Conclusion

The 1922 General Election was in some senses the first ‘modern’ British election in which the majority of the adult population of the United Kingdom had the chance to democratically decide their parliamentary representation (constituency-based, first past the post) on a single day and in an event that felt national as opposed to narrowly local. The vast majority of those elected would come from the parties that would dominate British politics for the next century, with the Labour Party emerging as a potential party of government. The Conservative Party meanwhile would win its first general election since 1900 and would go on to dominate British politics during the mid to late twentieth century. It was part of what David Thackeray sees as a cultural transformation, by which the Conservative Party adapted itself to the changed, and changing, nature of early twentieth-century Britain.¹ The divided forces of British Liberalism were reduced to a disappointed third force, and the 1922 election underlined the fact that elections were an expensive business, with most candidates requiring financial support.² In a postwar age in which the aristocracy, and well-to-do supporters, were engaged in financial retrenchment the cost of doing business cast a long shadow over the forces of British Liberalism.

As much as it marked a beginning, the 1922 General Election also marked the beginning of the end of the politics of the pre-democratic age. The ramifications of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, and the wider repercussions of the First World War, had created a new electorate with a new set of concerns, calling for new approaches to politics and perhaps new political parties. Lloyd George firmly believed that anti-socialism versus socialism would be the new axis upon which British politics would turn and, in a sense, the Coalition Liberal Party was a milestone on the road to a new party in which Conservatism and Liberalism would be fused into a new progressive party. Lloyd George was obsessed with the threat from radical Labour, and initially took for granted the willingness of the rank and file of the Conservative Party to fall into line behind their party leadership and acquiesce in the emergence of a new party. Meanwhile, as Neal McCrillis has observed, the Conservative Party in its structures and culture was already well advanced in the process of adapting itself to the postwar age.³

Many Coalition Liberals and a good number of Conservatives genuinely believed in the idea of a progressive, anti-socialist alliance as a means to extend the patriotic co-operation that had secured victory in the First World War. That continuing spirit lay at the heart of the maintenance of local arrangements at the time of the 1922 General Election. Lloyd George’s adherents were not simply careerists clinging to Lloyd George’s coat tails and many Conservatives saw no good reason to overthrow good candidates in the aftermath of a war of shared national sacrifice, and pooled resources, for the sake of the national interest.

That the Coalition Liberals ultimately emerged from the 1922 election with over fifty members of parliament was a remarkable achievement, even if it did not hand Lloyd George the role of king-maker to the Bonar Law government. Whether the Coalition Liberals in 1922 would have done as well without the existence of local party pacts with the Conservative Party is open to question. Without those pacts the Coalition Liberal Party would have returned fewer members, but that was probably also true of the Conservative Party, and also true of the Asquith Liberals. As Michael Kinnear identified in the 1970s, in 1922 ‘over 200 Liberal and Conservative candidates ran under the aegis of two or more parties’ including ‘prefixless Liberals’, ‘Constitutionalists’, ‘Conservatives with Liberal support’ and ‘Liberals with Conservative support’.⁴ In the circumstances of 1922, and the strong possibilities of some form of renewed coalition, some of these labels and local arrangements were vital to preventing a wider Labour breakthrough, but they also amounted to a hedging of bets by some candidates. In 1922 many had no wish to alienate sections of the electorate that might be persuaded to vote for them, and they had no wish to potentially exclude themselves from a role in whatever government might emerge from the election. So widespread were the local arrangements, and so loose were the party labels, that it really is difficult to think, except in the very broadest terms, of the 1922 contest as constituting a truly general election, carried out by truly national parties with centrally directed campaigns. Resolving the political landscape from the confusing mass of local arrangements and flag of convenience labels for many candidates took time after the election as members of parliament declared their allegiances by accepting party whips.

To some extent historians have failed to resolve the complexities of the election and that has fed through into historical understandings of the election. As the author of one work commented: ‘The election results, devastating for the Liberals, speak for themselves. The Liberals, whether Asquithians or supporters of Lloyd George were reassured’.⁵ While the two statements sit seemingly in opposition to each other, they were also largely true. Scovell and others were pleased at the Coalition Liberal returns, but in the longer term the holding action of 1922 failed to deliver Lloyd George the balance of power, and appeared in retrospect to be a key milestone on the road to Liberal irrelevance.

A seemingly confused election has resulted in a somewhat confused historiography, but we can go beyond the surface of explanations that the 1922 General Election, and with it the cause of Coalition Liberalism, was ‘a curious affair’.⁶ We can see that Lloyd George was much more than ‘the ghost at the feast’ after the Carlton Club meeting.⁷ He was playing a high stakes game that he expected to win with the Coalition Liberal Party being part of his collateral. But so too was Bonar Law and his strategy included a greater number of options, including potentially a deal with the Asquithians. Ultimately Bonar Law played the game more effectively and his surprise victory robbed Lloyd George of the dramatic re-entrance at the head of his stage army under some new ‘arrangement between the parties’ that he so desperately craved. That surprise victory was testament to the vigour and strength of the Conservative Party beyond the parliamentary party, which meant that ultimately Conservatives considered that they no longer needed the man who won the war to win an election.

And what then of the Labour Party? While historians of the Conservative Party have emphasised the effectiveness of the Tory machine in the 1922 election victory, the strength of the Labour organisation under Arthur Henderson had been fully demonstrated during the campaign. Labour had run a tight, disciplined campaign in which candidates had been well supported at the local and national levels. Energised by the general election the Labour Party would continue to build its strength at the constituency level, and by the time of the party conference in 1923 only 6 of the 603 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales did not have a local constituency Labour Party organisation. Women also continued to rally to Labour’s cause with 120,000 women members of 1,031 women’s organisations allied to local parties across the United Kingdom.⁸ Meanwhile five full-time propagandists toured the country to rally support at the local level.⁹ Labour’s success in the 1923 general election campaign little more than one year later would allow Ramsay MacDonald to form a first Labour government.