A south Wales tin manufacturer, who owned land in Herefordshire and Glamorgan, Booker was ‘one of the leading members of the Protectionist party in the House of Commons’.
The son of a clergyman, from an early age Booker was groomed to succeed his maternal uncle Richard Blakemore (1775-1855), of Leys, Herefordshire, and Velindra, Glamorgan, as ‘the great tin-plate manufacturer’.
Booker was active in local politics. At the 1837 election nomination for Glamorgan he spoke after the candidates to condemn to declare that the Merthyr ironmaster Josiah John Guest, one of the Liberal contenders, was unfit ‘to represent an agricultural county’.
When a vacancy arose for Herefordshire in September 1850, Booker came in unopposed. Although his uncle owned land in Herefordshire, Booker was something of a stranger, but his strong protectionist credentials led to his adoption by local farmers. Free trade was a ‘false and suicidal policy’, he argued, which led local Liberals to describe him as from ‘the ultra-Tory school’.
In his maiden speech, 13 Feb. 1851, in favour of Disraeli’s motion for agricultural relief, Booker presented himself as a manufacturer with an interest in agriculture. After extolling his Commons leader’s ‘transcendent ability’, he quoted statistics regarding the fall in wages and the decline in shipping and exports to highlight the negative impact of free trade. While he conceded that a change in public opinion would have to precede any restoration of agricultural protection, he supported the adjustment of taxes, describing the income tax as ‘unjust’, 31 Mar. 1851, and repeatedly objected to making it permanent. When criticising the Russell ministry’s budget, he rejected the notion that Britain’s greatness was dependent upon commerce and industry, with agriculture of minor importance, 7 Apr. 1851. However, his backing of Russell’s government for displaying ‘vigour and manliness’ in the Kaffir war was a harbinger of his later independence, 15 Apr. 1851. A strong Protestant, Booker supported the ecclesiastical titles bill, and regularly cast votes against the abolition of church rates, Jewish relief and the endowment to Maynooth throughout his parliamentary career.
He reprised his call for ‘fair play’ for agriculture and argued that in the longer term unrestricted imports would ruin British agriculture and industry, 15 Mar. 1852. On 19 Mar. 1852 he expressed his ‘entire confidence’ in Derby’s new government, and praised the ‘discretion, the eloquence, and the ability’ of Disraeli. In the same year he served on a select committee on colliery explosions that recommended using steam jets to provide greater ventilation, with a central board to oversee safety, provide guidance and impose penalties.
Re-elected in second place, Booker expressed alarm at Disraeli’s silence about protection when the new Parliament met, 25 Nov. 1852. While he rejected the free trade motion of Charles Pelham Villiers, he voiced admiration for Palmerston’s attempt to find a less contentious form of words. All the same, he was one of the protectionist minority of 53 that opposed the nobleman’s amendment, 26 Nov. 1852. His opinions remained unchanged but Booker conceded, in view of the late electoral verdict, that free trade must be given a ‘fair trial’. He voted in favour of Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852. He asked whether the Aberdeen coalition had received any information about the lowering of the high tariffs imposed by the Prussian-led Zollverein (customs union) on foreign iron, 17 Feb. 1853. While he missed the vote on Gladstone’s budget resolutions, 2 May 1853, Booker had previously repeated his complaint that the agricultural interest ‘were overtaxed to an enormous extent’, especially compared to manufacturing. Gladstone’s plan was ‘so ill-advised as to be deserving of every opposition’, he added, 25 Apr. 1853.
Displaying his paternalistic leanings, Booker welcomed John Morgan Cobbett’s factories bill, 5 July 1853, as ‘it was the duty of the legislature, by stringent laws, to prevent capital from dealing harshly with labour’. The following year he offered equally strong backing to the payment of wages bill to put down the truck system, noting in passing that he paid out £100,000 in wages each year, 15 Mar. 1854. He served on the select committee on the bill, siding with paternalists against laissez-faire MPs in all key votes.
Booker voted against the financial measures introduced to pay for the Crimean war, 9, 15, 22 May 1854, and was in the majority that voted the Aberdeen coalition out of office over Roebuck’s Sebastopol inquiry motion, 29 Jan. 1855. He missed Disraeli’s critical motion on Palmerston’s handling of the war, 25 May 1855, but supported Roebuck’s, 19 July 1855. On succeeding his uncle in September 1855, he assumed the additional name of Blakemore. He expressed his reservations about capital punishment, 10 June 1856, and in the same session served on a select committee on masters and workmen. Booker-Blakemore’s draft report ruled out establishing courts of arbitration on the French model, preferring to tinker with the existing laws, but the majority of the committee took an opposing view, which prevailed.
Booker-Blakemore deliberately absented himself from Cobden’s censure motion on Canton, the division that defeated Palmerston’s government, 3 Mar. 1857. At the ensuing general election, he explained that he ‘mistrusted’ Cobden’s motion, which he thought ‘unfair and dangerous, and not justified by the circumstances of the case nor maintained by the arguments’ put forward. Offering an interesting perspective on the balance between independence and party allegiance among mid-Victorian backbenchers, he admitted that ‘it was painful to me, as it always is, to vote against my own party’. But to be a worthy representative he must be able to ‘take an independent view of any question before Parliament, and vote or not, as my conscience dictates’.
He was even more forthright in his criticism of his own party leadership and praise of Palmerston’s government at the Herefordshire nomination. It was not ‘good Conservative policy to attempt to weaken Lord Palmerston’s government and possibly overthrow it ... upon a question of this kind’, he argued. He was also critical of the Conservatives’ attack on Lewis’s budget, a ‘most patriotic plan of reducing the estimates’, which his party had attempted to throw into ‘confusion’ with their opportunistic opposition. ‘It was a poor return to our soldiers and our sailors’, he declared, ‘to insist upon such a rapid reduction of expenditure as would cause them to be thrown adrift’. Believing his ‘own party to be wrong’, he had not hesitated to give ‘the little weight of his vote in favour’ of Lewis, whom he praised as a ‘safe British minister’.
His ‘liberal tendencies’ and Palmerstonian inclinations secured Booker-Blakemore’s re-election in second place behind the Liberal candidate.
It was surely no coincidence that Booker-Blakemore was absent from the division on the conspiracy to murder bill that ousted Palmerston’s government from office, 19 Feb. 1858, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of Conservative MPs. He spoke in favour of the marriage law amendment bill, 30 June 1858. In his last recorded speech he again displayed his uneasiness about the death penalty, especially in cases where the trial was heard by only one judge. Drawing on his experience in south Wales, he noted that judges, juries and prisoners were rarely bilingual, increasing the risk of misunderstandings and innocent men being sent to the gallows, 7 July 1858.
That November Booker-Blakemore died suddenly from ‘apoplexy’.