Disraeli and the PMs who fell short at the dinner table

 
8 July 2013

The juicy bits are always in the footnotes. Ed Young and former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd have co-authored Disraeli: or, The Two Lives, a new biography of the 19th-century Prime Minister, and Hurd has since dubbed Boris Johnson “the new Disraeli” in a newspaper article this weekend.

At one point, as the authors relate that when age and illness crept up on Disraeli he would sit sullenly at dinner parties, an asterisk appears. Follow it and you come to this: “Such behaviour is not unique among past Prime Ministers. One of us, while working for Ted Heath in the 1970s, had the job of encouraging him to be a more engaging dinner host. On one occasion a note was sent reminding the PM that he must speak to both influential ladies who sat beside him at the table. Moments later the note came back with a line from the Prime Minister. It simply said: ‘I have’.”

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