BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

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As late as 1886, Gladstone's performance continued to be
measured by means of a comparison with his dead adversary, Lord
Beaconsfield, rather than his current rival, the Marquis of Salisbury.
An impartial historian writing at the present moment of
the history of the last quarter of a century could
scarcely fail to seize on the antithesis observable in
the political conduct of England's most prominent and
most trusted leaders ... Mr. Gladstone . . . and
. . . Mr. Disraeli. . . . The one statesman set to
work to construct, the other still bends all his
talents to destroy, and as a consequence, while the
magnificent party of Palmerston seems splintered into
fragments, the once ruined anomaly which still called
itself Toryism has been reconstituted on a basis of
broad and comprehensive principle which promises to
defy the roughest assaults of time.15
It is ironic that the staunchly Tory paper credits Disraeli
with the Conservatives' change in fortune, a process it acknowledges to
have occurred in the past year.
Only during the last administration
(1874-1880), did he obtained the unqualified support of party
faithful.16
His ethnic origin and flamboyant style suggested a man who
remained in substance, although not in practice, an "outsider."I 7
Indeed, Disraeli was hardly the individual one would have expected to
become the object of Conservative adoration.
By contrast Salisbury, who, by virtue of his political outlook
and aristocratic lineage, would have appeared the rightful heir to
Conservative hagiography, is credited in The Morning Post as having
1 5 The Morning Post 19 April 1886, p. 5.
16 Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 128, 155-56, 194, 311.
1 7 Isaiah Berlin, "Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search
for Identity," Against the Current (New York: The Viking Press, 1980),
pp. 260, 263-65, 267, 270-71, 275.