Outline of Events

The opening of the 1840s saw William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli sitting together on the Tory benches and anticipating the fall of Lord Melbourne's Whig government. It was a brief moment of convergence. Their journeys to Westminster could not have been more different. Where Gladstone had left his mercantile home in Liverpool to attend Eton in 1821, proceeding from there to Oxford and then the House of Commons in 1833 at the age of 23, Disraeli, the baptized son of a literary Jew, had attended neither public school nor university, and had to struggle with debts and public disdain before finally securing a seat in 1837, at the age of 33. From 1841 their careers diverged again. While Gladstone became vice president of the Board of Trade in Robert Peel's Conservative administration, Disraeli languished sulkily on the backbenches. Momentous consequences followed from this. Gladstone, who in the 1830s had made his name as a High Church Anglican bent on raising the Christian tone of political life, now metamorphosed into an accomplished administrator, working closely with Peel to make Britain a land of free trade. Disraeli, by contrast, moved into a position of ever-more barbed criticism of Peelite Conservatism, which he branded an ‘organised hypocrisy’. In 1845 these divergent trajectories collided with a crash that reverberated through the nineteenth century. As famine consumed Ireland, Peel decided to break with established Tory policy and scrap the duty on imported corn – the Corn Laws. Where Gladstone rallied to Peel's side, Disraeli launched a series of scathing attacks from the backbenches that have never been equalled in effectiveness. In 1846 Peel pushed through Corn Law repeal, but in so doing broke the unity of the Conservative Party. Peel, together with around one hundred Members of Parliament (MPs) (including Gladstone) who had supported Corn Law repeal, now broke away from the Conservatives, leaving Disraeli as a prominent figure in the Protectionist Conservative rump. Never again would Gladstone and Disraeli serve in the same party. Here two controversies are considered: why did Gladstone abandon his inflexible High Tory politics for Peel's liberal reformism; and why did Disraeli denounce Peel so vehemently and champion opposition to Corn Law repeal?