The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  As Peel began to show his hand, so Disraeli identified a new enemy, the Prime Minister. The parliamentary confrontation between Peel and Disraeli over the question of the repeal of the Corn Laws and the scaling back of British protectionism is among the most celebrated and notorious in the annals of Westminster. Peel himself was an effective operator and Disraeli was never able to offer a convincing reply to Peel’s question, why was he ‘ready as I think he was, to unite his fortunes with mine in office’? He responded to Peel’s remark in the Commons with an outright lie, claiming that he never sought office, even though he had written to Peel to beg for a position both for himself and on a separate occasion for his brother. Nor can there be any question of a misunderstanding. Disraeli’s phraseology was unequivocal and untrue. Hansard recorded these words:

  I can assure the House nothing of the kind ever occurred. I never shall, it is totally foreign to my nature, make an application for any place … I never asked a favour of the Government, not even one of those mechanical things which persons are obliged to ask … and as regards myself I never directly or indirectly solicited office.

  He then went on to say that if offered a ministerial position, he might have accepted but ‘with respect to my being a solicitor for office it is entirely unfounded’. Remarkably, Peel was believed to have had Disraeli’s letter asking for promotion in his pocket and there was no satisfactory explanation for his failure to use it. It has been speculated that the gentlemanly Peel found it distasteful to read the contents of a private letter into the public record and in the House of Commons, yet the strength and inaccuracy of Disraeli’s rebuttal were surely sufficient to excuse any use of private correspondence.

  Disraeli’s conduct in this instance was flawed on every count. He had had no reason, beyond pious hope, to expect early preferment from Peel. There were many better claimants and his direct lies would, if exposed, have easily derailed his whole career. His credibility in Tory circles would have collapsed, not that at this point he had a great deal anyway. As with his youthful financial speculations and his relationships with married women, so his words in the Commons constituted a reckless gamble that was within a hair’s breadth of being catastrophic. Imagine the scene with Peel’s hand hovering over his waistcoat pocket, the elder statesman wondering whether he ought to pull out the evidence of Disraeli’s dishonesty and cashier him and declining to do so. Consider the irony of it: following his escape, Disraeli went on to destroy Peel.

  This question of economic reform has already been considered from Peel’s point of view and needs to be examined from Disraeli’s side too. Disraeli’s ferocious attacks on Peel only in part stemmed from chagrin at ambition stymied. For the most part, they emanated from the great clash stamped through the politics of the time: protectionism versus free trade. It is crucial to remember that there was much at stake. For its proponents, the system of protectionism was a noble cause. It was bound up with greater issues of patriotism and national security and there was every reason to advance such a view.

  The Corn Laws had been an intrinsic part of national life for two generations. The University of Warwick estimates that in 1841, in spite of developing industrialisation and urbanisation, the agricultural economy still represented 22.1 per cent of British GDP. In 1814 the Committee of the House of Commons had determined that the fair price for corn was eighty shillings a quarter. Its deliberations had been much influenced by the contemporary economist Robert Malthus, who argued that domestic production was needed to ensure supply in times of scarcity and that no sovereign nation should find itself at the mercy of foreign countries cutting off their food supply. If the eighty-shilling minimum were not kept, the theory went, then wages would have to be lowered or jobs lost, reducing purchasing power and hitting the manufacturing sector as well.

  The free trade advocate and political economist David Ricardofn1 argued that such theories did not stand up to scrutiny. Foreign governments would not cut off supplies when they wanted and needed the money and the benefits trade brought them, and the British, he added, ought to use their superior purchasing power to effect positive change. At this time, however, Malthus proved the more convincing economist. The 1815 Act accepted the eighty-shilling protection level. Above this amount there would be no tariff and below it importation would be banned. The system did not please even its proponents but systematic government tweaking maintained its utility as the years went by and saw to it that cheap corn from expanding agricultural areas elsewhere in the world did not flood the market. The key line for supporters was that imports of grain were to be readily available during the poor harvests of 1828–31, while imports were pegged back during the bumper years between 1832 and 1835.

  Unfortunately, a combination of bad harvests and a manufacturing recession in 1836 led to the resumption of pressure to change or repeal the Corn Laws. The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in Manchester in the autumn of 1838, with a London meeting in the following year. These meetings pushed a simple and attractive message: ‘cheap bread’. The use of new campaigning techniques and the greater ease of communication, via the penny post and the railways, enabled the Leaguers to disseminate this message with great efficiency, and even the resumption of good harvests in the first half of the 1840s could not now remove the growing pressure for a fundamental change in the system.

  The dramatic point to be made is that both the protectionist and the free trade sides could offer compelling arguments in their favour. After all, both Ricardo and Malthus were convincing and valued economists and their names resonate to this day. Malthus’s basic proposition, that we may run out of food if the population continues to grow, is widely accepted and although the historic record shows that mankind can cope with its own increase, still some people worry that we will be unable to feed ourselves. It was not in 1846 wholly irrational or merely opportunistic to be on the same side of the argument as Malthus who represented the mainstream political view at least until 1840 rather than Ricardo.

