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The so called humanitarian interventions of the Tony Blair years were disastrous for Britain's international reputation and for the countries concerned. Still we are continuing to pay the price for that in so many unfortunate ways around the world. Interesting perspective. Thank you.

Ever since Dr Starkey made this beautiful channel I have been hoping he would one day devote a video to Disraeli, of whom I had heard him speak admiringly in several interviews and who is one of my political heroes. I am very grateful that he has indeed made such a video and a lengthy one at that. Disraeli should never be forgotten and I want to thank Dr Starkey profoundly for keeping his memory alive and for stressing the importance of Disraeli in our day and age.

I understand the world 🌎 better by listening to Dr Starkey and understand why I struggle with so many imported ideas thankyou ❤️

Dear Sir: Thankyou for the courage, time and effort you have taken to upload these talks. While I do not agree with some of your statements, I respect you and your work enough to listen: You have made me think deeply about the issues you address, and have led me to see flaws on both sides. I am grateful. It remains my hope that humans of all political persuasions can somehow find common ground to show effective compassionate action in addressing the problems of our time.

Friday night, a dram of Glenfarclas 25 and a talk by Mr Starkey. Need I say more.

A much better camera set up than previous vids. Great content, as always Mr Starkey

Indeed, Disraeli was an outstanding political leader and he deserves all our admiration. Thank you very much for this remarkable analysis.

Thank you for another interesting talk. On the story of liberal intervention, Gladstone and the Balkan crisis is a moment with interesting differences with our current ancestor we have today. The main one I think is that Gladstone’s interventionism is directed towards protecting Christians. It’s no coincidence that Victorian’s had an uncomfortable relationship with the Ottoman Empire - seen before during the Greek war of independence. The Christian revival movements in Victorian Britain did not like the compromises necessary as part of the Eastern Question (propping up an Ottoman state to prevent Russian dominance in the east), that I think Disraeli understood. Disraeli ultimately is flamboyant, but also flexible enough to be comfortable with the trade offs that that movement could not stomach.

This was more then a talk , it was a lesson. And a very good one at that . Thankyou David.

A memorable talk, David, with a memorable quote, amongst many, "that jumped up little squirt Lord Faulkner". Thank you.

"New wine into old bottles." Splendid stuff. Thank you.

Great video. I have always found Disraeli and Gladstone fascinating. You do an excellent job of breaking this down for us. Disraeli saw a much bigger picture just as John Adams did when he agreed to defend the British soldiers in Boston. Oh, he was despised for that certainly did not have the financial resources to withstand being ruined. But due process and justice has to be for all.

Long-time Starkey fan - LOVING these talks!

Great stuff. Before he was cancelled, we only got Starkey once every few months, now we get as much as we want. Would be great to also have some engagement with other academics/ intellectuals so some of the great man's more outrageous statements can be challenged and discussed. Just a thought.

Dr. Starkey, David, what wonderful answers and analogies. Your depth of knowledge and understanding of historical facts is so impressive and your way of conveying and teaching so easy to take in and understand. Your cancellation by academia was nothing short of scandalous and a major injustice not only to you but to your prospective students. That, however, is the publics major gain. Thank you, Robert.

Fantastic presentation Mr Starkey- like a Bach cantata! More please!😁🤩

I really enjoyed this, and I don't think I've ever learned as much as this in less than an hour

I wish I could give this video 10 thumbs up. This is one of the best of Dr. Starkey's videos. I was well aware of Disraeli, but never paid much attention to him. My loss. The English/British system is different from that of the US and other countries. This is not a bad thing, and in fact, is quite appropriate. There is no one best system. I am in the US, although I have lived in the UK. Both systems have their good and bad sides. I prefer to live in the US, although I loved my time in the UK. While I was there, I ran, and was elected. to Board of Governors of my children's school. It was the best experience I could have had. I got to see a small part of the government of the country. I actually had to get a letter from the Home Office to be able to run as a foreigner. I still have it, somewhere. I tool all the training available to governors (please excuse the spelling, but spell check won't let me use the proper one). Unlike most ex-pats most of my contacts and friends were locals. This, I believe, enriched my experience. To conclude, I must thank Dr. Starkey for his incredible content. I don't always agree with him (although I do more often than not), but I always appreciate his point of view and his knowledge. That he is willing to share it with all of us is a wonderful thing.

