19 Jul 2013 03:53:24
Although Douglas Hurd is a Tory magnifico and his collaborator, Edward Young, served as David Cameron's speechwriter, their book is far from a hagiography of their party's idol. Their explanations of who Disraeli was, what he thought and wanted, how he operated, and whether his achievements and influence endured, are unflattering. The book is more a study in character – of the swift reactions of a volatile, opportunistic and irresponsible egotist to changing circumstances – than a staid political narrative. As a result, Disraeli: Or the Two Lives is full of unexpected jolts and paradoxes. It proves an unflagging pleasure to read – unexpectedly so for those who dislike the politics of the authors or their subject.
Disraeli's boyhood was a fit prelude to his outlandish adult career. His father was a literary dreamer, who lived off family money derived from the straw bonnet trade and stock-exchange manipulations. A squabble between his father and the family's synagogue over the latter's mindless fundamentalism resulted in Disraeli's baptism in an Anglican church, at the age of 12, in 1817. He was, however, an ardent philosemite who supported the right of Jews to sit as MPs not on grounds of tolerance or equity, but on those of racial superiority based on Jewish pre-eminence in the Old and New Testaments. "Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism?" he demanded in a Commons speech of 1847.
After attending a Unitarian school near Walthamstow, Disraeli was enrolled as a solicitor's clerk. He modelled his foppishness on Lord Byron's, soon began promoting South American mining shares, lost his investors a fortune, and – to recoup his position – published his first novel at the age of 21.
Thereafter, he wrote novels in pell-mell haste, as his shapeless plots testify. Some are vehicles for his romantic fantasies about himself; others are "silver fork" frivolities with titles such as The Young Duke. His rich and aristocratic characters are treated with a mixture of mocking envy and artless adulation. With their showy, gimcrack splendour, his novels are the 19th-century equivalent of Hollywood tinsel.
The Duke of Portland's family subsidised Disraeli's early career after he accumulated huge, reckless debts. He entered politics because he was fearful of being imprisoned in a debtors' prison, and therefore sought an MP's immunity from arrest. Inside parliament and out, he was a flamboyant self-advertiser who dripped superlatives, ornate insincerities and exotic effulgence. Always he was an adversarial politician who revelled in invective, an unprincipled and callous cynic who could steep himself in treacly sentimentality, a juggler of men and measures.
The hours that other political leaders (Tories as well as Liberals) devoted to charitable committees, or promoting social reforms, Disraeli spent in writing flirtatious letters to peeresses or taking the air in his carriage in London's royal parks. He was interested in epigrams, jewels, flowers, titles, other men's lineage, menus and table plans, but never in philanthropy. He was a giddying mixture of tolerance, malice and flippancy who gushed about the sublime and despised utilitarianism. Victorian materialism, with its trust in science, technology, progress and smoking chimneys above well-ordered factories, was antithetical to the revival of romantic chivalry he craved.
In 1852, Disraeli was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Derby's first administration. He found the costs of the Victorian navy as much of a nightmare to budgeting as the NHS is today. He was a nimble parliamentary tactician, and audacious in his attacks, bluffs, lies and policy somersaults. The Second Reform Act of 1867, which added half a million voters to the electorate, was the most notable of his inspired improvisations. It earned him the reputation of a "Tory Democrat", though he dreamed of reviving aristocratic domination.
The Conservatives repeatedly lost general elections under the leadership of Derby and Disraeli. Disraeli's only outright victory was in 1874. As prime minister, he was an imperialist. He encouraged music hall jingoism, proclaimed Queen Victoria the empress of India, bought control of the Suez canal, but failed to establish Britain as an oriental power. The climax of his career was the congress of Berlin, which he turned into a personal triumph even though he spoke no foreign languages, misread maps and imagined conspiracies.
Only one passage of this book seems perfunctory and strained. While acknowledging Disraeli's susceptibility to young aristocratic gentile men, Hurd and Young present him as a womaniser who conducted love affairs with married women, as did many other impecunious young politicians who could not afford to marry. Disliking his own mother, he liked his girlfriends to act the role of doting mother. His older mistress Lady Sykes even had an affair with the Tory grandee, Lord Lyndhurst, in order to promote Disraeli's career. He enjoyed the company of racy older women, and had a famously happy marriage to a rich widow 15 years his senior. Yet the person whom Disraeli fancied most was himself: he surely liked mirrored bedrooms best.
There is an old-fashioned male sturdiness to the judgments throughout Disraeli: Or the Two Lives. "We are particularly thankful for her fast typing skills," Hurd and Young say in the acknowledgments of the latter's spouse, who is described as "more like a mistress than a wife". This unreflective masculinity prevents them from being realistic or relaxed about Disraeli's inquisitive pleasure in intimacies with young men, as his two female biographers (Sarah Bradford in 1982 and Jane Ridley in 1995) had no difficulty in being.
The evasions, denials and counterfeiting of Disraeli's politics were indivisible from those of his sexuality, as shown in William Kuhn's study The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli. Kuhn's evidence suggests that Disraeli was (if not undersexed) too fastidious to enjoy the sweat and stains of sex; that his predominant sexual curiosity was directed at men; but that he felt it lazy, discourteous and impolitic to ignore the attractions of women. It seems significant that in Disraeli's notebooks, where he compiled lists of historic figures under such self-referential categories as "adventurers", "eccentric characters", "dandies" and "party hacks", he had an additional heading: "Heroes, impotent or adverse to women."
Hurd, as a long-serving ex-cabinet minister, and Young, the former Westminster backroom boy, have imbued their astute and sparky book with rich political craft. There is one man who is never mentioned, but of whom every chapter reminds the reader. In his ruthless tactics, his worship of the bitch-goddess success, his respect for money and titles, his careful tailoring, his sudden plunging humiliations, his air of charming menace, his combination of unforgiving aggression and puckish tricks, Peter Mandelson is the Disraeli of our day.
