This is bad news for Gordon Brown. Certainly, he must hope not to fall victim to the same xenophobic ridicule dished out to Britain’s first Scottish Prime Minister, James Stuart, Earl of Bute.

As Samuel Johnson so frequently deplored, mid-18th-century London was full of Scots on the make, grasping the opportunities proffered them by the 1707 Act of Union. None was more resented than Bute, a Tory who had married well, smoothed up to the future George III and, in 1762, rose to become Prime Minister. Particularly irksome to Bute’s detractors was his grandfather’s opposition to the Act of Union.

There were various reasons for Bute’s unpopularity, not least his supposed influence schooling George III in the defence of his sovereign rights and the imposition of a cider tax (by a Scot!). On the other hand, he was a decent man who secured through diplomacy a successful conclusion to the Seven Years’ War with France.

Yet, as countless songs and broadsheets attested, what really rankled was Bute’s Scottishness. Anti-Caledonian clubs sprung up across London and Scots were jeered in the theatre. Some compared them to Jews. Such publications as The Scots Scourge and British Antidote to Caledonian Poison hammered home the anti-Bute theme, as did John Wilkes’s North Briton. “No Petticoat Government, No Scotch Favourite” ran obscenely illustrated pamphlets, scurrilously accusing Bute of sleeping with the King’s mother.

On his way to dine with the Lord Mayor in November 1761, the London mob pelted Bute with dung. This despite his precaution of employing the notorious “one-eyed fighting coachman” George Stephenson as his bodyguard. At the State Opening of Parliament, he tried to avoid his waiting tormentors by leaving incognito in an ordinary hackney chair. However, he was spotted making his getaway and roughed up. Ill and weary of the unequal struggle, he resigned as Prime Minister in 1763.

When he sought convalescence in France, a stone-throwing crowd at Dover saw him off.

Bute scarcely deserved such opprobrium. He generously endowed Scotland’s universities and patronised English artists and writers, not least the Scot-baiting Dr Johnson. Yet almost 90 years would pass before the experiment of a Scottish Prime Minister was tried again — not very successfully — with Lord Aberdeen. Tony Blair, like Bute and Aberdeen, was born in Edinburgh. For this fact and so much besides, Gordon Brown must envy the current Prime Minister’s ability to get away with it.

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