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’. As for ‘One Nation, Disraeli actively repudiates it: he simply was not interested in a classless society.’

Then again, even that is probably to paint him as more consistent and ideologically high-minded than he was. In the Hurd-Young version, Benjamin Disraeli believed in more or less nothing except the further advancement of Benjamin Disraeli. He was — pick your quote — ‘an unscrupulous charlatan who believed in nothing’; an ‘unprincipled adventurer’ embracing an ‘unscrupulous nihilism’; ‘a bizarre, overdressed, bankrupt novelist who liked the sound of his own voice’.

The ‘Two Lives’ of their title refer to the real life of the man, and to the self-created myth that has eclipsed it. Six years after his death the ‘Primrose League’ honouring his memory attracted half a million members. He has more entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations than any other prime minister.