If you are to have a popular government - if you are to have a Parliamentary Administration the conditions antecedent are that you should have a Government which declares the principles upon which its policy is founded, and then you can have the wholesome check of a constitutional Opposition. What have we got instead? Something has risen up in this country as fatal in the political world as it has been in the landed world of Ireland - we have a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries our, "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure." [...] What dreary pages of interminable talk, what predictions falsified, what pledges broken, what calculations that must have gone wrong, what budgets that have blown up! And all this too, not relieved by a single original thought, a single generous impulse, or a single happy expression! Why, Hansard, instead of being the Delphi of Downing Street is but the Dunciad of politics.
Disraeli, speaking not of Gordon Brown, or Tony Blair, or even the prospect of David Cameron, but against the Maynooth Grant in 1845.
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