Chapter 8 Trying to broker a deal with the Conservatives

If Younger was approached on the morning of 3 November in line with Churchill’s suggestion, then the most likely outcome was a polite refusal to enter into any sort of formal arrangement, combined with a reiteration that the party would continue to stand behind the agreed policy of honouring ‘local arrangements’ and discouraging local hostilities. On 2 November, the day before the meeting, with rumours circulating in London, Younger had given assurances of Conservative policy:

Seen at the Unionist Headquarters in Westminster, last night, Sir George Younger dismissed the newspapers’ assertions of his making a new attack on the National Liberals and Mr. Lloyd George retorting with a threat of open war at the polls. Sir George declared, ‘There is not a word of truth in it. There has not been the slightest approach to a conference between Mr. McCurdy and me, and I have received no sort of message or ultimatum whatever from Mr. Lloyd George’. Sir Malcolm Fraser, the Unionist Chief Agent, agreed that the stories in the London evening papers took Unionist Headquarters by surprise, and that they knew nothing whatever to substantiate them. It was indicated that the Unionist Party would, in any event, continue its present policy of allowing local Unionist Associations to make local agreements with National Liberals if they chose, or to select their own candidates if they preferred. National Liberal Headquarters, nevertheless, stuck to their story that, ‘there was a limited pact’.¹

In the face of anything more formal, Coalition Liberals were left to put forward one or two ‘new’ candidates while hinting that a far larger number of candidates was waiting in the wings if the challenges to sitting Coalition Liberal MPs intensified. The Times reported that a hidden army of Lloyd George Liberal candidates was being held in reserve:

It was declared last Monday that between one hundred and one hundred and fifty National Liberal candidates were being held in leash to let slip against Unionists if the Unionist attacks on Mr. Lloyd George’s supporters were not sensibly diminished. Only two of the shadowy band revealed their whereabouts yesterday. One turned up in Shropshire [with the backing of both the Lloyd George and Asquith Liberals] to oppose Lord Windsor in the Ludlow Division. A second at Twickenham, where Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the new Parliamentary Secretary of the Overseas Trade Department, is seeking re-election. A careful estimate of the possibilities last night suggested that the hundred and fifty reserves would to-day dwindle to a skeleton force of eight or ten at most.²

The prospect of a wider war between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals sent ripples down to constituency level across the country prompting associations to re-examine their local arrangements. In Yorkshire, the Sheffield Telegraph openly inquired whether, in the event of all-out war between National Liberals and Conservatives, ‘Sheffield Liberals [would] … abide by their local understanding with local Unionists’.³

In an effort to quell such difficult questions in a speech in London on 4 November, with Lloyd George appearing with two Conservative ex-Ministers, the ex-premier went to great pains to emphasise, seemingly to Coalition Liberal Associations, but perhaps with one eye on the Conservatives: ‘Where there is a pact between parties, abide by it honourably’.⁴ Lloyd George’s speech, after the rebuff from Younger, appears to have been an attempt to shore up the uneasy truce between the parties (by implication an appeal to play fair) in the run-up to the closing of nominations.