Chapter 9 Exchanges between the parties after 4 November

The threat of full scale hostilities between the parties does appear to have had some impact on the behaviour of Conservative associations. Further challenges to sitting Coalition Liberals did not materialise and Lloyd George’s phantom army was not deployed. Indeed, in Twickenham the Coalition Liberal threat to oppose William Joynson-Hicks evaporated as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared. In the aftermath of the close of nominations the newspapers and party leaderships attempted to make sense of where the parties stood in respect of each other and the likely outcome of the election. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph expressed satisfaction that Lloyd George had not jeopardised ‘local arrangements’ by ‘producing his strategic reserve of candidates’.¹ Indeed, Lloyd George followed the close of nominations at Newcastle on 7 November when he said that he was ready to support any government wrestling with the problems of the peace. By this he clearly meant the Conservatives, as he went on to argue that his intention in securing the election of as many Liberals as possible was to save the government from ‘Die-Hard extremists’.²

The truce, however, had not been maintained entirely. On 8 November the Derby Daily Telegraph revealed that Marshall Freeman (nominated in Ilkeston against the incumbent Coalition Liberal, General J. E. B. Seely) had received a letter of support from Bonar Law.³ Matching Freeman’s eleventh-hour candidature in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, was that of Henry Lorimer in South Derbyshire. The seat had been captured by Coalition Liberal Henry Gregory in 1918 with the benefit of the coupon but he was not standing again in 1922. His Labour opponent in 1918, Samuel Truman, was ready to stand again and the Coalition Liberals had decided to put forward a relatively unknown candidate, Goronwy Owen. That Owen had little to no connection to South Derbyshire, and was closely associated with Lloyd George’s coterie of Welsh Coalition Liberals, alienated him from local supporters of Asquithian Liberalism, and persuaded local Conservatives to put forward their own candidate. Overall, the truce between the Conservatives and the Coalition Liberals had held, but in some circumstances local antagonisms were too strong to contain and Conservative Central Office felt that it had no choice but to support candidates legitimately put forward by local associations.