Brilliant as always.

I would love to see a video on Stanley Baldwin and one nation conservativism.

I love shows like this - Disraeli Churchill etc

Dear Mr. Starkey, I could not agree more with your descritption on conservativism and it's ever evolving course of self renewance! Thank you so much for amplifying and strengthen my views on the matter. best regards! X.H.

My English father-in-law was a working class Tory and my mother-in-law, Labour. My wife... took her father's path and was Conservative. Canada has a similar problem: the Conservatives of today have no ideology of conservatism. That ended in the 1960s.

As a Scottish nationalist David, I can say without contradiction, I know no fellow Scottish nationalists that refer to the English as colonisers. Will there be some? Well of course but it really is overplayed as is just about every critique of Scottish nationalists. We want to build a better nation, though in the global political economic world we now live under that will be extremely difficult. Breaking Scotland away from the British state is a noble goal, I hope to live to see it & acknowledge the difficult times that will have to be endured in that process. Work as though you live in the early days of a better nation. Always enjoyable & interesting listening to your vast knowledge. Best wishes.

Every word that comes out of this man’s mouth is nectar.

I'd disagree that Gladstone was a leveller in a way comparable to later left wing beliefs. He believed fervently in hierarchy and described himself as an inegalitarian. Gladstonian liberalism was really about Christian individual sovereignty, not social justice. He hated languid, entitled aristocratic leadership which he saw as exploitative, but did believe in leadership by the competent, educated and wealthy. He hated bullies and bullshitters, you might say, and encouraged responsibility. Later welfare state socialism in the name of social equality is a bastardisation of Gladstonian liberalism.

Just connected with this and found it fascinating. As a student I always thought of the old Roundhead/Cavalier saying in relation to Gladstone vs. Disraeli: 'Right but repulsive, wrong but romantic'. Not that Disraeli was 'wrong' - far from it in most instances - but Gladstone was surely 'right' in many of his domestic reforms? Introducing meritocratic entrance exams for the civil service, ending the practice of purchasing of army commissions, widening the provision of free and secular state education, taxing heavy spirits to tackle endemic alcoholism, - weren't all of these Gladstonian reforms with vital long term benefits? High minded, preachy people such as Gladstone are neither colourful nor attractive, but sometimes they are the required antidote to the sleaze that naturally engulfs politics when unchallenged. Cue the present day - don't we desperately need a new Gladstone to roll back the capture of our society by a corrupt, plutocratic 'chumocracy' with enormous power? He / She / They could start by passing a law to prevent senior state regulators moving straight across into hugely overpaid jobs at the head of the industries they purported to regulate (OFWAT and the FCA come straight to mind). So I'd welcome Gladstone-2!

Who was the hidden hand Disraeli was speaking of? This is a very interesting quote. “Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.”

Awesome. Excellent channel. Brilliant content.

Thank you Dr Starkey! Brilliant.

One of your best yet Dr Starkey! Ask me I think it the UK needs someone with the brass to stand up an say Make Britain Great Again.😉

Disraielly was modern conservative,he had brought about electoral reform, bringing in lower class people to vote,His speeches were like blowing winds reforming the parliament to catch up with the time,He was a real constitutional who knew old flexible English constitution, Quite right the English judicial system is also very old,but the liberal Blair set up supreme court,in fact house lord's judicial committee is the last court of appeal.Never before we have seen an irrational prime minister like Blair,He was a davastating, Gladstone was also liberal ,very brave and rhetorical.S otland had its own parliament,but here we don't have federal government rather unitary form of government

I always love your lectures and analysis.

