PRITCHETT WAS CORRECT IN his assessment that Graham had been squeezed out of parliamentary politics. What separated him from a typical politician was not his class, his oratorical skill, his outspoken passion, or his unusual life experiences, but much more significantly, his political certainties. His views were predicated on his aesthetic and moral sense of value, resulting in an uncompromising semi-intellectual and semi-moralistic snobbery, inasmuch as he believed he possessed a clear and practical vision of the root causes of the society’s ills and their cures, and anyone who did not concur was either bourgeois, corrupt, or a fool.

Graham would also be squeezed out of any significant role in the ILP due to his demeanour, and a rapid change in political fashion, whereby the patronage and legitimacy he had once offered were no longer seen as relevant, or, coming from a landowner, appropriate. Graham’s hierarchy of needs was quite different from that of the party’s new adherents, most of whom would no doubt have agreed with Brecht’s famous line ‘Grub first, then ethics’, which led to his disillusionment with the philosophical and moral basis of the new political entity. Getting working men into parliament had not been enough after all, and, notwithstanding the intellectual calibre of those elected, the nature of parliament itself was a barrier to change, defiling any member with pitch, whatever their party. As for the workers themselves, they did not embrace a noble, altruistic socialism, as he had hoped, but continued to vote for whomever they considered best served their interests.

Graham’s subsequent criticism of what he saw as a lack of radical fervour from his erstwhile colleagues also blighted his reputation in the expanding Labour movement. At the other end of the social scale, he would remain toxic to the British establishment, and would receive no honours or patronage. He was a political outsider, positioned between two armed camps and belonging to neither. Thus, he had an extraordinary ability to divide opinion, not along class lines, but between conservative and bourgeois elements in all classes, and those who admired his heroic qualities, whether they agreed with his political views or not.