Disraeli's secret

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Harvey Sicherman

QUEEN Victoria's favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1803-81), seems at first glance impossibly far removed from our experience. Novelist, wit, orator, arguably the founder of Britain's modern Conservative Party, Disraeli was an exotic to his contemporaries and remains an endless fascination to those who study his life. There were none like him in his time, and not in our time either.

Still, there is good reason to revisit Disraeli's career. He grappled with problems astonishingly similar to those facing the United States today, and in some of the same places, notably the Balkans. Among his legacies was a settlement that conferred peace for thirty years in that tortured region without the posting of a single British soldier. And Disraeli achieved that feat despite a highly popular agitation for a humanitarian intervention that offended his skepticism about moral crusades and that, in his view, would have seriously injured the national interest. This success he owed in no small part to a keenly held concept of that interest. He also possessed rare traits of statesmanship: he knew what he wanted to do, and he persisted in his purpose. To these qualities Disraeli joined a dramatic imagination. His instructive and entertaining career holds relevant lessons even for the dilemmas we face after September 11.

DISRAELI'S ascent to political power was highly improbable. In an age of religious controversy, he was a converted Jew who described himself to Queen Victoria as "the blank page between the Old and the New Testament." (1) To the burden of his origin he added fashionably bad habits. Disraeli bedded many women and borrowed much money; ultimately he was forced to find a respectable and wealthy lady of good standing simply to escape the scandals. His Mary Anne turned out to be not only his rescuer but the love of his life.

Then there was the Disraeli style. A man of medium height and a rather large head surmounted by carefully curled black hair, he dressed like a regency rake in his younger and middle years, sporting highly colored waistcoats and gold chains. Disraeli early exhibited a failing common to gifted men; he could never resist a witticism even if it made him unnecessary enemies. He offended intellectuals by, among other things, dismissing Darwin ("I am on the side of the angels"), and opposing "scientific government." Disraeli thought a large permanent bureaucracy would be dangerous and able men could be just as easily recruited through the spoils system.

Disraeli also made enemies in high society. His first successful novel, Vivian Grey, was a brilliant satire on the political and social life around him. Its characters were thinly disguised; some editions have "keys" at the back for the uninitiated, identifying the real protagonists. It haunted Disraeli's relationships for years. These were qualities that ordinarily took a man out of politics. "Dizzy", as he was universally known, was often his own worst enemy.

"A Spirited Foreign Policy"

DESPITE ALL, Disraeli made it to the top of the "greasy pole" twice. His first premiership in 1868 was brief but succeeded in passing a landmark expansion of the voting franchise. The second, lasting from 1874 to 1880, came near the end of his life but also marked his greatest achievement in foreign affairs.

Although his political program was primarily domestic, Disraeli saw a "spirited foreign policy" as the international dimension of his patriotism. He had entered public life in the 1830s and supported Britain's balance-of-power habit: no continental power or group of powers should become strong enough to threaten Britain or its "permanent" interests. In his view, a superior navy and alliance with at least one substantial land power could best safeguard these interests; sentiment in foreign policy, whether for personal reasons or past services, should be rigorously excluded.

Disraeli was not a professional student of foreign affairs and, notoriously untutored by the facts, imagined many things. European domestic politics, for example, appeared to him merely as a contest between overbearing moneymen and desperate revolutionaries that could be influenced best by Her Majesty's secret service. He thought Louis Napoleon, an old social acquaintance, was a great statesman. Disraeli believed that the aristocratic lords of the American South would win the Civil War. These flirtations with fantasy, however, do not seem to have affected his grasp of reality when it came his turn to conduct the affairs of state.

Throughout a decade in opposition, Disraeli castigated Gladstone's foreign policy for its cant and inactivity. He complained that Britain had sat out the Franco-Prussian War, allowed Russia to violate military restrictions on the Black Sea, and caved to the Union's claims over the Confederate raider Alabama. Worse, Gladstone had failed to keep up the navy while wasting millions on a useless army. Sustained by two bottles of white brandy, Disraeli collected these denunciations in a great three-hour speech on April 3, 1872, which also contained this delicious depiction of the Gladstone cabinet: