Our O-man asks what I think of Disraeli. Very little.

I also see BD as an opportunist, a sort of Victorian Bill Clinton who, lacking firm principles, sought to co-opt the other party's issues (like advocating the various Reform Bills) and make them his own. He also seemed more interested in the Party than conservatism itself. Still, if memory serves, Queen Victoria liked BD a great deal, yet found Gladstone a tremendous preachy, whiny annoyance.

I err toward real Tory reactionaries like Eldon and Wellington. They had principles -- they opposed everything.

In order to complain of an outrage it is more productive to invoke a bygone felicity than it is to insist on counsels of perfection, even though such returns never get all the way back to 'the way things were,' and something better than that is the eventual objective of the exhortation. 'Reaction' is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit late in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous.

Mel Bradford in "The Reactionary Imperative"