One day during the summer of 1825, Foreign Secretary George Canning received an anonymous letter that he read carefully and filed among his official correspondence, despite its unclear origin. The letter, which was to influence the lives of many people as well as the outcome of several projects, warned the Secretary about the formation of a dissident faction within the Tory party which aimed at toppling him from his position in government. The group, led by the Duke of York and the Marquis of Hertford, had decided to channel their attack through a newspaper, which would be organised in London by publisher John Murray II. One of the editors of that newspaper, apart from other well-known journalists, was barrister John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott.

The letter mentioned the names of several influential politicians who were, or would be involved in the plan, as well as leading businessmen and journalists. Yet, in the course of the events about to be narrated, these men gradually began to defect from the group, with the exception of the newspaper's publisher, John Murray II, who was left with the financial losses of the enterprise and a blow to his prestige as publisher. Yet the hardest blow was received by a then twenty-year-old young man who had not even been considered in the initial cabal or named in the denouncing letter. At first he had acted as an errand boy in the setting-up of the newspaper, but later he took over the whole enterprise, partly in reality, and partly inside his imagination. Benjamin Disraeli made his contemporaries believe that the whole enterprise had been his idea and was later blamed for the failure of this journalistic venture. To the end of his life, he denied having had any part in it.

This is the story of the Representative newspaper, a publication that was intended to have been one of the first in the country, but was doomed before it was launched due to powerful forces that worked against it from the start, mainly political and financial, but also, and more importantly, forces associated with common human failings such as egotism and disloyalty. These forces were so strong that the newspaper itself became secondary to its own story.