By early 1872, Tory MPs were mutinous. A youthful Cambridge student, Reginald Brett, best summed up their sentiments. Writing to his father, Lord Esher, solicitor general in the previous Conservative government, he shrewdly observed that ‘Dizzy’s speeches [are] brilliant enough’, but that he would never ‘frame a great opposition’ because he failed to ‘convince’. ‘He is a critic, and a capital one of a bad government,’ observed this precocious future MP, ‘but not the counter-theorist who by dint of fact and perseverance can gain his end.’ In other words, Disraeli was not Gladstone.
