Benjamin Disraeli

• 1. Introduction

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  Benjamin Disraeli climbed what he called "the top of the greasy pole" to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, not once but twice, despite arriving at Westminster as an outsider with debts he could not fully settle until 1849, a nervous crisis behind him, and the memory of being shouted down at his very first speech in Parliament. He is the only British prime minister to have been born Jewish. He transformed the Conservative Party from a rump of protectionists into a modern political force identified with the British Empire, and he spent three-quarters of his forty-four-year parliamentary career in opposition, biding his time with exacting patience. Who was this man who rewrote his own family history, who wrote bestselling novels between political battles, who purchased a controlling stake in the Suez Canal in a matter of days, and whose friendship with Queen Victoria was closer than that of almost any other prime minister she ever had? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. The Making of a Self

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  Benjamin D'Israeli was born on the 21st of December 1804 at 6 King's Road, Bedford Row, Bloomsbury, the second child and eldest son of Isaac D'Israeli, a literary critic and historian. The family was of Sephardic Jewish mercantile background, and Disraeli later romanticised its origins, claiming grand Spanish and Venetian descent. Biographer Bernard Glassman argues the rewriting was designed to give him status comparable to England's ruling elite. Biographer Sarah Bradford put it differently, suggesting that his dislike of the commonplace would not allow him to accept facts as middle-class and undramatic as they really were. In truth, it was on his mother's side, in which he took no interest, that distinguished forebears existed, among them Isaac Cardoso and members of the Goldsmid, Mocatta, and Montefiore families.

  The decisive moment of his childhood was not about ancestry but about religion. Following a quarrel with the Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1813, his father Isaac renounced Judaism and had the four children baptised into the Church of England in July and August 1817. Isaac had remained a conforming member of the synagogue partly out of deference to his own devout father, Benjamin senior; after the elder Benjamin died in 1816, Isaac felt free to leave. A friend named Sharon Turner, a solicitor, convinced Isaac that the children would be disadvantaged remaining unattached to formal religion. Turner stood as godfather when young Benjamin was baptised on the 31st of July 1817, aged twelve. That baptism made a parliamentary career conceivable, since until the Jews Relief Act 1858 MPs were required to swear the oath of allegiance on the true faith of a Christian.

  His schooling was piecemeal. He attended a dame school in Islington from about age six, then a boarding school run by a Reverend John Potticary at Blackheath, and finally a school run by Eliezer Cogan at Higham Hill in Walthamstow. Disraeli bitterly regretted not being sent to Winchester College, one of the schools that consistently produced the political elite. His two younger brothers were sent there. In November 1821, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, he was articled as a clerk to the City of London solicitors' firm Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearse and Hunt. The following year he changed his surname from D'Israeli to Disraeli; biographer Glassman surmises it was to avoid confusion with his father. The whole family adopted the new spelling except Isaac and his wife.

• 3. Debts, Novels, and Early Disasters

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  A Rhine Valley tour with his father in the summer of 1824 settled Disraeli's mind. He later wrote that while descending those waters he decided he would not be a lawyer. On returning to England he left the solicitors' firm and enrolled at Lincoln's Inn, but soon abandoned that path too, redirecting his energy toward speculative stock dealing. A boom had developed in shares in South American mining companies as Spain lost its colonies in the face of rebellions, and the British government, urged by George Canning, recognised the new governments of Argentina in 1824 and Colombia and Mexico in 1825. With no money of his own, Disraeli borrowed to invest and became involved with financier J. D. Powles, prominent among those stoking the mining boom. In 1825 he wrote three anonymous pamphlets for Powles promoting the companies, published by his father's friend and publisher John Murray.

  Murray had ambitions to launch a new morning paper to compete with The Times. Disraeli persuaded him to proceed, and the paper, called The Representative, promoted the mines and supportive politicians, particularly Canning. The mining bubble burst in late 1825, the paper survived only six months, and Disraeli and his partners had lost £7,000 by June 1825. He could not pay off the last of those debts until 1849. Humiliated, he turned to writing, motivated partly by desperate need for money and partly by a wish for revenge on Murray and others he felt had slighted him.

