The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole - scoundrel, genius and Britain's first prime minister Edward Pearce Jonathan Cape, 496pp, £25 ISBN 0224071815

Why has Edward Pearce written a biography of Robert Walpole, universally acknowledged as Britain's first prime minister, and almost universally as its most corrupt? Pearce was for years an acerbic commentator on Westminster machinations, and an affectionately exasperated analyst of the Labour Party's myriad follies. What could take him back to the early 18th century and the life of the man who ran the country for longer than Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair combined? It is conventional for a biographer to develop some affection for his subject, and Walpole - venal and ruthless, the man who perfected the buying of votes and fixing of elections - is an impossible test of the biographer's sympathy.

The answer Pearce gives is that a new and comprehensive biography is needed. Yet Pearce's can never become the missing standard account. It is a witty narrative written by an author intrigued by his topic, but it is largely, candidly, dependent on secondary sources. It is not without archival discoveries, however, and Pearce has spent time with Walpole's correspondence, and interestingly digresses into his financial dealings among the Norfolk gentry and his communications with his many spies. But mainly he has swotted his way through the works of the leading academic historians, and has done rather well to convert their research on the politics of Hanoverian Britain into sparky prose.

The great movements and vital minutiae of post-Restoration politics are summarised with confident brevity, even if the general reader will sometimes be left a little dizzy. Pearce's problem is that Walpole's career requires much explanation of the political manoeuvres and geopolitical conflicts of the early 18th century. Whole chapters are devoted to ecclesiastical controversies or to the rivalries of European princelings. Walpole's actual personality is indecipherable among the manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres of men of power. Occasionally, you glimpse something personal: the appetite for revenge, the arriviste's prickliness, the capacity for affection - especially for his mistress, later wife, Molly Skerrett. But mostly this is a book about the feuds and alliances of politicians.

Pearce is an expert on such feuds and alliances in a later age, and cannot resist analogies. In the 1720s, the Tories were "terribly like the Labour Party in the late 1950s". Walpole's predecessor Robert Harley was "the Baldwin of his time". When Pearce cannot fetch a parallel from politics he turns to literature. When he tells us that the relationship between George II and his wife Caroline was pretty much the same as between Bishop Proudie and his wife in Trollope's Barchester Towers he is surely just reporting his own pleasure in the association. It is unreliable, but it is enjoyable. Pearce's style, larded with literary quotation and untranslated tags from Latin or German, is the thing that keeps you going.

The story seems to be of the brute pursuit of power. Walpole's fortunes were intimately linked to the Hanoverian dynasty which arrived after Queen Anne's death in 1714, and which, with a change of name, is still with us. First, he became paymaster general, in which post he vastly enriched himself in ways that have remained mysterious to researchers (Pearce is no exc eption). Two crises promoted him. The first was the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Walpole arrived with the Bank of England to save the day and restore confidence, even if his act of reassurance was based on little economic understanding. Then there was the so-called "Atterbury Plot" of 1722, when Walpole successfully projected himself as the man to save the nation from Jacobite plotters in high places (Atterbury was Bishop of Rochester) who wished to depose the German King in favour of James II's Roman Catholic son, James, "the Old Pretender".

Walpole became indispensable to George I, and survived the succession of George II in 1727 to become all-powerful. He did perhaps have one principle: a determination to oppose Jacobitism, and to root it out wherever it might be imagined. He had "plumped hard for Hanover" at a time when many Whiggish colleagues were willing to believe that regime change might be reversed. Pearce underestimates the threat of Jacobitism, presuming that Walpole was exaggerating the danger for his own ends. It was a useful danger because it was real.

Pearce will admit to admiring Walpole for keeping Britain out of foreign wars for more than 20 years, but he also sympathises with his Whig party. One reason that his biography could never be standard is that he is cheerfully contemptuous of 18th-century Toryism, and a partisan for those he anachronistically calls "liberal": the supporters of the Glorious Revolution, advocates of rights for Protestant dissenters, proponents of commercial progress and Enlightenment scepticism. Walpole was one of these "moderns", yet apparently a man without principle. Pearce cannot quite vindicate him, but his biography is a fascinated test case of how far "a man of the highest intelligence, endowed with relentless application" might go in pursuit of sensible aims, if he were "beyond the norm of rough politics, amoral".

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