The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli

by Richard Aldous

Few in the House, whether members or observers, doubted that as much as a ‘triumph’ for Gladstone, the budget was ‘a defeat of Disraeli’. The full importance of this defeat became apparent weeks afterwards in a savage personal attack on Disraeli in the Quarterly Review. Disraeli was derided as a ‘favourite of misfortune’, who ‘went forth blundering and to blunder’, and had ‘unrivalled powers of conducting his party into the ditch’. He had ‘never led the Conservatives to victory as Sir Robert Peel had led them to victory. He had never procured the triumphant assertion of any Conservative principle, or shielded from imminent ruin any ancient institution.’ Disraeli was instead a destroyer, a man whose ‘tactics were so various, so flexible, so shameless’ that he made government by any party ‘an impossibility’. The Tories might only regain the nation’s trust by removing him. The article was anonymous, but there was no secret as to its author: Lord Robert Cecil (later Lord Salisbury) a future prime minister and one of Disraeli’s own backbench MPs. ‘I dislike and despise the man,’ Cecil told his father, who had threatened not to pay any further election expenses unless he desisted from attacking Disraeli. ‘I have merely put into print what all the county gentlemen were saying in private.’