  There was a vogue at the time for what was called silver-fork fiction, novels depicting aristocratic life read by aspirational middle-class readers. Disraeli's first novel, Vivian Grey, published anonymously in four volumes in 1826-27, was a thinly veiled retelling of the Representative affair. It sold well but caused wide offence in influential circles when the authorship was discovered. Disraeli was then just twenty-three and did not move in high society, as the solecisms scattered through the book made clear. Murray and the writer John Gibson Lockhart, men of great influence in literary circles, believed he had caricatured them and abused their confidence. Biographer Jonathan Parry writes that the financial failure and personal criticism of 1825 and 1826 probably triggered a serious nervous crisis that lasted four years: he had always been moody, sensitive, and solitary, but now became seriously depressed and lethargic. Recovery came partly through travel. With his sister's fiancé, William Meredith, Disraeli toured southern Europe and beyond in 1830-31. The trip was cut short suddenly by Meredith's death from smallpox in Cairo in July 1831. Despite that tragedy, the journey left lasting marks, shaping Disraeli's attitude to the Eastern Question that would define his second premiership decades later.

• 4. Into Parliament

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  After four unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli won a seat in the House of Commons in July 1837 as one of two Tory members for Maidstone. His maiden speech on the 7th of December 1837 followed a long address by Daniel O'Connell, whom he sharply criticised for what he called a long, rambling, jumbling speech. O'Connell's supporters shouted him down. Disraeli kept a low profile for the rest of that session.

  His path to Maidstone had run through repeated failure and public confrontation. Standing as a Radical at High Wycombe twice in 1832 and then again in 1835, he lost every time. By April 1835 he had shifted sufficiently toward the Tories to fight a by-election at Taunton as a Conservative candidate. O'Connell, misled by inaccurate press reports, launched a public attack describing Disraeli as a reptile possessing all the necessary requisites of perfidy, selfishness, and depravity. Disraeli's public responses, extensively reproduced in The Times, included a demand for a duel with O'Connell's son that led to Disraeli's temporary detention by authorities. Disraeli was highly gratified by the dispute, which propelled him to general public notice for the first time.

  In December 1835 he published Vindication of the English Constitution, an open letter to Lord Lyndhurst articulating a political philosophy that, in Bradford's view, he adhered to for the rest of his life: the value of benevolent aristocratic government, a loathing of political dogma, and the modernisation of Tory policies. He was elected to the exclusively Tory Carlton Club in 1836. The following year he married Mary Anne Lewis, the widow of Wyndham Lewis, who had helped finance his election campaign and died in 1838. Mary Anne was twelve years his senior and had a substantial income of £5,000 a year. His motives were widely assumed to be mercenary, but the couple came to cherish one another and remained close until she died more than three decades later. She reportedly said afterward: Dizzy married me for my money, but if he had the chance again, he would marry me for love.

• 5. The Corn Laws and a Party Remade

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  Prime Minister Robert Peel's proposal in 1846 to repeal the Corn Laws, which had imposed a tariff on imported wheat protecting British farmers while making bread artificially expensive, split the Conservative Party in two. An alliance of free-trade Conservatives, Radicals, and Whigs carried the repeal. Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck had led the protectionist resistance. The split drove almost every Tory politician with experience of office out of the party, following Peel toward the Whigs. Biographer Robert Blake wrote that Disraeli found himself almost the only figure on his side capable of the oratorical display essential for a parliamentary leader. The Duke of Argyll observed that he was like a subaltern in a great battle where every superior officer had been killed or wounded.

  Bentinck died suddenly on the 21st of September 1848. To secure the financing needed to purchase Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire, which a Tory with leadership ambitions was expected to hold as a country house, Disraeli obtained a loan of £25,000 from Bentinck's brothers, Lord Henry Bentinck and Lord Titchfield. The Conservative Party would not win a majority in the Commons again until 1874.

