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It is one of history’s enigmas that William Wilberforce, honoured in today’s bicentenary commemoration of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, did not share the same sense of outrage about the repression of British workers. The MP played a part in outlawing unions, introducing imprisonment without trial and reducing freedom of speech.

Nor was he the prime mover of the abolition movement in the early years, when he was a rich wastrel fond of carousing at Goostree’s, a gentlemen’s gambling club in London where fortunes could change hands in an evening. He mimicked his adversaries and was in the habit of bursting into song in public, once serenading the Prince of Wales. His political allies despaired of his capricious nature.

Yet against all that has to be set Wilberforce’s seemingly impossible achievement of not only making the slave trade illegal, but his part in outlawing slavery itself 26 years later. The historian Simon Schama rates parliament’s action as “an absolutely spectacular act of irrationality”. Slavery represented “a Klondike of money” to Britain, he said.

The architect of this apparent miracle was a short man, just 5ft 4in tall, with a big nose and weak eyes. Sociable, popular and energetic, Wilberforce’s beguiling eloquence was admired by James Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer. “I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.”

Before his conversion to evangelical Christianity, Wilberforce was a ladies’ man whose friends included the bewitching Duchess of Gordon, who recruited for the Gordon Highlanders by offering the king’s shilling between her lips. At 37 he fell for Barbara Spooner, the beautiful daughter of a banker, 17 years his junior. The couple were married within six weeks.

Wilberforce’s home town and political seat was Hull. Unlike many British ports, Hull was not dependent on slavery but on the Baltic trade that had made his family rich. So his campaign neither offended his family nor upset his constituents. And his wealth allowed him to follow his instincts as an independent Whig. He refused to join the Tory party of his lifelong friend William Pitt the Younger, the future prime minister, who liked to stay at Wilberforce’s house in Wimbledon. “Hundreds of times I have roused Pitt out of bed in the morning and conversed with him while he was dressing,” Wilberforce reminisced.

Wilberforce disarmingly argued that the owners of slave ships and plantations were not to blame for pursuing their lawful business, of which cruelty and inhumanity were the inevitable byproducts. Nation and parliament were to blame for making it lawful. Plantation owners had nothing to fear from abolition, he claimed, citing the death rate among slaves — and sailors — engaged in the trade.

He concluded one great speech: “The nature and the circumstances of this trade are now laid before us . . . we may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it.”

Yet most of his knowledge of the slave trade was secondhand. “He had no first-hand experience, really. He relied on others for their stories and research,” said Stephen Tomkins, whose biography of the statesman was published recently. One of his key advisers was Thomas Clarkson, a devout young Anglican whose detailed accounts of the slave trade helped to drum up public support for abolition.

Thanks to Clarkson and the Quaker movement, which had taken the early lead against slavery, Wilberforce was armed with an unprecedented 103 local petitions when he first attempted to introduce a bill to abolish the slave trade in 1788. It was considered a pushover: he had the support of the public, Pitt and Charles James Fox, the leader of the opposition.

Always prone to sickness, Wilberforce fell seriously ill — perhaps with an ulcerated colon — and was not expected to survive another fortnight. Unable to attend parliament, he saw the debate cancelled.

Remarkably, at first there was no organised opposition to abolition. But by the time Wilberforce rallied with the help of opium, to which he was mildly addicted, the proslavery wing of parliament reared into action. MPs argued that abolition would give British commerce to its enemies. It was naive to imagine the colonies could convert from free to paid labour without loss. Countless British families were threatened with ruin.

“In parliament there was a massive amount of vested interest and they had too much to lose,” said Tomkins. “The antiabolition movement was highly organised. They produced an enormous amount of publications and even songs in favour of slavery.” Wilberforce made many enemies. A friend volunteered as the MP’s armed bodyguard after he exposed to parliament the abuse of a pregnant slave girl by a Captain Kimber, who began stalking the campaigner.

Born on August 24, 1759, Wilberforce spent his first decade in the family home and business premises on the high street of Hull. His grandfather, also William, had started the firm, which imported timber and iron, and the boy’s father Robert was a partner in the business. Robert and his wife Elizabeth also had three daughters though only one survived.

William himself was a sickly child who was 10 when his father died. Dispatched to a rich uncle in Wimbledon, he boarded at a school in Putney where, he recalled: “They taught everything and nothing.” His aunt Hannah was an evangelical convert who introduced him to John Newton, the former slave trader and composer of such hymns as Amazing Grace who was to influence him later. Alarmed at the Methodist ideas he was picking up, his mother recalled him to Hull and set about instilling an appreciation of theatre, card parties and balls. “I acquired a relish for it,” he said.

His hedonism accompanied him to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he spent his time among “as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived”. By his second year he was reckoned to be the university’s most popular student, offering portions of a great Yorkshire pie in his room to his “swarms” of visitors. Business had no appeal and he wanted to be an MP.

After spending nearly £9,000 securing the goodwill of Hull, paying local merchants the standard 10 guineas each for their votes (other voters got £2), he was duly elected at the age of 21. Drink and the roulette tables began to pall and he fretted that he was wasting his life. Under the influence of Newton, now a rector in London, at 25 he became an evangelical, resolved to combat the evils of the day — sabbath-breaking, swearing, drunkenness and indecent books. The result was a Society for the Reformation of Manners that got books censored and moral reforms passed.

He was opposed to extending the vote to the working class, whose political aspirations he tried to curb through the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion. But to label him a hypocrite is wrong, in Tomkins’s view: “He gave an enormous amount in charity to the poor and struggling.” Likewise, his compassion for slaves was “real, heartfelt and costly”.

It probably cost him his life. Increasingly frail, he became confused in his parliamentary speeches and resigned his seat in 1825 to serve as a figurehead of the campaign. On July 26, 1833, he rejoiced that the bill to abolish slavery had passed its final reading. Three days later he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The bottom line is that Wilberforce played a leading part in stopping 40,000 Africans a year being made slaves to the British. When he first proposed a bill to abolish the trade, the number of people in comparable forms of forced labour throughout the world was an estimated 75%, according to Tomkins. “Today it is one-fifth of 1%,” he noted. “It is enough to say that he fought the greatest evil in the world of his day, and played a part in its defeat. Who could ever claim more?”