cades that followed the fall of Walpole it was not always clear whether there was a Prime Minister at any given time, because the post was not yet firmly established in practice nor officially recognised. But other political leaders built upon the methods Walpole pioneered, usually acting in the role of Prime Minister while officially holding the post of First Lord of the Treasury, as he had. From the late-eighteenth century the office of Prime Minister gradually became accepted and then entrenched as a permanent fixture of British government. In 1778, during the American War of Independence, the Prime Minister Lord North wrote to George III that: ‘in critical times, it is necessary that there should be one directing Minister’. In 1803, during the gap between his two premierships, William Pitt the Younger told Lord Melville of the need for an ‘avowed and real Minister, possessing the chief weight in the Council, and the principal place in the confidence of the King’. By 1805 The Times newspaper was beginning to use the phrase ‘Prime Minister’ in this sense and around this time it began to be employed in parliamentary debates. The office of Prime Minister was widely accepted as a political reality by the mid-nineteenth century. But official acknowledgement of this development was slower to take place. In 1878 William Gladstone – who served as Prime Minister on four separate occasions – remarked: ‘upon the whole, nowhere in the wide world does so great a substance cast so small a shadow; nowhere is there a man who has so much power, with so little to show for it in the way of formal title or prerogative’. Yet in the same year a significant development occurred when Benjamin Disraeli used the term ‘Prime Minister’ when signing the Treaty of Berlin. The list of government ministers printed in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates, seems to have first used the title Prime Minister in 1885. An early internal reference to the Prime Minister was included in