  Through these years in opposition, Disraeli found his most consequential public voice in the cause of Jewish political rights. In 1847, when the Jewish MP Lionel de Rothschild could not take his seat in the Commons because he could not swear the prescribed Christian oath, Disraeli spoke in favour of amending the oath. He argued that Christianity was completed Judaism and asked the House where its Christianity was if it did not believe in Jewish faith. Gladstone and Lord John Russell thought the speech brave. His own party thought it blasphemous. Every member of the future protectionist cabinet then in Parliament voted against the measure. The bill was defeated. It would not be until 1858, under the second Derby government in which Disraeli again served as chancellor, that Baron Lionel de Rothschild finally took his seat as the first MP to profess the Jewish faith.

• 6. The 1867 Reform Act

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  Disraeli believed that if given the vote, British working men would instinctively use it to return Conservative gentlemen to power. Acting on that conviction during the third Derby minority government in 1866-67, he maneuvered through a reform of the franchise that would become one of the most consequential acts of the Victorian era. With what Derby himself cautioned was a leap in the dark, Disraeli outflanked the Liberals, who as supposed champions of reform dared not oppose him. Conservative dissenters, most notably Lord Cranborne, accused Disraeli of a political betrayal which had no parallel in their parliamentary annals, but Cranborne could not lead an effective rebellion.

  The Reform Act 1867 passed in August of that year. It extended the franchise by 938,427 men, an increase of 88%, by giving the vote to male householders and male lodgers paying at least £10 for rooms. It eliminated rotten boroughs with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and granted constituencies to fifteen unrepresented towns, with extra representation to large municipalities including Liverpool and Manchester. Nottingham MP Bernal Osborne declared from the Liberal benches that Disraeli had achieved what no other man could have done, lugging that great omnibus full of country gentlemen and converting Conservatives into Radical Reformers. Disraeli gained wide acclaim and became a hero to his party for what was described as marvellous parliamentary skill.

• 7. Empire, Suez, and Europe

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  By 1875, approximately 80% of the ships using the Suez Canal were British. The canal, opened in 1869, had cut weeks and thousands of miles from the sea journey between Britain and India. Built by French interests, 44% of the stock belonged to Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, notorious for his profligate spending. On the 14th of November 1875, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Frederick Greenwood, learned from London banker Henry Oppenheim that the Khedive was seeking to sell his shares to a French firm. Greenwood told Lord Derby, the Foreign Secretary, who notified Disraeli. The Prime Minister moved immediately.

  On the 23rd of November, the Khedive offered to sell the shares for 100,000,000 francs. Rather than approach the Bank of England, Disraeli borrowed the funds from the banker Lionel de Rothschild, who took a commission and whose capital was at risk because Parliament could have refused to ratify the transaction. The contract was signed at Cairo on the 25th of November and the shares deposited at the British consulate the following day. Disraeli telegraphed the Queen: it is settled; you have it, madam. Sir Ian Malcolm described the purchase as the greatest romance of Disraeli's romantic career. Under Gladstone, Britain would go on to take control of Egypt in 1882, and in 1909 a later Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, called the canal the determining influence of every considerable movement of British power to the east and south of the Mediterranean.

  Disraeli's second term was also defined by the Eastern Question, the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire and the desire of other European powers, especially Russia, to gain at its expense. In 1878, faced with Russian victories against the Ottomans, he worked at the Congress of Berlin to obtain peace in the Balkans at terms favourable to Britain and unfavourable to Russia. That diplomatic success established him as one of Europe's leading statesmen. The Liberals defeated his Conservatives at the 1880 general election, with Gladstone conducting a massive speaking campaign and world events, including controversial wars in Afghanistan and South Africa, having turned against the government. In his final months, Disraeli led the Conservatives in opposition. He published his last completed novel, Endymion, shortly before he died on the 19th of April 1881, at the age of 76.