‘In doors and out of doors a disheartened opposition will be querulous and capricious,’ Disraeli had written in Bentinck. As each parliamentary session succeeded the next, that sentiment increasingly came to grip the Conservatives benches. Apart from anything else, Disraeli looked ill and jaded, and sounded worse. Years of neglecting his teeth had left him in severe discomfort. New, badly fitting dentures made speech difficult. ‘In the best part of [Disraeli’s] speech and in the middle of a sentence his teeth fell out,’ reported the Radical MP Lawrence on one occasion. ‘He caught them with
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