  Moreover, as is so often the case with economic policies, many politicians had not especially strong views against received wisdom. Lord Melbourne’s famous description of collective responsibility, quoted by constitutionalists throughout the ages, was based on the issue of the Corn Laws: ‘Now, is it to lower the price of corn, or isn’t it? It is not much matter which we say, but mind we must all say the same.’ In the specific instance of the Corn Laws, however, it should be noted that Melbourne’s view did settle on a position and in 1839 he remarked that repeal was the ‘wildest and maddest scheme that ever entered into the imagination of man’. As for Peel, his political trajectory provides an example of how received wisdom can change as the tides change eventually. He entered the 1841 election committed to retaining the Corn Laws before executing a sharp political turn. He had observed the success of reducing duties in other areas and this appears to have convinced him of the benefits of removing them on corn. In addition, the disaster of the Great Famine in Ireland led Peel to feel the need to soften the tariffs at once and then to acknowledge to the Cabinet and himself that he could see no prospect, once they were suspended, of reimposing them. This decision by Peel has been thoroughly vindicated by history but it does not follow that opposition to it was automatically vexatious and opportunistic. The joke at the time was ‘Why are the Tories like walnuts? Because they are troublesome to Peel.’ That was the fraught context of the 1840s in a nutshell and it left a good deal of scope for politicians to act on the basis of principle. This may be hard to believe about Disraeli but not about his ally, Lord George Bentinck, who went on to become the main figure of the anti-repeal Tories in Parliament. Bentinck was no natural leader. Until he rose to speak against repeal, he had not uttered a word in Parliament in the course of eighteen years. He was irked by the sense that his leader Peel stood revealed as a liar and a cheat and that he, Bentinck, had therefore been elected to Parliament on the basis of a lie. His rigorous moral code shone through as he opposed repeal in spite of the personal advantage it w
ould have brought. He said, ‘I keep horses in three counties, and they tell me I shall save £1,500 a year by free trade. I don’t care for that; what I cannot bear is being sold.’ He had even been offered office by Peel so had no sense of personal slight, and to concentrate on politics he sold his horses, one of which went on to win the Derby, depriving him of his life’s ambition. This country gentleman now threw his lot in with Disraeli to oppose repeal. He provided what seemed a calm, stout English foundation to the movement, bringing in allies who were wary of Disraeli himself but who would follow a man with aristocratic gilding and the patience to do the quiet but necessary organisational work. Disraeli could now set to work on his rhetorical prowess and we must do him the justice of remembering that he might genuinely have believed in the arguments against the repeal of the Corn Laws. After all, their repeal did little to help relieve the famine in Ireland.

  On 22 January 1846, Disraeli rounded on Peel in the Commons. In his speech, he underlined his own consistency, noting that ‘to those opinions I have expressed in this house in favour of protection, I adhere. They sent me to this House and if I had relinquished them, I should have relinquished my seat also.’ He called for the repealers to listen to ‘the unequivocal expression of the public voice’. He then moved to attack Peel for his inconsistency in supporting the Corn Laws ‘by eloquent panegyrics on the existing system – the plenty it had caused, the rural happiness it had diffused’. He also mocked Peel for his previous changes of heart over Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform.

  Then he began to abuse the Prime Minister. Peel, he said, ‘might as well at once adopt the phraseology of Walpole, and call himself a sole minister, for his speech was rich in egotistic rhetoric’. He expressed his bitterness at Peel’s present arguments. ‘What were the means, what the machinery, by which the Right Hon. Gentleman acquired his position, how he obtained power to turn around upon his supporters and treat them with contempt and disdain? … Would his sovereign have called on [Peel], if in 1841 he had not placed himself, as he said, at the head of the gentlemen of England … supporting the “sacred cause of protection”?’ Disraeli was scathing about the reality of Peel’s change of mind. ‘The gentleman who has had the question of protection before his official mind in every shape that ingenuity could devise, during his parliamentary career of a quarter of a century – this gentleman suddenly finds that the arguments in favour of protection to native industry, are not, after all, so cogent as he once thought them; he discovers that the principle of protection cannot be supported … The future of which they are thinking, is indeed posterity, or only the coming quarter day … What I cannot endure is to hear a man come down and say, “I will rule without respect of party, though I rose by party; and I care not for your judgement, for I look to posterity” … The minister who attained as he did the position which the Right Hon. Baronet now fills, is not the minister who ought to abrogate the Corn Laws.’

  History has given this battle to Peel. The Corn Laws were repealed yet Disraeli did have a point. Not only did he argue that economically the Corn Laws had worked but in addition Peel split his party. He and his ‘Peelite’ faction would eventually join with the Whigs and liberal-minded politicians in Parliament to form the Liberal Party. Disraeli would remain with the core Conservatives, weaker and unable to govern independently for a generation. The telling line is perhaps when Disraeli remarked that Peel ‘is not the minister who ought to abrogate the Corn Laws’. There is an undoubted virtue in a politician being flexible enough to change his mind but there is also reasonable criticism to be made of one who abandons his previous position on which he stood successfully for election. Sir Robert Peel both issued the first election manifesto and made the first great U-turn. While it is possible that Peel may be regarded as a statesman because he was willing to change his mind, so Disraeli can be thought one because he stuck to his election promises.

