The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition by Emily Jones
Benjamin Disraeli’s career was a triumph of highly coloured imagination over earnest respectability. Conservatives were intoxicated by him, and thrilled to his name long after his death in 1881, for he gave them the romance of politics, not just the humdrum practicalities.
He was as vivid as one of the preposterously overdone aristocrats in his novels, proclaimed his Jewish ancestors to be every bit as distinguished as the British upper class, and became, after humiliations which would have sunk a less courageous man, the most improbable Prime Minister in British history.
Emily Jones has had the good idea of tracing the use of Disraeli by his successors to demonstrate their own legitimacy. Here was a Conservative prophet who appeared to have foreseen how, as the franchise widened to include the working class, the Conservative Party could continue to flourish.
Jones opens her chapter on Tory Democracy, c. 1883-1928 by quoting what The Times said in April 1883, on the second anniversary of the great man’s death:
“In the inarticulate mass of the English populace, Disraeli discerned the conservative working man as the sculptor perceived the angel prisoned in a block of marble. He understood that the common Englishman, even when he has nothing to guard beyond an income and a frugal home, has yet Conservative instincts as strong as the wealthiest peer.”
In that year Lord Randolph Churchill founded the Primrose League, in memory of Disraeli, whose favourite flower was said, perhaps erroneously, to be the primrose.
The Primrose League made politics hugely enjoyable and was a vast success. By 1891 it had a million members, most of them working class, and by 1910 it could boast, with perhaps a touch of exaggeration, two million members, far more than the Conservative Party itself.
This huge army of volunteers was mobilised by the party at election time, and was much needed after 1883, when under the Corrupt Practices Act strict spending limits were introduced for general elections.
The league offered wonderful opportunities for dressing up, handing out mock-medieval titles, wearing fancy badges, playing sports and singing songs, going to dances, picnics, teas and fetes.
Yet it was also serious. Lord Randolph’s mother, the Duchess of Marlborough, who served as President of the Ladies’ Grand Council, said its aim was “to show the nation that the Conservatives are interested in the wellbeing and comfort of the people”: a cardinal message taken straight from Disraeli.
In the early years of the league it was put to Lord Randolph that the members should be given some solid political education, to which suggestion he responded:
“No, the only way is to amuse them: they’re quite incapable of anything else.”
This information comes from a sparkling volume, A Gift from the Churchills: The Primrose League, 1883-2004, by Alistair Cooke (now Lord Lexden), published in 2010 by the Carlton Club.
Lord Randolph wished to be seen as Disraeli’s heir. In the 1880s he became the Conservatives’ most popular speaker, a champion of Tory Democracy who attracted vast audiences by being astoundingly rude about the Liberal leader, William Gladstone.
But as his son, Winston Churchill, later wrote, the Conservative Party Establishment did not approve of Lord Randolph:
“He was as unwelcome and insoluble a riddle to them as ever Disraeli had been. To them he seemed an intruder, an upstart, a mutineer who flouted venerable leaders and mocked at constituted authority with a mixture of aristocratic insolence and democratic brutality.”
Lord Randolph rose at astonishing speed to become, in August 1886, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but in December of that year gratified the Establishment by overplaying his hand: he threatened to resign, and found to his dismay that his resignation was accepted.
His son Winston reverenced his memory, perpetuated his creed of Tory Democracy, and carried forward his instinctive disrespect for party hierarchies.
That disrespect, to put it mildly, had been demonstrated in 1846 by Disraeli himself when he led the revolt of Tory backbenchers against their leader, Sir Robert Peel, in protest at the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Jones retrieves from obscurity writers such as T.E.Kebbel (1826-1917), who after Disraeli’s death acclaimed him as a political writer “who ranks with Bolingbroke and Burke”.
She also quotes to good effect the French scholar, Louis Cazamian, who in Le roman social en Angleterre, published in 1904, shows a deeper sympathy than most English critics for Disraeli as a writer who had helped both to express and to produce a “transformation of the national soul”.
Jones points out that Disraeli long remained famous in the United States as well as in Britain. The English actor George Arliss (1868-1946), who looked like Disraeli, had great success in America by playing him on both stage and screen, notably in 1929 in the film Disraeli.
Arliss can also be seen in Impressions of Disraeli, put out in 1931 by the Conservative and Unionist Film Association, with a brief introduction by Stanley Baldwin, who addresses the viewers in his best plain-man style.
Disraeli’s speeches and novels form an inexhaustibly rich quarry from which later politicians and pundits have mined whatever materials they needed in order to present themselves as that statesman’s heirs.
