Lord George Bentinck

About this book

Lord George Bentinck is an account of Disraeli's relation with his parliamentary colleague and friend. It is a vivid story of one of the great parliamentary dramas in British history. It is hard to overstate the bitterness and fury which Peel's decision to repeal the corn laws had provoked in British politics. Friendships were sundered, families divided, and the feuds of politics carried into private life to a degree quite unusual in British history. But the worth of this book goes beyond constitutional history or even the Irish potato famine. Disraeli helps explain the intellectual and ideological grounds of the Young England Movement, a conservative force that aimed at a union of discontented industrial workers with aristocratic landowners and against factious Whigs, selfish factory owners, and dissenting shopkeepers. In forging such a policy of principle, the Conservatives, as Disraeli's book well demonstrates, became a minority party but one which carried the full weight of moral politics.