Clash of the Titans

By Huw Edwards Presenter, BBC Four's Gladstone and Disraeli: Clash of the Titans

The Liberal Gladstone and Conservative Disraeli hated each other

In the mid-19th Century, most of the Edwards family were tenant farmers in Cardiganshire.

Refusing to vote for the local (Tory) landowner at election time was a very dangerous thing to do. In those days, voting was not a secret process.

Employers or landowners could check up on how workers or tenants had voted. The "rebels" were promptly punished. One of my ancestors was thrown off his farm near Tregaron for daring to vote Liberal.

Personal feud

It was William Gladstone who put a stop to this obnoxious system by introducing the secret ballot in 1872.

I have spent a good part of my life reporting on party political conflicts and the clash of egos, personalities and policies at Westminster.

But none comes close to the titanic clash between William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

I think it is fair to say that these two giants invented modern party politics, and their bitter personal feud shows how chemistry plays a big part in shaping the political narrative.

CLASH OF THE TITANS Huw Edwards tells the story of Gladstone vs Disraeli on BBC Four at 8pm on Tuesday 3 March

Quite simply, Gladstone and Disraeli hated each other. As Kenneth Clarke says in our film: "Gladstone thought Disraeli was a charlatan and Disraeli thought Gladstone was mad."

Gladstone has always been an important figure in my native Wales.

He understood and supported the Nonconformist leadership of the country in the 19th Century.

He married a Welsh woman, and established a superb library at Hawarden in Flintshire, which was also the scene of his favourite stress-busting activity - tree-chopping.

But in many ways, he is hard to love. For all his political skills, his commitment to social reform and his belief in an ethical approach to foreign policy, he was rather cold and aloof.

You felt that he was always about to wag his finger at you and tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Full of surprises

By contrast, Disraeli was all charm. His flamboyant dandyism could be over the top and his sentimentality about English tradition verges on the saccharine.

But he wrote beautifully and knew how to get on with people, especially Queen Victoria.

More surprisingly, his 1870s premiership showed a real practical concern for the social conditions of working-class people, an experience with which the high-minded Gladstone never fully engaged.

But my journey through the story of this Clash of the Titans was full of surprises.

I never thought it would take me to Corfu where, as a result of cunning manipulation by Disraeli, Gladstone almost ended up sidelined in the governorship of the island.

And in Berlin we reflected on Disraeli's greatest triumph - his complete dominance of the major international congress held there in 1878. No shallow dandy could have achieved that.

There is so much in this story. Like my Welsh hero David Lloyd George, Disraeli was an outsider.

Unique double act

He was a Jew who was baptized into Christianity to have the chance of rising in anti-Semitic 19th Century Britain.

He was an outsider who wanted to belong, and he embraced the romance and chivalry of ancient tradition.

Meanwhile, the forbidding Gladstone - "he always addresses me as if I'm a public meeting," said the Queen - had the energy and political savvy to reinvent himself as "The People's William". He toppled Disraeli thanks to a new style of nationwide electioneering.

They are colossal figures but they also had a strange mutual dependency.

Gladstone outlived his old sparring partner by 17 years, including two more spells as prime minister, but he never showed the same mastery as when he was under pressure from his elegant adversary.

It was a unique double act that lasted 40 years. We will never see its like again.

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