Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard – review

‘Who the hell is Disraeli?’ This, as a gleeful footnote in Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s new book reminds us, was the response of John Prescott when asked on television what he made of Ed Miliband’s speech last year extolling the virtues of Dizzy’s world-view. Actually — as their book goes on to make clear — Prescott asked the right question. Who the hell was Disraeli? He certainly wasn’t anything close to what posterity — in search of a Tory Great Man — has made of him.

Not only, they tell us in this vigorously debunking romp through his political life, did he never use the phrases ‘One Nation’ or ‘Tory Democracy’, he was actively hostile to the concepts that they are now understood to represent. He ‘preferred to flirt with phrases about the aristocratic fundamentals of British society’, and no sooner had he passed the Second Reform Act than ‘he set about using the redistribution proposals to protect Tory rural constituencies from the new working-class voters in borough seats’.