A dandy Tory.(Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister)(Book review)

Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister, by Christopher Hibbert (Palgrave Macmillan, 432 pp., $29.95)

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THE story is told that when Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked in the Nixon White House he gave his boss a list of classic political biographies. Nixon was especially interested in Lord Robert Blake's treatment of Benjamin Disraeli. "You know very well," the president reportedly told Moynihan, "that it is the Tory men with liberal policies who have enlarged democracy." As he set about imposing wage and price controls, expanding affirmative action, and jacking up social spending to record levels, one wonders if Nixon had old "Dizzy" in mind.

But was he right about Disraeli? Was the flamboyant novelist-cum-politico really a "Tory man with liberal policies"? In a lengthy Weekly Standard essay, David Gelernter has argued that Disraeli was in fact "the inventor of modern conservatism"--in both Britain and the U.S. "Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society," says Gelernter, "but modern conservatism--a mass movement, a philosophy not for aristocrats and the rich but for everybody--was Disraeli's creation."

Others use Disraeli as a cudgel to flay Baroness Thatcher. "Thatcherism was anything but a Tory creed in the true sense: It was warmed up laissez-faire liberalism," wrote Financial Times columnist Michael Prowse a few years ago. "The Conservatives dominated 20thcentury British politics not because of their commitment to markets but because Disraeli, their great 19th-century leader, positioned them as a party that could credibly claim to care about the whole nation: the poor as well as the rich."

As Tories and Republicans ponder their raison d'etre, the time is ripe for a fresh appraisal of Disraeli. Few scholars are better suited to the task than Christopher Hibbert, an elder statesman of British letters whose previous works include a social history of England and a biography of Queen Victoria. His latest effort mines Disraeli's speeches, letters, diaries, and novels to produce a remarkably scrupulous and sophisticated study.

Yet readers should be warned: This is not a political history. Those seeking a more detailed intellectual analysis of Disraeli's "One Nation" Toryism, or of his link to modern U.S.-U.K. conservatism, should look elsewhere. Hibbert's chief aim is to illuminate Disraeli's private life and consider how it melded with his public one. The result is a book that, as its subtitle implies, tells us much about Disraeli the "dandy"--and Disraeli the author--but far less about Disraeli the prime minister.