  *

  The recent view of Benjamin Disraeli, much influenced by Lord Blake’s biography of 1966, is that he was essentially an opportunist with a disreputable early life and a selfish later one and a man guided solely by personal ambition. Yet to achieve what he did, Disraeli had to overcome greater barriers than any of his contemporaries. In the first place, politics was not exclusively an aristocratic profession but it was dominated by the noble families. Even being a Member of Parliament required property ownership. Although the likes of Peel, Disraeli’s grand opponent, and Disraeli’s nemesis, William Gladstone, were not of noble stock, they cannot be placed in the same bracket as Disraeli either. They held the priceless advantage of coming from exceptionally successful commercial families and were educated at Harrow and Eton respectively. Disraeli invented a noble history for his family and his imagination must have at least persuaded him, although nobody else, that he was the equal of any number of blue-blooded politicians.

  Nor can Disraeli’s Jewish heritage be ignored. At least since the days of Oliver Cromwell Britain has thankfully never been a hotbed of anti-Semitism but his identity was nevertheless a drag on his ambitions. Had his father not fallen out with the synagogue and chosen to have his children join the Church of England, Disraeli’s Jewish faith would have been an insurmountable obstacle to a political career in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lionel de Rothschild, who made so important a contribution to the success of the Great Exhibition, was forbidden from taking his seat in the Commons because he would not renounce his Judaism, even though he was repeatedly elected. Only in 1858, eleven years after his first election, did the House of Lords relent and permit each House to draw up its own oath of allegiance. This enabled Rothschild to take his seat at last as a Liberal and the first Jewish Member of Parliament.

  Disraeli had participated in this long-running debate and it is to his very great credit that he sided with the Liberals, antagonising some of his Tory supporters in the process. He argued not merely in favour of tolerance, but essentially that Judaism and Christianity were equally important, a remarkably challenging view, particularly for him to take in the circumstances of the 1850s. Disraeli’s argument could only have highlighted his own sense of ‘foreignness’ and he never sought to disguise his family antecedents. If anything, he made a virtue of them. He was capable of principle, in other words, and it is against this background that his mistakes must be judged and his successes applauded. It is as if the minuses have been piled up, with the result that his reputation has been overtaken by those of Gladstone and Peel. Yet once it is recognised that it is disproportionate to view his opposition to repeal of the Corn Laws as exclusively opportunistic, his successes can be explored with a greater sense of justice.

  The formal foundation and naming of the Conservative Party are correctly attributed to Peel but it was Disraeli who developed both its structures and the policies that allowed it to appeal to the legions of newly enfranchised voters. He hauled the party back from the nadir of its Peelite split and made it electable again. As for his political beliefs, these have been hidden in clear sight, for they went well beyond a desire for self-promotion, imbuing the Conservative Party with a range of values that have been quoted favourably ever since. Unusually, he disseminated these ideas through his novels which flowed with his political ideology. He referred to Coningsby: or The New Generation (1844), which tells the story of a character who seems a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself, as ‘the secret history of my feelings’, while the full title of his next novel, Sybil, or The Two Nations, encapsulates what Disraeli felt to be the abiding curse of British society, one that onenation Conservatives could help to dispel. His writing attempted to replace a ‘progressivist’ Whig interpretation of history with his own Conservative version, which in turn attempted to heal the wounds in British society and to bring the two nations together.

  Disraeli also invested a good deal of creative and political energy in describing a past consisting of a feudal idyll. He held, or claimed to hold, the view that there had once been a golden age in Britain when
the interests of landowners and their tenants went hand in glove. One looked after the interests of the other which in return gave fealty not out of fear but from love. Disraeli’s was part of a great common vision which a host of others, including Augustus Pugin, shared. It was a concept of a kinder, gentler and more balanced past, that might be resurrected if the will existed. For Disraeli, there was a personal twist. He not only believed that the golden age was about to awaken but he also had no doubt that he was the man to bring it back to life. In Sybil, for example, he wrote that this vision, this golden Toryism, ‘was not dead but sleeping … Yet will rise from the tomb … to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the subject, and to announce that power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE.’ Such a position, Disraeli considered, needed to be revived because the current situation was so divisive.

  Again in Sybil, the novel’s hero Egremont met a stranger who explained to him the situation. Egremont declared in a pious statement of patriotic sentiment, ‘Say what you will, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’ The stranger’s question of ‘Which nation?’ puzzled Egremont, and he listened as the stranger then went on to describe the existence of ‘two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, and are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’ ‘You speak of –’ said Egremont hesitatingly. ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’