The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli

by Richard Aldous

The budgets of 1860 and 1861 had transformed William Gladstone into a hero of industrial workers. Slashing duties encouraged an immediate boom in popular consumption, which earned him the reputation as the champion of the people’s breakfast table. Even more admired was the chancellor’s defeat of the House of Lords on paper duties – ‘don’t tax knowledge’ – that provided him with a new national constituency and grateful newspapers willing to promote him. Increasingly literate workers eagerly followed his speeches in the reports of the penny press. His couching of economic policy in moral tones, with an emphasis on prudence and balancing the books, chimed with the everyday reality of working families, who understood only too well the demands of prudent housekeeping. ‘There is not a man who labours and sweats for his daily bread,’ suggested John Bright, ‘there is not a woman living in a cottage who strives to make her home happy for husband and children, to whom the words of the chancellor of the exchequer have not brought hope, and to whom his measures, which have been defended with an eloquence few can equal and with a logic none can contest, have not administered consolation.’