John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham

Lord Durham wrote the report that invented responsible government in the British Empire, and its most famous sentence is the one nobody quotes with approval now. He was a wealthy Whig coal owner nicknamed Radical Jack, a principal author of the Great Reform Act of 1832, and ambassador to Russia before being sent to Canada in 1838 as governor general after the rebellions in both Upper and Lower Canada. He lasted five months. His summary handling of the rebel prisoners - exile to Bermuda without trial - was disallowed in London and he resigned in a temper, but he had already gathered the material. The Report on the Affairs of British North America recommended two things. The first was that the colonial executive should be responsible to the elected assembly in local matters, which is the origin of self-government throughout the empire and was adopted in Canada within a decade and eventually everywhere. The second was the union of the Canadas with the explicit purpose of assimilating the French population, whom he described as a people with no history and no literature; that recommendation was also carried out, in the Act of Union of 1840, and it failed, which is why Quebec reads the report as a founding document of a different kind. He died of tuberculosis at forty-eight, months after it was published. Responsible government arrived in Nova Scotia in 1848 and the Province of Canada the same year, and the principle travelled from there to Australia, New Zealand and eventually to every dominion, which makes the report one of the most consequential documents in the empire's history. It is also the reason the phrase about a people with no history is quoted in Quebec schools. Both things are true of the same forty pages.

• Lived: 1792 CE – 1840 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: politician