FURTHERMORE

Shock disclosure: Disraeli not a One Nation Tory

PETRONELLA WYATT

What we are lacking at the moment is the Intelligent Person's Guide to 'One Nation' Toryism. Or, for that matter, any sort of guide. This is something that I intend to remedy.

It needs a remedy. One Nation Toryism is one of those things honoured more in the speech than in the observance. Few Tory MPs, one suspects, know what it really means. In any case, they always seem to get it wrong.

The whole One Nation business is to Dis- raeli what the story of trying to turn back the tide is to King Canute — neither of them had much to do with either. Recently we have made slight progress on the One Nation thing. It has been pointed out that Disraeli never uttered the actual words. He referred, instead, to 'the two nations.. . THE RICH AND THE POOR'.

Still, the inference from this discovery is merely that it ought to be called Two Nation Conservatism. This, one imagines, would be open to further misrepresenta- tion. Picture Sir Peter Temple-Morris, or another of those leftish Tories, getting up in the Commons and speaking in favour of a return to Two Nations. As George Bush used to put it, he would be up to his neck in `cloo-doo'.

So, herewith, with acknowledgments to sundry historians, a brief guide to the pit- falls of One Nation Toryism. I do not claim that this guide has the virtue of being par- ticularly intelligent, but it does at least have that of being timely.

The idea, as most readers will know, derives from a passage in Disraeli's novel Sybil, which was published in 1845. I doubt, however, whether many of the Tory MPs who claim to aspire to the idea have actual- ly read the book (unfortunately, one cannot see the movie). If they had, they might enjoy a better understanding of whether or not Disraeli actually meant what he was saying.

This is vital to our guide. This is because One Nation Tories often call themselves Disraelian Tories, which they usually assume to be the same thing. But Disraeli is a dangerous hero for any political faction. This is because, according to the experts, he was prone both to insincerity and incon- sistency.

Sybil is full of gushing sensibility and nonsensical epigrams. It about an aristocrat called Egremont. He is, as far as we know, based on Disraeli. But it is not Egremont who utters the fatal lines. It is a character called Morley. Morley is a political agitator and Egremont's rival for the hand of Sybil, the heroine. The character is thus suspect as a mouthpiece for Disraeli.

This is not to claim that Disraeli, at this period of his career, was on the board of early Thatcherites. Soon after entering Par- liament in the 1840s, he allied himself with a movement called Young England. This was a section of the Tory Party that affect- ed to have a social conscience, setting itself against the `millocracy' of the emergent middle classes. But, as Disraeli's biogra- pher Lord Blake points out, it was 'the reaction of a defeated class to a sense of its own defeat'.

The founder of Young England was a man called George Smythe, the dissipated eldest son of Lord Strangford. Smythe modelled himself on Byron, but his writings are only remembered now for absurdities like his plea to revive 'touching' for the `King's Evil'. It was for him, not Randolph Churchill, that the phrase was first coined, `a splendid failure'.

One of Young England's other leading lights was Lord John Manners. Lord John was very thin. His empty stomach must have gone to his head. No man was ever such an assiduous devotee of lost causes. He toured Lancashire and decided that monasticism was the cure for the ills of Manchester. He was the author of the mor- tal lines: 'Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die/But leave us still our old nobility.'

This then was early Disraelian Conser- vatism, or, if you like, early One Nation Conservatism. I do not know what Sir Peter Temple-Morris & Co. will make of it. But, in retrospect, we know what Disraeli made of it: not much.

By 1845 Disraeli had been in Parliament for seven years and had done nothing of importance. He had failed to win prefer- ment from Sir Robert Peel, the prime min- ister. He had to stake his career on the ruin of Peel's. His association with such people as Lord John Manners was largely cynical. A section of the landed aristocracy was increasingly hostile to Peel's free-trade policies; they held themselves up as the protectors of the working classes against the new bourgeoisie. Most of these landed Tories voted against the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. When the bill was passed, with help from the Whigs, they brought down their own government in an act of revenge. Disraeli was one of the most vocif- erous of this group. His contribution to Peel's defeat helped keep the Tory Party out of effective power for around 25 years.

It was only by abandoning the protec- tionist nonsense of Young England and reorganising the Party along Peelite lines that the Tories were able to form a govern- ment in 1866 and then, under Disraeli's premiership, in 1874. Disraeli's fabled Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches during that election campaign contained very little about social issues, because he did not wish to frighten off the wealthier middle-class voter. They contained a lot, on the other hand, about the Tories being 'the patriotic party' (which makes one wonder how Disraeli would have regarded the EU). Historians agree that, while in office, Dis- raeli's social policies differed very little from those of Gladstone. His government, certainly, had nothing in common with Young England; it was neither a revival of Tory paternalism nor a precursor of redis- tributive state intervention in the interest of the have-nots.

Those modern Conservative MPs who conjure up Disraeli are therefore calling for low public spending at home and patriotic posturing abroad, a combination closer to Thatcherism than to Lord Gilmour or Lord Prior. Not that Disraeli would mind being misunderstood. The man whose epigrams Oscar Wilde took for a model would expect nothing less. 'A little sincerity is a danger- ous thing, and a great deal of it is absolute- ly fatal' — this is pure Disraeli. How ironic if it turned out to be the epitaph of today's One Nation Tories.