“With words we govern men,” Disraeli himself said. In France, he observed, a population of 32 million were “governed by a phrase”, namely “the Sovereignty of the People”.
To his speeches and novels can be added innumerable biographies: André Maurois in his Disraeli of 1927 gives a brilliant short account, Robert Blake’s Disraeli of 1966 is much the most notable post-war performance, but towering over them all is still Monypenny and Buckle’s life of Disraeli, published in six volumes between 1910 and 1920, and consolidated by Buckle in 1929 into a corrected, two-volume edition running to a total of 3,200 pages.
Jones has not set out to write a life, but a study of how that life was later drawn upon and adapted to meet new political conditions.
How to structure such a book? There is no fully satisfactory answer. Jones adopts a clumsy mixture of thematic and chronological treatment.
Her chapter on Tory Socialism, c.1882-1918 overlaps with the chapter mentioned earlier on Tory Democracy, c.1883-1928.
The same witnesses recur, and when they are obscure, the reader needs to be reminded who they are, which leads to a degree of repetition. On page 205, Jones tells us:
“In an attempted ‘slasher’ in the Quarterly Review (1929), for instance, the anti-socialist biographer Anna Ramsay argued that the Hammonds’s interpretation of industrialisation was a ‘Socialist Fantasy’ based on misunderstanding.”
The same sentence can be found on page 108.
When Lord Derby, the Conservative leader, was reproached by a friend for the revolutionary proposals in the Second Reform Bill of 1867 – one of the greatest triumphs of Disraeli, who got it through the Commons – Derby retorted: “Don’t you see how we have dished the Whigs?”
Jones says “dished” means “smeared”. She is wrong. Dished means confounded, outwitted, defeated. Victory was won by widening the franchise far more radically than the Conservatives had the previous year condemned Gladstone for trying to do.
Here is one of Disraeli’s most disconcerting but realistic lessons for his Conservative successors: that victory is sometimes won by being more radical than your opponents.
Baldwin’s famous declaration of December 1924, “we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago”, is quoted by Jones, and until now has been generally regarded as the beginning of One Nation conservatism.
Jones points out that G.M.Trevelyan contended, in his Life of John Bright published in 1913, that although in Sybil (the novel, published in 1845, in which Disraeli spoke of two nations, the rich and the poor) “quasi-democratic leanings” are revealed, its author “had not yet educated either himself or his party to the point of regarding the rich and the poor politically as one ‘nation’.”
Baldwin may well have read Trevelyan, but it remains the case that Baldwin deserves the credit for promoting One Nation conservatism, and that this was a clear change from the situation described in Sybil, where the rich and the poor lead separate lives.
We are reminded by Jones that when the One Nation Group of Conservative MPs was formed in 1950, its members included both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell. One Nation could mean pretty much whatever one wished it to mean: it need not have its present leftish Conservative connotations.
Disraeli felt an irrepressible urge to tease and insult the prigs, chief among them Gladstone. His critics at the time, and later, considered this teasing to be disgraceful and irresponsible.
But to his admirers, his impertinence was and is a great part of his charm. Disraeli challenged the conceited belief of the middle-class Liberals that they are the true guardians of the interests of the working class.
He defied the tyranny of virtue, or pretended virtue, which today comes so easily to the woke warriors who consider themselves entitled to tell the rest of us how to behave.
One of the many merits of Jones’s work is that she sends us back to Disraeli himself, to delight in a wit and dandy who revered Byron and anticipated Wilde.
Tory Democracy, espoused with enthusiasm by Boris Johnson in the 2019 general election campaign, is an alliance between a section of the ruling class and the working class in order to outrage and outwit the middle-class prigs.
The programme of this alliance is patriotism – love of country symbolised above all by the monarchy and the armed forces – plus practical measures to improve the lives of the workers.
Tory Democrats proclaim, as Disraeli did, the greatness of Britain, and aspire to preserve and increase it. They defend existing institutions by sometimes deplorably demagogic methods: the EU Referendum of 2016 was a populist device to restore the traditional doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.
Kemi Badenoch has a faint touch of Disraeli about her. She too has it in her to confound her more conventional supporters by adopting methods which seem disconcertingly radical but bring victory.
How horrified the stern, unbending Gladstonian Conservatives will be if that happens. Lord Blackwater will be miffed.
All this goes far beyond the admirably scrupulous account offered by Jones. Such scrupulousness does not quite get to the heart of the matter.
Disraeli touched the imagination of the people, and of Queen Victoria, by turning politics into a theatrical performance with himself as the star. He was an actor at once truthful and ironic, genuine and fantastical, who transported audiences into realms of laughter and pleasure where Gladstone would never go.