Indeed, it’s even apocryphally claimed he once said: “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, Attlee got out”. Of one of his predecessors, Stanley Baldwin, he said: “He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” He called his deputy prime minister and later successor, Clement Attlee, “A sheep in sheep’s clothing”. “If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore”, claimed his wife.Ī second master of the put-down was Winston Churchill. “Mr Gladstone speaks to me as if I were a public meeting”, said the former. Unfortunately, for poor Gladstone, Queen Victoria and his own wife seemed to have learnt the art of the verbal punch. However, every school boy’s favourite must be this deliciously loquacious but bloviated description of Gladstone: “A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments, malign an opponent and glorify himself.” I’d like to see Shashi Tharoor better that.
Asked to distinguish between a misfortune and a calamity, this is what he said: “If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity”. However, it wasn’t just words that Disraeli played with so effectively. Do you think I should gift Rahul Gandhi a copy of this book? Savour this collection: “He has not a single redeeming defect” “He’s honest in the most odious sense of the word” “He made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice”.
BLOVIATED SCORN HOW TO
Benjamin Disraeli, as Leader of the Opposition, knew how to discredit Prime Minister William Gladstone with just a single sentence.
0 kommentar(er)
