ABSTRACT
It was between 1868 and 1886 that certain characteristic political attitudes of the ‘Right’ and ‘Left’, as they were to exist well into the middle of the twentieth century, were first shaped; and the shaping was done by Gladstone and Disraeli. The particular differences for which they were responsible have little to do with social problems at home, however. Even if it be accepted that there is at least something in the view that Disraeli’s government from 1874 to 1880 paid more attention to working-class living and working conditions than Gladstone’s first two ministries, the Conservative party after his death, even when associated, as it was after 1886, with the Liberal Unionists, did little in its domestic policies to commend itself to the working classes. ‘Tory Democracy’ was little more than a colourful theory about Disraeli’s Conservatism invented by Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1880s for the purpose (in which he was ultimately unsuccessful) of embarrassing Lord Salisbury. Nor, owing to Gladstone’s obsession with Ireland, the consequent loss to the party of Joseph Chamberlain, and the political disarray into which the party fell after Gladstone’s resignation in 1893, did the Liberals after 1880, whether in office or in opposition, appear to possess a relevant social
policy until after 1905. The differences which Gladstone and Disraeli symbolized were almost wholly within the spheres of foreign and imperial policy. In this respect, Gladstonian Liberalism established the normal (though never universal) attitude of the Liberals, and their heirs in the twentieth-century Labour party; while Disraeli established the normal (though not quite universal) Conservative attitude to foreign and colonial affairs until 1956.
