ABSTRACT
Arthur James Balfour was Conservative Prime Minister between July 1902 and December 1905, before he held any other of the very senior posts in government — a rare political occurrence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Balfour’s premiership was not particularly impressive and he is remembered more for his subsequent career and his immense pragmatism in a period of fundamental social and political change in the early twentieth century. Indeed, it was almost a quarter of a century after he left 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister that he left the Cabinet for the last time.
