The notorious tale which surrounds the competition of 1856–57 for the British government offices is part of the mythology of the Gothic Revival. In the saga of the so-called ‘Battle of the Styles’, it has generally been regarded as the fiercest skirmish, fought between the perfervid Gothic architect, George Gilbert Scott, and Lord Palmerston, the Liberal prime minister and a staunch classicist. However, the actual politics of the design was not this fabled, clearcut Liberal-versus-Conservative schism, nor was the heart of the architectural question — Scott’s Gothicism — unambiguous. The real complexities of the story were defined by two great, imbricated cultural forces which matured in the 1850s: the Reform movement in political life and the High Victorian movement in architecture. These established the environment in which unexpected political alliances could be made — most notably that between Palmerston’s chancellor of the exchequer, W. E. Gladstone, and Scott — and in which an exceptionally broad-based architectural theory could be forged, and then tested to its breaking point.