult and invidious; but the examination of competing cases in the ex-official corps is a function that could not be discharged with the necessary combination of free responsible action and of exemption from offence and suspicion.” Gladstone therefore declined to “create a precedent of deviation from a course undeviatingly pursued by my predecessors of all Parties.” Lord Morley, who gives this letter in his Life of Gladstone, observes in a note: “Mr. Gladstone had suffered an unpleasant experience in another case of the relations brought about by the refusal of a political pension, after inquiry as to the accuracy of the necessary statement as to the applicant’s need of it.”
We are told also in the same work that Gladstone, in his last term of office, came to hold strongly the view that these political pensions, which he himself created, should be abolished. Lord Morley says he was only deterred from trying to carry out his views by the reminder from younger Ministers, not themselves applicants, nor ever likely to be, that it would hardly be a gracious thing to cut off benefactions at a time when the bestowal of them was passing away from him, though he had used them freely while they were within his power.