Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon - Early Political Career

Early Political Career

Grey was selected as the Liberal Party candidate for Berwick-upon-Tweed where his Conservative opponent was the sitting member Earl Percy. He was duly elected and, at 23, became the youngest MP (Baby of the House) in the new House of Commons. Grey retained his seat in the 1892 election with a majority of only 442 votes and to his surprise was made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs by William Ewart Gladstone (albeit after his son Herbert had refused the post) under the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery. Grey would later claim that at this point he had had no special training nor paid special attention to foreign affairs.

Grey would later date his first suspicions of future Anglo-German disagreements to his early days in office after Germany sought commercial concessions from Britain in the Ottoman Empire in return for support for the British position in Egypt. "It was the abrupt and rough peremtoriness of the German action that gave me an unpleasant impression"; not, he added, that the German position was at all "unreasonable", rather that the "method... was not that of a friend." With hindsight, he argued in his memoirs, "the whole policy of the years from 1886 to 1904 be criticized as having played into the hands of Germany".