Friendship and Betrayal

Can there be true friendship at the top? In this highly original book, Graham Stewart explores the fragility of personal relationships in public life.

With a wide range of historical examples, Stewart illustrates the pleasures and pitfalls of friendship in the public eye and examines in detail three fascinating relationships that epitomise the problms friends confront when they enter the political arena together.

Friendship and Betrayal begins in the louche Restoration Court of late seventeenth century England where the future Queen Anne formed an intense attachment to one of her ladies-in-waiting. A tale of widening differences in rank and authority comes to a head when the introduction of a new “favourite” causes a jealous and dangerous reaction from the jilted friend.

The second story concerns one of the United States’ greatest Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin. It explores how the violent ideological struggle of the American War of Independence turned his friendship with his colleague Joseph Galloway, into a mutual hatred that also ended up tearing Franklin’s family apart.

The third story unfolds in the high noon of Edwardian England. It examines the bond between two Liberal politicians, Herbert Asquith and Richard Burdon Haldane, as they rise through the ranks to government. But with success came harsh political neccessities, and only one of them was marked out to pay the sacrifice.

Written with insight and intelligence, Friendship and Betrayal uses gripping historical events to show how burning ambition can come between colleagues and asks whether it is possible – or even desirable – to put friends before principles.