William Cobbett Part 2 – Cobbett’s Talent for Making Enemies
There’s an old saying that a man is known by his enemies, which would make William Cobbett one of the most comprehensively known individuals in British history. By the time of his death in 1835, he’d managed to alienate virtually everyone who’d ever tried to help him, befriend him, or work alongside him. His talent for turning allies into adversaries was so pronounced that it almost overshadowed his considerable gifts as a writer and political analyst. Cobbett didn’t just burn bridges – he dynamited them, salted the earth, and then wrote savage pamphlets explaining why the people on the other side had always been beneath contempt anyway.
The pattern was established early and repeated with depressing regularity throughout his life. Time and again, Cobbett would find himself in situations where a modicum of tact, a hint of compromise, or even basic human courtesy might have secured his objectives. Instead, he invariably chose the path of maximum confrontation. Did he prefer the purity of righteous isolation to messy compromises? Probably not. He just liked an argument.
His army career provides the perfect introduction to the Cobbett method of relationship management. As a young sergeant major, he discovered that his officers were supplementing their modest salaries by embezzling soldiers’ pay – a practice so routine that it was barely considered corruption. Any sensible man would have noted the information for future use and got on with his career. Cobbett, naturally, decided to pursue formal charges against his superiors, a course of action roughly equivalent to a junior civil servant today deciding to personally investigate the Chancellor of the Exchequer for tax avoidance.
Cobbett had assembled enough evidence to seriously embarrass his officers, but they had enough institutional power to ensure that pursuing the matter would end his military career. A man with even rudimentary political instincts might have used this leverage to negotiate a quiet resolution that served everyone’s interests. Instead, Cobbett pressed ahead with his charges, lost spectacularly, and found himself buying his way out of the army with his reputation in tatters and his future prospects severely compromised.
This episode established the template for virtually every subsequent controversy in Cobbett’s life: brilliant investigation, overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, complete tactical incompetence, and ultimate defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. It was a pattern that would repeat itself with monotonous regularity over the next four decades, leaving observers to wonder whether Cobbett was genuinely incapable of learning from experience or simply preferred the moral satisfaction of glorious failure to the grubby compromises of practical success.
His American period demonstrated that distance from England hadn’t improved his diplomatic skills. Writing as Peter Porcupine, he managed to offend not just his political opponents but also potential allies who might have helped establish him in Philadelphia society. When Dr Benjamin Rush, one of America’s most respected physicians, criticised his medical opinions, Cobbett responded with a libel so vicious that it resulted in a crushing legal defeat and damages that forced him to flee the country. A more prudent man might have recognised that attacking the medical establishment whilst working as a publisher was poor business strategy. Cobbett didn’t.
This libel case illustrated his inability to distinguish between principled opposition and personal vindictiveness. His attack on Rush wasn’t driven by genuine concern for public health but by wounded pride and a compulsive need to have the last word. The same pattern would recur throughout his career. Legitimate criticism transformed into personal warfare through Cobbett’s inability to moderate his tone or limit his targets.
Back in England, his management of the Political Register showcased his talent for alienating natural supporters. The journal’s radical politics attracted a devoted readership amongst working men and progressive reformers, but Cobbett’s editorial methods ensured that potential allies were regularly driven away by his personal attacks.
His relationship with other radical leaders was particularly instructive. Men like Francis Place and Joseph Hume shared many of Cobbett’s political objectives and possessed the parliamentary connections and organisational skills that might have advanced their common cause. Instead of cultivating these relationships, Cobbett treated them with suspicion and contempt, convinced that anyone who worked within the existing system must be either a fool or a knave. His purity of conviction was admirable in theory but catastrophic in practice, ensuring that radical energies were dissipated in fratricidal conflict rather than directed against their common opponents.
The pattern reached its nadir during his brief stint as MP for Oldham in the 1830s. Here was Cobbett’s chance to translate decades of political analysis into practical legislative achievement. Instead, he managed to make himself a parliamentary pariah within months of taking his seat. His speeches were brilliant but endless, his interventions were invariably off-topic, and his manner combined pompous self-regard with sneering contempt for anyone who disagreed with him. Fellow reformers who’d initially welcomed his presence soon came to regard him as an embarrassing liability.
The psychological roots of Cobbett’s disagreeableness weren’t hard to discern. His rural childhood had instilled a deep suspicion of social pretension that he never outgrew, whilst his early experiences of institutional corruption had convinced him that compromise was simply another word for complicity. These insights contained important truths, but Cobbett’s inability to distinguish between justified scepticism and paranoid hostility turned his greatest strengths into crippling weaknesses.
Moreover, his success as a writer had created a feedback loop that reinforced his worst tendencies. Cobbett’s readers loved his savage denunciations of public figures and his refusal to show deference to rank or reputation. The more outrageous his attacks, the more enthusiastically they were received by his audience. This created powerful incentives for escalation that gradually consumed his capacity for measured judgement or strategic thinking.
The modern parallels are depressingly familiar. Social media has created similar incentive structures that reward provocative content over thoughtful analysis, whilst the polarisation of political discourse makes Cobbett’s zero-sum approach to ideological difference seem almost quaint. Today’s political commentators face the same temptation to prioritise audience engagement over practical effectiveness, with predictably destructive results for both democratic discourse and policy outcomes.
But perhaps the most tragic aspect of Cobbett’s disagreeableness was how it obscured his genuine insights and prevented him from achieving the reforms he genuinely believed would benefit ordinary people. His analysis of economic inequality, government corruption, and institutional failure was often brilliantly perceptive, but his delivery was so abrasive that it repelled potential supporters and strengthened his opponents’ resolve. He possessed the intellectual tools to diagnose society’s problems but lacked the emotional intelligence to build the coalitions necessary to solve them.