"Intoxicated with his own verbosity" - wow - such a phrase has fullest effect when it is reserved for those politicians who are unequivocally intoxicated - to the eyeballs - with their own verbosity. In the modern day, such a person can be no other than John Bercow.

Hello david. Just watched disraeli,a true romantic so this video was just perfect to watch after watching the dvd. What a great man disraeli was.. Wish we had more mps like him around today.

Dizzy was of a character and intellect that’s virtually impossible to imagine in British politics today. A truly great Briton.

Thank you so much! As a German, I am highly fascinated by the rhetorical mastery, in which British historians, philosophers and political theorists can bring History to life - espacially History of Ideas. Does anyone have an idea what to read in order to further engage with Disraeli's world of thought?

Thank you Dr Starkey.

Please Sir: Who did the painting of you, the one sitting down and dressed in a sporting look.. It it well done and I appreciate it. thank you for your time

Another extremely enlightening lecture.

If in doubt about a quiz question about an historical prime minister, chances are the answer is Disraeli.

Sir, you are a national treasure to Americans and Britons. I channel you when I explain to my children that the people ordained their constitution; no pope no pretentate, the people

(6:15) 'Intoxicated with the EXUBERANCE of his own verbosity.' My mother would often quote it and then laugh.

“Semi fascist states of continental Europe” - could not have been described with any better precision.

This was a truly great and fascinating talk, but we've now gone way beyond being "a bit imperfect". The system is clearly fracturing, breaking and will need another tearing before it is repaired.

Excellent 👍 thanks keep the good work up 👏👏

I'm a Palmerston and Gladstone man myself

I made exactly the same point in an essay at Sunderland Polytechnic in 1986, Although Dr. Starkey does it with more flourish and unfortunately has the ability to use the actions of Blair and Johnson to illustrate his point.

RIP Professor John Vincent. His book on Disraeli was regarded as the Magnum Opus for some time.

Brilliant!

Love the lamp

Thank you.

They all thought he was a snake, and I call snake. As Hotspur puts it, 'Tell truth and shame the devil'

Disraeli was indeed a genius and what a character and it indicates that the British weren't racist or prejudiced , nor was Queen Victoria , no wonder Queen Victoria loved and respected Disraeli , he was amusing, brilliant and showed the Queen abject respect and loyalty, whereas Gladstone, although brilliant would have been a sanctimonious bore , she couldn't stand him initially .

Of course Labour would never have got into power without the 1918 Reform Act, which gave non property owners the right to vote.

More like this please.

Thank you

Three things I think are important are as follows; 1 - You former Conservative (usually) MP’s at the constituency home gate with the wife and children after an affair is publicised putting in the whole spectacle and being basically publicly humiliated and losing their ministerial position etc. This seems fine given they have been directly elected from the whole 2.4 children angle and virtues of the (usually) Christian position on family life etc. You then fast forward to the present and have a wildly different society with no such dominant religious angle and yet men (usually) are still humiliated and lose their career (whether supreme in their brief or not) because of basically sex.....this just seems insane and so wrong. In other words - another intolerance has replaced the previous doctrine of intolerance. 2 - I think it has become clear to many people (not me as I predicted this long ago) that the grave harm of Blair was not solely Iraq but in fact, what took place domestically. The list is sizeable and you mentioned another area that is on that list - the road of good intentions and all that. In time more people will become far more aware of just how harmful his ‘things will only get better’ actually was. 3 - I think the moment you mentioned the referendum pertinent to the 1867 act of Disraeli it was rather important. If you imagine that nobody (of significant number) in large working class areas was even registered (or intending to vote as they don’t vote in elections ordinarily) to cast their vote in that referendum then you begin to realise just how apathetic the very people Disraeli included in democracy actually were - I was one of them. You may conclude that including a broader segment of society into democracy (as Disraeli does) is step 1 (a vital prerequisite for genuinely being democrat as a state) but surely they (the now included electorate) need to be inspired for something/someone to actually get off their backsides and go and vote for. I will now continue watching the rest of your great work.

