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His youthful reputation as a scandalous womanizer (deserved) and as a financial charlatan (undeserved) haunted his career. All his life he was candid to the point of impudence and imprudence and maintained a totally un-Victorian intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy. His pen dripped venom. He once endowed an opponent with "the crabbed malice of a maundering witch." Justifying his casual inconsistency on an issue in Parliament, he bluntly said: "We came here for fame." When friends congratulated him on his first accession to the prime ministership, Disraeli said cynically: "Yes, I've climbed to the top of the greasy pole."
In his twilight of honor, he was made Earl of Beaconsfield and moved to the House of Lords. "I am dead," said Dizzy, "dead but in the Elysian fields." The irreverence reached right to the brink of the grave. All his life he had captivated older women; he married and lived happily with one twelve years his senior. Queen Victoria, grieving over her lost Prince Albert, was his last and greatest spiritual conquest. As Disraeli lay dying at 76, a courier from the Queen asked if she could come visit him. "It is better not," he said. "She would only ask me to take a message to Albert."
No Sacred Cows. In his summing up, Blake suggests that it was this profound disdain for all the sacred cows of English life and government that fed Dizzy's antagonists. Yet, his opportunism and imagination created an impressive political legacy. It was he who first formulated the now-obvious parliamentary principle that "it is the duty of the opposition to oppose." It was Dizzy who wrought the Reform Bill of 1867, giving the vote for the first time to large numbers of the emerging industrial class in Britain. He shaped and dramatized the Tory sense of larger world responsibilities. With Bismarck at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he headed off a potential clash among European powers in the Balkans, creating the Continental peace that lasted until 1914.
Beyond all this, the reader may well conclude that Disraeli's greatest gift was for acupuncture, which he practiced with matchless skill on all the pomposities of his era. He was a swinger for all seasons.