Townshend arrivedhalf-drunk on champagne and spirits, and immediately rose to speak without giving himself a chance to learn the detail of what had been debated in his absence. He began his speech with a bold and naked lie, calling God to witness that he had not been consulted on the motion to regulate the East India Company’s dividends. This was a double blunder. On the one hand, it suggested that Townshend was unaware of the business of his own department.  On the other, the bill for regulating dividends had in fact been drawn up in his office that very morning and in consultation with him, as no fewer than a dozen men sitting beside him knew very well. When he sat down at the end of his speech, Conway asked him in a whisper how he could possibly have lied to the House so grossly. “I thought it would be better to say so,” Townshend replied airily.

But before he sat down, Townshend had delighted the House with a torrent of wit and buffoonery which for some days was the only thing spoken about in London, and which was immediately christened “Charles Townshend’s champagne speech”. About the regulation of dividends, he had said nothing whatsoever. Instead, he had painted a picture of the politics of the times both farcical and satiric, in which the parties and their leaders were cajoled and mocked. Horace Walpole witnessed the event, and, far from being affronted by it, could not contain his admiration:

It was the most singular pleasure of the kind I ever tasted. The bacchanalian enthusiasm of Pindar flowed in torrents less rapid and less eloquent, and inspires less delight, than Townshend’s imagery, which conveyed meaning in every sentence. It was Garrick writing and acting extempore scenes of Congreve.

The mood of merriment was sustained elsewhere until two in the morning, when over supper at Conway’s house Townshend had kept the table in a roar by doing imitations of his own wife and another woman with whom he believed himself to be in love.  He was eventually silenced by physical exhaustion, not the want of wit and new ideas.

Whether you prefer the synthetic indignation of the modern House of Commons at the spectacle of a drunken minister, or the refusal to be scandalised of their 18th-century predecessors, is now perhaps simply a matter of taste. But the contrast between the fates of these two drunken parliamentarians has deeper implications.

The imperturbability of Townshend’s contemporaries in the House in 1767, and their indifference to whether or not Townshend had been drinking before he rose to speak, opens a window onto what is now a very strange country — a moral and political landscape dominated by apparently impregnable and unchallengeable aristocratic power. 

Alan Clark affected and revived some of the outward manners of that world. But the fact that he put his head in his hands when narrating the escapade in his diary shows how far he was from actually inhabiting it, and how shallow his patrician roots in fact were, notwithstanding the castle, the pictures, the fast cars, and the sharp suits.