ABSTRACT
Benjamin Disraeli was an ethnic and cultural outsider: the son of a Jewish intellectual with literary pretensions in a party dominated by English landowners innately suspicious of foreigners. He owed much to the patient spade work of recovery undertaken by the Earl of Derby. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in each of Derby's minority governments, though his economic analysis proved no match for William Ewart Gladstone's detailed knowledge. He became Prime Minister of another minority government on Derby's resignation in 1868, although many on the Conservative back benches resented his exotic flamboyance and his Jewish origins. His contribution to the revival of the Conservative party and to its emergence as the natural party of government from the 1880s is undeniably considerable, although some historians have considered him much stronger on image One Nation Toryism, Imperial grandeur, Patriotism than on substance.
