Lord Binning’s family were related to the Stanhopes and staunch supporters of Pitt’s administration. Being, as the eldest son of a Scots peer, ineligible for a seat in Scotland, he was provided with an English seat in 1802 ‘under the peculiar protection of Mr Pitt’, by Pitt’s sister’s father-in-law, Lord Eliot. Lord Melville, Binning’s uncle by marriage, writing after the election of 1806, when he ‘failed in all his attempts to obtain a seat’, reported:
Mr Pitt had a sincere attachment to him, and there never was a more enthusiastic worshipper of Mr Pitt’s memory than Lord Binning is. He is unhappy in being out of Parliament, and I am satisfied that his chief cause for being so is his being deprived of that means of manifesting his respect for the character and memory of Mr Pitt.
HMC Lonsdale, 220.
As might have been expected, Binning followed Pitt’s line in his first Parliament, voting with him for the orders of the day, 3 June 1803, against Addington, 7 Mar., 13 and 16 Apr. (though on 15 Mar. he did not divide on Pitt’s motion on the navy) and also for Fox’s and Pitt’s defence motions which brought down Addington, 23 and 25 Apr. 1804. He went on to support Pitt’s second administration and voted against the censure of Melville, 8 Apr. 1805. He was on the committee which investigated the 11th naval report. After Pitt’s death he was one of the Pittite group led by Canning, Sturges Bourne and George Rose which held fortnightly dinners at White’s, and became a steward of the Pitt Club. He voted against the Grenville ministry on Ellenborough’s seat in the cabinet, 3 Mar. 1806, and against the repeal of Pitt’s Additional Force Act, 30 Apr. On 26 June he asked why Scotland was excluded from the training bill; on 3 July, when he was teller against the bill, he was put down by the lord advocate who asked him why he wished to extend to Scotland a bill that his fellow oppositionists had been abusing for weeks; but promised to bring in a separate bill for Scotland.
Binning found no seat in 1806, though his friend Huskisson reported that he wished Binning’s father had allowed him to contest Dover, where he might have got in at modest expense. Melville secured an opening for him from Viscount Lowther on a vacancy at Cockermouth in January 1807: Melville had suggested that Binning might come in for Haslemere on the same interest instead of Viscount Garlies, when the latter succeeded to the title in November 1806, but Binning had to wait for the next vacancy.
He supported the Portland administration, as did his father, a representative peer from 1807 to 1812. On 27 July 1807 he defended the militia transfer bill, taking the opportunity to state his preference for Pitt’s defence measures over Windham’s. In April and May 1808 he was chairman of the committee which reported in favour of sugar distillation and against the use of corn in the manufacture of spirits, and defended the measure against criticism from the agricultural interest. On 25 Apr. 1809 he came to Castlereagh’s defence when the latter was accused of corruption, moving the previous question, though he was induced to withdraw the motion. In July he accepted a place on the Board of Control under Lord Harrowby, who addressed him as ‘one of the few persons in your situation who turns his mind to public business’, and whom he informed that he did not mind the absence of a salary, as there was neither expense nor attendance out of session required and he would be glad to be useful.
Binning called upon me today to make his profession of faith and following, reserving only the question about Lord Chatham against whom he cannot vote for private reasons, Lady B. being Lady C.’s intimate friend, I believe connexion. For the rest he was to follow me, in or out implicitly. This is very satisfactory.
Binning duly went away without voting on 5 Mar. On 30 Mar., however, in the further division on the Scheldt expedition, he outdid Canning, who decided to vote with government after censuring them orally, by voting against them. Canning’s story was that Binning and two other friends were going away, but finding the door locked, came back and voted with opposition.
The vote caused something of a stir in government circles, but the Whigs rightly continued to regard Binning as ‘against the opposition’. On 5 Apr. 1810 he was a keen critic of Sir Francis Burdett’s conduct and on 21 May he voted against parliamentary reform. He acted with Canning thereafter, agreeing entirely with him during the Regency crisis despite his admiration for Perceval’s role in it, and ridiculing the notion that Canning’s party had no future, though his own seat was certainly put at risk by his adherence to them. Lord Granville Leveson Gower’s wife Harriet had this to say about Binning and his wife in 1812: ‘Lady B. is a gossip and a bore. It is perceptible qu’il a vécu avec elle, but I like him very much. He is sensible, well informed, good humoured, and interests himself about interesting things.’ On 21 May 1812 Binning voted with the majority for Stuart Wortley’s motion in favour of a stronger administration, but on 12 June Stuart Wortley’s wife reported that her husband ‘made Lord Binning and C. Ellis go away last night that they might not vote against government which you see Canning himself avoided’. This was on Stuart Wortley’s further motion, which confirmed the Liverpool administration. Binning, however, approved Canning’s breaking off the ‘uncertain and desultory negotiations’ with the new administration, being unwilling to approve of ‘all their terms’.
