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125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the twentyfirst century.1
Both these facts would have astounded Disraeli's contemporaries. No politician's credibility, character and creed were more vigorously debated during the nineteenth century and none was found so universally wanting. It became commonplace for Disraeli's critics - and not a few of his followers - to doubt his sincerity and question the depth of his convictions, considering him as little more than a supremely gifted (but essentially shallow and showy) opportunist.2
No episode in Disraeli's political career engendered more controversy, both at the time and subsequently, than the one which materially advanced his claims to the leadership of the Conservative party. In 1846, the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, piloted a bill through parliament accomplishing the graduated repeal of the Corn Laws.3 The measure overturned a 30 year Conservative defence of the Corn Laws, as the necessary support and bulwark of the landed interest, and vitiated the pledge to uphold them made by the Conservative majority returned to parliament at the 1841 general election. In heated parliamentary exchanges, Disraeli established himself as Peel's leading political opponent, using all his literary skills as a wit, novelist and phrase-maker to flail the Prime Minister with forensic skill and exactitude. As Disraeli later wrote, Peel encountered 'an opposition which he had not anticipated & partly carried on in a vein in which he did not excel'.4 Peel's 'betrayal' of the Corn Laws - and of his party - meant that the prime minister was only supported, in the final parliamentary divisions on repeal, by 112 Conservative MPs or about one-third of the party. It is worth remembering that, but for the unwavering support of the Whig-Liberals and their parliamentary allies (the Radicals and Irish MPs), the Corn Laws would not have been repealed. They were repealed - but the political legacy was brutal. The Conservatives endured 28 years of almost continual opposition, punctuated by brief spells of minority government in 1852,1858-9 and 1866-8, and generations of...