Marvellous talk

The 'petty MP' was Daniel O'Connell, hardly petty.

Had John Smith lived the country would never have been cursed with Blair.

Most of what I knew of Disreali was from Trollope's caricature in the Palliser novels ("probably not temporary insanity"), so this was enlightening.

I'm a hard line Unionist.

I love your channel, great information. Would you ever do a video on the battle of Towton.

David, you talk about how bad the Balkans are now. They were no better under the Turks. What does that tell you?

And Disraeli created a great album with the rock group Cream.

Goat intro ✴️😁

Loved this

dear david love your dizzy upload dizzy would put the modern day tories to shame him and gladstone both did much good i hope you are well stay safe yours avon leicestershire 2022

Great video thanks

I've heard Simon Heffer describe himself as a Gladstonian Liberal. Starkey in discussion with the fellow Cambridge Historian would make a fascinating conversation.

24:00 "Dishing the Whigs" = "Owning the Libs"?

This talk made me deeply dislike Disraeli, the opposite of it's intended effect.

Paradoxically speaking, if the UK had a more robust system of checks and balances like the United States, separation of powers included, Blair would have never been able to abolish a position like Lord Chancellor. Because we in the US separate the executive and legislative branches more, and because we have an upper house that is still on equal footing to the lower house, and because we have a written constitution with a very high bar to amend, the ability of a Blair like figure to do much real long term damage constitutionally is next to zero. Frankly, long term the British constitution is doomed precisely because its historical nature as a nebulous/abstract concept, means you always one election away from a radical rewriting of your system and the minute the Lords or the King were to intervene as a "check", those institutions will have signed their death warrants. Also it should be noted that even in the United States, our Vice President is also President of the Senate. If the electoral college is a tie, the House elects the President by state delegation and the Senate elects the Vice President by majority vote. The Chief Justice presides over impeachment trials in the Senate. Just because an institutions crosses over the boundary, does not by itself mean that it violates the separation of powers, in fact such boundary crossing is essential for the separation of powers to function as part of a system of checks and balances.

Gladstone was not the 1st political statesman to get a state funeral - Palmerston had one in 1865 much to the annoyance of the queen.

Excellent!

Mrs Thatcher's economic ideas were very much in the tradition of Gladtone, as was widely acknowledged at the time. In the 20th century there was much overlap between liberalism and conservatism in response to the rise of Labour. You can see this in the career of Winston Churchill, as I'm sure Dr Starkey knows. I believe that if Gladstone's struggle to achieve Home Rule for Ireland had succeded both countries would have been spared much pain and misery.

amazin as always

Wouldn't England and Whales be better off without Scotland? I was living and working in England in the early 2000s. When I asked one of my English management colleagues about the Scotland situation his response was quite interesting. He said, build a trench across the border and hopefully it will float out to sea. This was also the era of the Quebec independence referenda. They had two and neither was successful. I had a meeting in London with a Canadian business partner just before the second. He predicted rightly, that the second would fail. What was happening then was demographics. You should have seen the speculation in the US on what would happen if Quebec had separated from Canada. I recall one PBS report that speculated that the rest of Canada would become part of the United States.

In the thumbnail there seems to be a passing resemblance between D & S...Good video, thanks!

The citizens of anywhere are depicted, in my view, by the character of Gabriel Conroy in Joyce's story, The Dead. I'm sure that wasn't Joyce's intention but it's my analysis of that revolting, rootless, condescending cosmopolitan.

Recently watched the 1930's film Disraeli starring George Arliss. Would love to see it remade today.

