With his party in a predicament from which even some new Disraeli might be hard put to extricate it, he has so much going against him. For a start, the connection with Wales, which English voters tend to distrust. Though not born in Wales, he made his name as its secretary of state and compounded that by marrying into it. He also went bald early in life, a setback for those who aspire to govern the country. Even worse, he seems to come from a family that is impeccably well behaved.
Political leaders seem especially afflicted with relatives who keep getting into scrapes.
Before that, there was John Major's perpetually embarrassing brother Terry. Margaret Thatcher had Mark, the son whom everyone except she and husband Denis thought had been horribly spoiled, who famously distressed her by getting lost in the desert, and whose business interests sometimes looked murky. There was also, though less disturbingly, Denis, whose rightwing tendencies sometimes broke out when they shouldn't have. I once saw him on the platform at a Conservative party conference flapping his hands together with huge enthusiasm for someone defending a ferociously rightwing cause - which the rest of the platform was pretending not to support. Harold Macmillan had a wife who conducted a long affair with a louche Tory backbencher of dubious sexual proclivities, though in those buttoned-up days it never got into the press.