A rare exception to the rule is Roy Jenkins. Notwithstanding a 30-year career in British and European politics (he was both chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary in Labour governments in London, and president of the European Commission in Brussels), Jenkins loves his food and drink and can discuss a host of subjects in an accent that, despite his origins in the working class of south Wales, is now as posh as that of a duchess. No mean author, either: the dust jacket of his latest book, Gladstone (698 pages. Random House. $35), lists no fewer than 17 previous works. Jenkins has said he once believed that Gladstone, four times prime minister of Britain in the 19th century, was “a peak too high” for him. But he scaled the heights and has produced a biography of the old school: comprehensive, well written, sound in most of its judgments and, along the way, unexpectedly funny.

“Fun” is not a word one would normally associate with William Ewart Gladstone. He was born in 1809 to Scottish parents in Liverpool. His father was a West Indian merchant who seems to have been one of those Scottish capitalists who kept the Sabbath and anything else they could lay their hands on. He was rich enough that William did not have to worry about money for the rest of his long life. After Eton and Oxford and a year on the grand tour (Gladstone would be forever dashing off to Italy), he was elected to the House of Commons just before his 25d birthday, in 1832. He resigned as prime minister, for the fourth and final time, in 1894.

In later life, Gladstone became the epitome of Victorian liberalism (not to be confused with its American bastard offspring -as chancellor of the exchequer, Gladstone hated spending money). The young Gladstone, however, was the sort of churchy Victorian Tory who dropped the Almighty into almost every conversation. His first book was entitled “The State in Its Relations With the Church,” which Jenkins suggests is unreadable; it was, in any event, unread. Throughout his career, he remained obsessed with doctrinal questions and ecclesiastical appointments (a diary entry: “In consequence of the death of the B[isho]p of Carlisle, a perturbed Sunday”). Religion for Gladstone was not a thing to be experienced coolly. In fact, he was cool about nothing, but rather a great whirling, turbulent machine, which was regulated occasionally by exercise–principally, chopping down trees on his estate.

He found relief in other Ways, too. For years he would walk the streets of London, ostensibly to save ladies of the night–in fact, as his diaries make clear, to exercise his sexual drive. He probably didn’t sleep with the fallen women; in 1896 he said that he had never been “guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed.” But he certainly did something after these nocturnal excursions–other-wise, why the sign of a whip in his diary after each of them? And he worried tremendously about his failings. “Remedies,” he wrote in a diary passage on matters sexual. “1. Prayer for blessing on any act about to be done. 2. Realising the presence of the Lord crucified or Enthroned. $. Immediate pain…” One begins to appreciate why his long-suffering wife once said, “Oh, William dear, if you weren’t such a great man you would be a terrible bore.”

Though Jenkins’s book is consistently enjoyable, he never quite spells out what was great about Gladstone. True, Gladstone was one of the first Britons to appreciate that while geography has determined that the Irish and the English can never live apart from each other, they have difficulty sharing the same bed. He has a decent claim to be the father of the British welfare state but, with his dedication to free markets and limited government, would have been appalled at the way it developed after his death. His greatness, in any event, would be a fine topic of conversation with Roy Jenkins in Umbria, over a glass of Orvieto and a plate of figs-praying to the Lord Enthroned that the shade of Gladstone did not come tearing into the village square, wanting to discuss the bishopric of Carlisle.