‘Disraeli or The Two Lives’ by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young

One day I will manage to finish Robert Blake’s classic 800-page whopper of a Benjamin Disraeli biography which is always being cited as one of the greatest works of modern biography. But that will be a huge time commitment. And so, knowing a fortnight ago that I was planning a visit to Hughenden (Disraeli’s country house), I decided to read this book instead, and I am very glad that I did.

It does not pretend to be a full biography, but at 350 pages it is nonetheless pretty substantial, and what makes it interesting is the underlying thesis / argument that is developed and, I think, pretty well justified too. The authors sum their view up pretty effectively towards the end as follows:

Almost as soon as Disraeli had been laid to rest, his reputation underwent a transfiguration. With amazing speed the controversies which surrounded his career disappeared from the nation’s memory. The myth became mightier than the man ….. The purpose of this book has been to strip away the posthumous glamour and to bring alive the true genius of Disraeli. The result is a man in some ways more remarkable than the mythical Disraeli, driven by a relentless thirst for excitement and a taste for extravagant ideas.

Much of the book is thus focused on de-bunking the Disraeli's fabled reputation and his life story is told through that lens. He was not, it appears, ever a great ‘Tory democrat’, had no real interest in social reform, and did not particularly care about there being ‘two nations’. He changed his views all the time in response to developments in the UK and the British Empire. There was never any consistency of principle, beyond a continual thirst for personal advancement up ‘the greasy pole’ (a phrase he invented) and a general wish to conserve British institutions and enhance national prestige.

He was though, effective as a politician and got some important things done. He served three terms as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons (under Lord Derby’s premiership) and subsequently served two terms as Prime Minister. Despite his deficiencies of character and tendency to take the credit for the work of others, there was at the end a solid record of achievement to boast about.

His personal rivalry with William Gladstone and capacity for flattering his way into Queen Victoria’s affections are well known and shown here to be accurately remembered. But I learned a lot of other things too. First, I had known that he was born Jewish but converted to Anglicanism at quite a young age, but I had not realised that this was something his father required him to do, nor that he never really ever ceased to be Jewish in his own mind, suffered from continual anti semitic prejudice throughout his life and always admired the achievements of what he regarded as a somewhat superior Jewish race. Nor had I appreciated that he was first and foremost a writer of fiction and that he continued to publish highly successful novels throughout his life, right into his retirement. I had not known just how indebted he was much of the time, nor that he was well past his best and fell asleep a lot in meetings when in 1874 he finally became Prime Minister with a really impressive majority.

The authors here explain Disraeli’s politics – possibly simplifying them a bit too much – as involving the creation and maintenance of a coalition which opposed middle class business interests and preferences. He brought the traditional land-owners and agricultural workers together with the industrial working class in a bid to temper the advance of unfettered industrial capitalism. If that is a fair summary, it seems surprising that so many recent senior Conservatives are so keen to identify him as a role model as contemporary British conservatism seems to me to have much more in common with Gladstonian liberal values than Disraelian Tory ones. Perhaps it is helpful to see both strands as being equally present today and to account for much of the internal debate that goes on?

For me this biography worked best when it focused on Disraeli’s private affairs. He wrote a huge number of letters which are available for biographers to mine, and a very compelling portrait is built up here. Disraeli was a brilliant young man who came from a middle class background and was denied the traditional kind of education associated with elite political careers. He thus had to make is way into parliament and government by deploying his intelligence and making a spectacle of himself through the use of invective in his speeches and engagement in factional infighting. He took a lot of risks, always making himself conspicuous and falling out with people when necessary, but eventually made his way up to the top of the ladder.

Douglas Hurd, of course, is himself a former Foreign Secretary of distinction, and the book does contain quite a long section that I found rather harder going on Disraelian diplomacy during the 1870s. I appreciate the historic importance of the Congress of Berlin and declaring Queen Victoria ‘Empress of India’, but I did not engage with those passages as much as I did with the more domestically-related material, and particularly the central, pragmatic Burkean as well as Disraelian idea that change led by government should occur, but only within the grain of ‘the customs, manners, traditions and sentiments’ of the population. Theories and grand plans – what he labelled ‘abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines’ - should not dictate government action.

Overall I found this to be a very interesting read. Just the right balance between narrative and analysis. Authoritative and very well-written.