Disraeli, who employed humour and sarcasm in an attempt to deflate ‘that unprincipled maniac Gladstone’ as he called him in private, a man who in his view possessed an ‘extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition’. Gladstone for his part regarded Disraeli as an unprincipled opportunist: ‘The Tory party,’ he remarked, ‘had principles by which it would and did stand for bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed.’
