Books
Everyone his own Dizzy
Alan Watkins
Disraeli Sarah Bradford (Weiden feld £14.95) israeli is the extreme example of the 1...1 tendency of the Conservatives to choose queer fish as their leaders. Bonar Law was odd. The three most recent leaders, Lord Home, Mr Edward Heath and Mrs Margaret Thatcher, were curious choices too when you come to think about them. They were certainly more curious than the politicians who were thought of as the natural leaders, R.A. Butler and Reginald Maudling. Disraeli was not only the oddest of the bunch: he was also the most successful politically, though it is too early to know how Mrs Thatcher will do.
He has another characteristic besides his extreme oddness and his relative success. Everyone sees in Disraeli what he or she wants to see in him: he is a man not so much for all seasons as for all purposes. The High Churchman Gladstone became the hero of Welsh nonconformity, but with him there was a progression from the reac- tionary young Tory of Macaulay's essay to the People's William of his last years. There was a certain sense in regarding him as a tribune. With Disraeli it was, and is, as dif- ficult to know what he believed at the end of his career as at the beginning. Anthony Trollope considered him both the cause and the symbol of that corruption which, in Trollope's view, had overtaken English public life. It is Disraeli, not the fictional Melmotte, who is the true villain of The Way We Live Now, because it was Disraeli who allowed and encouraged figures such as Melmotte to flourish.
To Mr Michael Foot today, on the other hand, Disraeli is not only our finest political novelist (a common and defensible judgment) but also a radical who, as he demonstrated in Lothair above all, saw through and denounced, in one of Mr Foot's favourite phrases, the hypocrisies of his day. Accordingly, Disraeli joins Mr Foot's private pantheon of early founder- members of the Tribune Group, who in- clude Jonathan Swift, William Cobbett and Oliver Cromwell. He has even called his dog 'Dizzy.' Mr Norman St John-Stevas, however, can deliver an address from the pulpit of St Margaret's, Westminster, to the assembled members of the Primrose League (so called because primroses were Disraeli's favourite flowers: in Sybil he compares scrambled eggs to them). Mr St John-Stevas says that Disraeli has much to teach Mrs Thatcher's Government today. This is what is now called 'code' by the knowing. 1981
was the big Disraeli year in the Conservative Party. Approving mention of him indicated that the speaker was opposed to the Government's economic and social policies and yet remained a true Conservative, as distinct from a new Liberal (the old Liberals being Thatcherite) or an unreconstructed Whig.
Miss Bradford's is the first full biography — there have been several studies of the novels — since Lord Blake's book, which was published in 1966 and of which, ex- cellent though it is, one is tempted to echo Beaverbrook on the Life of Northcliffe and say: 'It weighs too much.' Bradford (432 pages including Index and Notes) is shorter than Blake but does not supplant it. However, Miss Bradford has given us an always interesting and usually well-written book which has clearly involved her in a lot of hard work.
Has she given us anything new? She claims, modestly enough, to have re- interpreted Disraeli's relations with his elderly wife Mary Anne by drawing on his correspondence, some of it unpublished, with his unmarried sister Sarah. Relations with Mary Anne were not as harmonious as they were supposed to be by previous biographers owing partly to her jealousy of Sarah's place in his affections. Indeed, Miss Bradford catches Disraeli 'deceiving' Mary Anne on one occasion, though she cannot tell us the name of the other lady. (There was a comparable tendency by biographers to romanticise Dr Johnson's somewhat similar marriage.) In general, however, Disraeli's devotion to Sarah was well- known: a selection from their correspon- dence was published as early as 1886.
Perhaps more interesting is his devotion to young men, always well-connected and usually far less intelligent and accomplished than he. The most extreme example was
I'm trying to refute the allegation that I'm a wine snob. Lord Henry Lennox, son of the Duke of Richmond, to whom Disraeli wrote, among other things, 'I love you.' Miss Bedford is admirably balanced on this aspect of Disraeli. On the one hand, she cannot agree with those previous biographers who said that it was common for Victorian men to address each other in this highly affec- tionate way. But, on the other hand, she sees that Disraeli idealised 'youth' as a good in itself — 'and lofty connections as, if anything, an even greater good. It would be wrong to imply that Miss Bedford has writ- ten a personal as distinct from a political biography. She holds the scales very well, and takes us competently through the great set-pieces: the disastrous maiden speech, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the leader- ship of the gentlemen of England, the second Reform Bill, the Congress of Berlin, 'We authors ma'am' (quoted again, but no reference supplied. Where does it really come from?) On the young Disraeli, who was lucky not to find himself behind bars, Miss Brad- ford is indulgent: 'Dazzled by Powles and by the prospects of the South American El Dorado which he hoped would bring him millions, Disraeli, who was always finan- cially naive, was apparently unaware of the extent of the fraud perpetrated on the in- vesting public by Powles — or of the fact that he was describing, in the most laudatory terms, mines and companies which existed only on paper.' I am not sure that he was as financially naive as all that, as his relations with several rich women demonstrate: though it could also, I suppose, be argued that these relations (or their cash conse- quences) indicate a triumph of romantic hope over prudent calculation. And certain- ly Miss Bradford's kindly portrait is not altogether borne out by B.R. Jerman, The Young Disraeli (1960), on which Lord Blake relied heavily, acknowledging his debt, but which Miss Bradford mentions only in her Bibliography.
Yet what did he really believe? Miss Bradford summarises it as well as anyone I have read. 'Disraeli shared [the]romantic Toryism [of Young England] but he was uninterested in the practicalities of Man- ners' and Ferrand's schemes for public holidays and allotments for the poor. Their conceptions of a revived feudalism was for him essentially a pretty notion, useful as a symbol of the "territorial constitution" of England in which he really believed. He was attracted by their idea of the role of the Church as a revivifying force against the spiritual degradation of materialism, but not by the "Romanising" tendencies of the Oxford Movement which had so deeply in- fluenced them... In Disraeli the visionary was always mixed with the practical politi- cian.'
My lasting impression from Miss Brad- ford's book is, however, of how much poor Disraeli suffered from the attentions of the medical profession. At the end of his days he was prescribed vintage port for his gout. It is a wonder he lived as long and wrote and did as much as he managed to do.
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