THE THIRD IS THE ONLY WAY:

There is an old story -- which might or might not be true, it doesn't really matter - about a woman who met both Gladstone and Disraeli, the great statesmen of the Victorian age. "Gladstone made me feel that he was the cleverest person in the world," she said afterwards. And Dizzy? "Ah," she sighed. "He made me feel as if I were the cleverest person in the world."

If the Labour party is really serious about winning a general election -- or even recovering a few council seats here and there -- then it needs to discover its inner Disraeli. 

A bust of Gladstone is looking down at me as I write this, and he's terrifying. He's only about ten inches tall, but that's enough to radiate the full force of his high-minded moral disapproval. Oh, that hooked nose, that severe brow and those hawkish eyes. You can see exactly what Queen Victoria meant when she complained of him: "He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting". 

Does that hectoring self-righteous tone sound familiar? That feeling that everything is terrible in this country, and it's all our fault? It might have worked in the Victorian age, but it's beginning to appear that it cuts no ice with the modern voter. 

Disraeli and Johnson share a gift for suggesting that everything is going to be all right

Disraeli's approach to the Queen was quite different. He wrote her gossipy letters, he flirted, he made her Empress of India, and referred to her as his "Fairie Queen". Delighted, she sent him bunches of primroses in return. 

The historian David Starkey once compared Boris Johnson to Disraeli, and never has the comparison seemed more apt. The prime minister went up to Hartlepool during the recent by-election campaign and radiated optimism, good cheer, and the message that life will get better. Just like the royal flattery of Disraeli, another slightly exotic outsider who greatly divided opinion, he laid it on with a trowel. 

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