Can an 82-year-old lead the world’s most powerful nation? It’s happened before 

Two recent episodes on Capitol Hill — Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) freezing in front of television cameras before being led away by colleagues, and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) appearing confused during a committee vote — has led to a new round of hand-wringing over the ages of the likely main presidential candidates in 2024.  

This issue will spotlight the fact that President Joseph R. Biden is three years older than his opponent, Donald J. Trump, now 77.  The media will be on constant watch in case Biden has a McConnell or Feinstein “moment.”   

Republicans, meantime, will hammer home the message that it’s just too risky to entrust governing the most powerful nation on Earth to a man who will be 82 at the start of another term and that voters have never done so in the past. 

Except that they have. 

In 1892, British voters turned to William Gladstone to lead their nation, then the most powerful on Earth, and their empire, which governed one-quarter of the planet’s population. 

He was 82 ½ years old.   

It was Gladstone’s fourth term as prime minister. 

Just as today, the prospect of a man that age leading a major power dismayed some and disgusted others. Queen Victoria let it be known she was not amused. Though only 10 years younger, she could not believe the “great interests” of the state were being entrusted to the “shaking hand of an old, wild and incomprehensible man.”   

(For his part, Gladstone described his first meeting with Victoria after the election as “such as took place between Marie Antoinette and her executioner.”) 

Recent appraisals of Biden’s health and stamina also echo what was said by Gladstone’s own physician at the time of his victory. The doctor, Sir Andrew Clark, found “no sign of mental deterioration.” True, Gladstone’s “powers of hearing and sight were not what they were.”  But that was no reason, in Clark’s opinion, “why Mr. G. should not embark again on office.” 

This “might hasten” Gladstone’s end, Clark admitted, “but in any case that could not be very distant.” 

Ironically, Clark, then 67, died just a few months after he wrote those words. Gladstone, 19 years his senior, lived another six years. 

There is much that separates Biden from Gladstone. The British prime minister has been called the “greatest public orator of his day,” his speeches unsurpassed on either side of the Atlantic. No one has ever accused America’s 46th president of eloquence.   

Then, again, no one has ever accused Biden of engaging in what Gladstone called his “rescue work.” This was his habit, even as prime minister, of wandering the streets of London late at night where he met prostitutes, took them back to their rooms and spent the evening trying to convince them to start new lives.  

What Biden shares with Gladstone late in life, and what matters most, is his commitment to a cause. 

For Biden it is to end the hyper-partisanship in American politics — more than that, to show the world that liberal democracy still works.   

Gladstone took office to solve a problem eating away at the soul of his nation: the demand of those in Ireland for self-government. How Gladstone met that challenge and how his Conservative opponents thwarted him tell a story for both Biden and the Republican Party, today. 

When Gladstone met with Victoria to “kiss hands,” as was once said when a new prime minister took office, he had already tried to grant Irish Home Rule once before. His bill would have kept Ireland firmly anchored in the United Kingdom; a Parliament in Dublin would have had powers roughly akin to an American state.   

The Conservatives would have none of it. Gladstone was a dangerous radical, they declared, and Home Rule would be the beginning of the end of both Britain and its empire. Neither was true, but that didn’t stop the Conservatives from pounding home this message at every opportunity. 

In fact, Gladstone had once been a Conservative himself, starting his political career by defending the slave trade. Unlike most people when they age, he became steadily more progressive, accepting that change was not only necessary but was the right thing to do. This explains his so-called “conversion” to Home Rule in 1885. 

He even tried convincing the Conservatives to join his Liberal Party to grant Home Rule as the “gift,” as he put it, of the British nation to the Irish nation. 

According to one of Gladstone’s biographers, the Conservatives responded with “complete cynicism.” With words that are all-too familiar, Roy Jenkins explains that the “virulence of party hatreds” made it impossible for Conservatives to believe that Gladstone was sincere.  Instead, they decided to use Home Rule to bring down the “Grand Old Man” of British politics.   

To defeat Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill in 1886, a rising Conservative star, Lord Randolph Churchill, focused on opposition in Ireland, itself, among Protestants living in the northern province of Ulster. If Home Rule was enacted, Lord Randolph declared: “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.” 

Churchill’s aim was to defeat Gladstone, not to make violence or the threat of violence acceptable in Irish politics. He ended up doing both. 

Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill was defeated; his Liberals were hopelessly split. The Conservatives won a snap general election with a comfortable majority. At the time, many thought Gladstone was finished.   

Only he wasn’t.   

Just the opposite. He bided his time for six long years while the much younger Churchill burned himself out and was fast fading when the Grand Old Man returned to form his last government in 1892. 

Closing in on the age of 83, Gladstone threw himself into drafting his second Home Rule Bill and then defending it in the House of Commons with often spontaneous speeches. Again quoting Jenkins, “Even among his bitterest opponents, there was a sense of witnessing a magnificent last performance by a unique creature, the like of whom would never be seen again.” 

This time, the House of Commons passed Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill — only to have the Conservatives turn to the unelected House of Lords, where it was rejected, much as today’s Republicans use the Senate filibuster and their supermajority on the Supreme Court to ditch popular legislation. 

After this defeat, Gladstone wanted to call another general election but his colleagues refused to go along. With the Grand Old Man no longer leading them, the Liberals were routed when an election was called in 1895. They would be out of office for a decade. By then, Gladstone was dead. 

The Conservatives, meanwhile, laid the foundations for the very thing they had hoped to avoid. A third Home Rule Bill led to the creation of private armies in Ireland and took Britain to the brink of civil war, a civil war that was averted only by the onset of the First World War. By the time that war ended, and the Conservatives were finally willing to grant Home Rule, most of Ireland had moved on. The result was more bloodshed, the break-up of the United Kingdom and Ireland’s partition. That led to further conflict which has never fully been resolved.     

“What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule,” Victoria’s grandson George V once observed. “The Empire would not have had the Irish Free State giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces.” 

Unlike his younger contemporaries, Gladstone’s years of experience gave him the foresight they couldn’t imagine.   

Biden’s years of experience have given him the foresight to know that American democracy is on the line, a foresight his critics evidently can’t imagine, either. 

Kevin Matthews is a professor of British and Irish history at George Mason University and the author of “Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics, 1920-1925.”