Nor, according to Canning, did Binning show much enthusiasm about a seat in Parliament at the election of 1812, though he perhaps overlooked the fact that Binning was ill in Scotland at the time. On 9 Nov. he wrote to a mutual friend Charles Bagot:
Binning is out entirely by his own indolence and shilly-shalliness, and by taking for granted that everything would be done for him, provided he took care to keep out of the way of doing anything for himself. Had he come up to town upon the first positive and certain intelligence which he received of the dissolution, he would have been returned for Arundel: secondly, he might have come in for Lord Clinton’s seat, almost for nothing, for less than £1,000, and failing that, thirdly, I could have brought him in for Honiton, for I believe not more than £1,500 ... I know no chance that he has, unless he can agree with Solyphoeus [i.e. Sir William Manners].
This was rather a blunt statement of the situation: the fact was that Binning accepted an opening at Arundel on the independent interest at Huskisson’s instigation, though on condition that the expenses were ‘£2,500 if seated, £200 if not’, because he had heard nothing from Lord Clinton about the seat at Callington. When it transpired that Lord Clinton expected opposition to his interest there, Binning backed out, as was expected of him. He would not treat with Manners for a seat (at Ilchester), presumably because of the expense: it went to John William Ward. The only card up his sleeve was the possibility of sitting for Bossiney in place of James Stuart Wortley if the latter were returned for Yorkshire; but Stuart Wortley gave up the county. By then Binning had been defeated at Arundel: he did not now know ‘where to turn myself or what to do’, but had hopes of an opening in the re-shuffle that followed double returns at every election.
Had Canning come to terms with administration and obtained the Foreign Office, Binning was expected to have been under-secretary together with Charles Bagot, but he was left in the wilderness when Canning disbanded his party in 1813. Nor did he find a seat and Canning advised him against coming in. When, however, Canning obtained an ambassadorial appointment at Lisbon in 1814, Binning, on his return from Paris, made his peace with the Liverpool administration and accepted the privy councillorship refused by John William Ward in July. Canning hoped he would be awarded a seat at the Treasury board. He was consequently returned for Mitchell as a friend of government by (Sir) Christopher Hawkins in December, though the prime minister had first tried to secure his return for Bletchingley on an opening there. On 22 Feb. 1815 he supported the revision of the Corn Laws, which he thought should not be a party question but one of the protection of the landed interest of the country and with it of the majority of the population. Canning, complimenting him on his speech from Lisbon, hoped that Binning would continue to ‘draw off the fury of the mob by misdirecting them to Lord Bayning’s’; privately he was disappointed that Binning had not ‘squeezed in’ more speeches.
Most of Binning’s speeches were on Scottish affairs. In 1817 and 1818 he introduced bills to establish madhouses in Scotland; in 1819 he defended the Caledonian canal against its critics, 22 Mar. In 1818 and 1819 he defended the Scotch judicial practice of declaring statutes in desuetude. He was balloted, but not chosen, for the secret committee on the Bank, 3 Feb. 1819. He objected to Lord Archibald Hamilton’s motion to reform the burghs, 6 May 1819, and in defending the seditious meetings prevention bill, 7 Dec., and the blasphemous libel bill, 23 Dec., he found their justification in the situation in Scotland.
‘Binny’ did not obtain major office until 1834. There had been a rumour in February 1815 that he was to be a lord of the Admiralty, but nothing then came of it. In July 1815 Huskisson wrote that ‘poor Binning’ had gone to Scotland ‘very much out of spirits’; adding:
with his usual fidgetiness he has persuaded himself that the chance of office is hopeless, and that it would have been better to have stood out for a peerage for his father. The late promotions have convinced him that the latter was unattainable. To the former he sees no opening. He is gone however with a renewed assurance from Lord Liverpool that he would provide for him as soon as he possibly could.
It was clear, however, that Liverpool would not ‘exert himself’ to create a vacancy for Binning. In the autumn of 1815 his refusal to be chief commissioner on a mission to China to preserve the privileges of the East India Company was approved by Charles Bagot: as it was ‘out of your way ... it was nonsense altogether, and you had no choice I think but very civilly to say no to it. Amherst did right to take it.’ (Lord Amherst was in fact refused entry to China.) Binning had weighed the pros and cons and decided against, from dislike of leaving his lonely father and wife on the private side, and publicly from the feeling that he would gain no political credit (he was not being named ambassador) even if the mission succeeded, and that he would lose his parliamentary standing to other contenders. Huskisson agreed, but Canning rebuked Binning, thinking that the refusal must somehow damage his prospects and that ‘a step aside is sometimes a step onwards’.
He died 9 Dec. 1858. ‘He was of the ordinary height, but unlike his father and grandfather, who were corpulent, he was slight in body. He had a sharp penetrating eye ... He had a clear penetrating voice tinged with a burr.’