When Diplomacy Fails Presents

Britain goes to war

An in-depth examination of the British Empire

from the closing stages of the Victorian era

to the opening phases of the First World War and beyond.

Section 2. Background Part A. The Golden Age. Chapter 10

Benjamin Disraeli had done it.

He had surpassed the expectations of the electorate, his colleagues, and even his great rival William Gladstone,

by winning the general election of 1874, and catapulting his Conservative Party back into power as a majority government

for the first time in over 30 years.

Disraeli was far from the usual suspect one would have expected to lead the Conservatives.

He had not endured the normal rituals of his aristocratic peers and colleagues.

He had not been born into money, neither had he gone through the Oxbridge educational system.

He had not inherited the post from his father.

He had worked for every step he had successfully taken up the

political staircase by the time he became Prime Minister for the second time. He had endured

his share of bitter disappointments, seen Britain's demographic shift and adopted his party's tactics

accordingly. He had more recently lost his wife, his greatest supporter, but instead of going off the rails,

he stuck to his plan to modernize the Conservatives and take down the Liberal Party.

As Gladstone had struggled to reconcile the varied segments of his enormous Liberal Party,

Disraeli had recognised the need to emphas emphasize the conservative old values of his own party,

as well as downplay the aspects which had made it so unpopular in the reform-centered years of change.

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