OPINION: Are you Dizzy in disguise?
Nick Pelling explores a Tory Tradition.
Imagine a politician who was willing to say almost anything to get into power. Who claimed he was going to level up society but actually did very little. Imagine a politician who wrote distinctly average books and reams of unreliable journalism just to make money. And imagine a politician who could deflect most criticism with a witty quip.
Yes, we are talking about Benjamin Disraeli, Tory PM from 1874 to 1880. As a young man, ‘Dizzy’, as he became known, was an inveterate chancer. He ran up debts all over London (up to around £2 million in today’s money) and sought to enter politics simply because being an MP in Victorian Britain conferred immunity from arrest. (Debtors’ prisons were particularly grim places.) It also promised important social connections and free use of Westminster writing paper and postage. To achieve this salvation, he first posed as a leftish Radical and then switched to the Tories when the odds improved. Once established as a rising Tory, he used his fluency with words to shin up what he called the ‘greasy pole’ of politics. He also wrote rather average novels just to make a little cash. Of his own talents he once quipped, “when I want to read a great novel, I write one.” It was in one of these potboilers, Sybil, that a character spoke of “the two nations” in Britain – the rich and the poor. And by some mystery, the idea of ‘two nations’ morphed into the phrase, ‘one nation Toryism.’ Disraeli was then credited with having invented a new Tory vision of the upper classes looking after the grubby lower orders. When he became PM, however, he did little to change the screaming inequalities of Victorian society. It was more the Tory press, in later years, that blew hot air into this phrase. Dizzy would probably have found that funny.
Disraeli (Dizzy)
One does not have to stretch the fabric of history to see that the current incumbent of No 10 has all of Dizzy’s dubious qualities. He did not believe in Brexit; he did believe in Brexit. He writes endless words – including a supposedly comic novel: Seventy-Two Virgins – to keep the money coming in, to help maintain a certain lifestyle. (A mode in which John Lewis furnishings are just not acceptable.) He has dreamt up a phrase – ‘levelling up’ – to flim-flam the nation that the Tories are the party of increasing equality. Cue more laughter from Dizzy’s ghost. Thanks to all of this, he has also slithered up the greasy pole of politics. Both Disraeli and Johnson can use words to wound: Johnson recently responded to a question from an overly earnest Labour MP by saying that he “could not detect a crouton of substance in his minestrone of nonsense.” It reminded me of Dizzy’s put down of the always rhetorically overblown Gladstone, that the Liberal leader was “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”
It may be that all of this is just a curious historical coincidence. But I would argue that there is within Toryism quite a lineage of tricksy word-spinners. Even Winston Churchill, Johnson’s hero, wrote yards of words primarily to make money. Curiously, in Johnson’s book on Churchill he says that, before World War Two, Churchill was “not just thought to be untrustworthy, he was thought to be congenitally untrustworthy.”
In fact, Johnson is firmly in the Tory tradition of dodgy adventurers who have gambled, scribbled and womanised along the wobbly tightrope of fame. Men on the make. Think of Jeffrey Archer, for example. He wrote trashy novels, but they brought in rivers of money. He floated up to become the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and then a life peer. But his fall was dramatic. He told too many lies. Eventually, he was found guilty of perjury and sent to prison. Johnson too will fall at some point. Maybe it will also be the lies that do for him. Surely, he will still hope that History will elevate him to the Tory pantheon of heroes where his reputation will sit on a par with Churchill and Disraeli. But I suspect he may – given his apparent taste for reckless life steps – end up being ranked a little closer to Archer. Perhaps, he should be seen as just another graduate from the esteemed Tory academy of charmers, chancers and bamboozlers.
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