That was a very insightful presentation and as an American I will look for books detailing Disraeli's life and career because it seems to me that Donald Trump is something of an American version of Disraeli. Many will disagree but Trump's clarion call of "America First" speaks to the forgotten middle class here in America.

These talks are amazing 👍

Gladstone was right in his reaction to the Bulgarian massacres. It was the UK's following policy of propping up the sick man at the Bosporus that was shameful. (Blair's intervention in Iraq - which wasn't his decision anyway - a stable and cukturally different was a whole different matter.) He also was right on home rule. That it never came through caused all the Irish troubles from 1916 onwards.

To whomever is looking after the audio, it’s super low quality - maybe over compressed?

Dr. Starkey, could you recommend any biographies of Disraeli, the Great Conservative? Thank you, sir.

Can you do a video of William Gladstone please?

love Starkey

David you are the first of a few who are intellectual giants.

Do you have a book recommendation on Disraeli?

Interesting that there is no mention of Gladstone's influence upon the lodestar of the modern Conservative Party - Margaret Thatcher. She bragged in the 1980s that if Gladstone had still been alive, he would have joined her Conservative Party.

The patriotism has been lost in the conservative party now as an even seen with david Cameron and his article about his continuation of Blair ,bring back the nationalist conservatives

Surely the main problem with an Empire's collapsing is not that the liberals helped it on its way, but that it leaves people unable to rule themselves, divided, without an independent history etc, because of the nature of imperial domination. Look at southern America and the West Indies. Look at Europe and N Africa and the Middle East after the Romans. They were a potential mess after achieving independence with or without liberalism. Liberalism was in many ways a response to the autocratic and oppressive nature of imperialism and the political and economic exploitation that went with it - an attempt to heal its wounds. Manchester liberalism developed as a challenge to the pre-industrial orthodoxies of London commercialism and Whitehall policies and networks of power and influence. The century upon century of warfare within Europe after the fall of Rome was the legacy of Empire. The Balkans would have been a mess had the local populations thrown out the Turks without liberal help or liberal ideology. Liberalism, of course, did affect the forms the messes took and the relationships between former colonies and other states, whether 'allies' or former imperial powers. Nationalism was, arguably and in part at least, a Romantic, backward-looking notion that developed in tandem with conservatism. And this caused huge problems in the C20th that cannot gbe blamed on liberalism. Look at Scott, one of the founding figures of historical romanticism and a conservative crafter of a semi-mythological, romanticised history of the UK. In a different context, similar principles were used to break up imperial entities such as the A-H and Ottoman Empires. At the core of all nearly all political problems is the question: Who owns what? That's to say, a major issue is almost always the way property is distributed, and this is entangled with the non-ending struggle between plutocratic elites and the people, autocracy and democracy noted by Plato in the Republic (Bk 6?). What is particularly destabilising following the collapse of Empire is the struggle to settle who owns what, something made extra difficult after the fall of the C19th/20th empires by the rise of global capitalism and the continued economic and political as well as socio-cultural influence the imperial powers. The UK, of course, suffered less post empire than its colonies because the fundamentals of the post 1660 to 1689 settlement pertained, whereas its empire had destabilised any existing settlements or political, socio-economic and cultural settlements in a quarter of the globe. Its only successful large-scale legacy polities were those that were just a replication of the old settlement in countries where the original polities had been wiped out or shovelled to one side. Places like Hong Kong were exceptions that proved the rule.

"You don't even know who I am."

Gladstone was right about the Balkans.

4.02 Isaac never converted / renounced Judaism. He got very fed up with the anachronistic ways of Bevis Marks, but he died a jew nonetheless.

Disraeli transformed the Tory party from a party of the aristocracy into a party of the plebeians, led by aristocrats.

Disraeli and Gladstone were the last two Prime Ministers to have statues dedicated in Westminster Abbey. Not trying to be political but it seems to me that a statue of the greatest Prime Minister who ever lived and the first woman Prime Minister is more than enough reason to add two more.