Chapter 1 The party political outlook in October 1918

If Lloyd George’s actions following the Carlton Club meeting and the apparent lack of direction and clarity in his public pronouncements during the last ten days of October smacked of indecision then it was scarcely surprising. The passing of the coalition might have been unlamented, but in political terms it had at least been a well-established feature of the political landscape and few could predict what would replace it. Since the turn of the century British politics had appeared to be in a state of flux. The Conservative Party had experienced a stunning defeat in the 1906 General Election, losing 246 seats in a landslide in favour of the Liberal Party under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, which had won 397 seats, allowing it to form a government. The new Liberal government had embraced radical reform that antagonised the Conservative Party, creating serious political divisions over issues such as the demands of Irish nationalists for independence or at least home rule. The January 1910 General Election had resulted in a hung parliament as did the election in December 1910. The political deadlock had continued until the outbreak of war in 1914 which had, at least for the moment, restored a sense of national unity as the Liberals and Conservatives supported the war effort. The outbreak of war had also damaged the Labour Party, founded in 1900. It had grown out of a number of socialist parties and the trades union movement to return forty-two MPs in January 1910 and forty in December 1910. In 1914 the Labour Party was split between pacifists and those willing to support the war, and that raised questions about what would happen to the party in the long term.

In May 1915 unease at the lack of success on the battlefield forced Liberal prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith to re-organise his cabinet, admitting a number of leading Conservatives as ministers to form a coalition government. That arrangement had broken down in December 1916 as the Conservatives had conspired with David Lloyd George, the Liberal Secretary of State for War, to wrest significant power out of the hands of Asquith, who was seen as failing to prosecute the war, and the business of government, effectively. Rather than become a largely figurehead prime minister, Asquith had preferred to resign, leaving Lloyd George as prime minister, backed by Conservatives and a significant number of Liberal MPs. The coalition which Lloyd George oversaw had prosecuted the war to a conclusion but with the collapse of the German armies in late 1918 many wondered what might happen in terms of Britain’s political future.

Both Labour and the rump of the Liberals, still under Asquith, appeared weak. The Conservatives appeared united, but had no wish to dispense with the services of Lloyd George, popularly referred to as the man who had won the war. He was too much of a vote winner. Lloyd George and his Liberal adherents had no wish to rejoin the Asquithian Liberals and Labour was yet another small party. Thus, a deal to extend the coalition into the peace had been rapidly hatched between the Lloyd George Liberals and the Conservatives. This had involved a letter of recognition (referred to as the coupon) being given to sitting MPs, whether Liberal or Conservative, who backed the continuation of the coalition into the peace.¹ Lloyd George’s Liberal supporters had campaigned for sitting Conservatives and vice versa depending on the party affiliation of the sitting MP. It was a remarkable success and instead of a hung parliament the coalition of Conservatives and Lloyd George Liberals had won by a landslide with a mandate to address the problems of the peace. The election also marked a changing of the guard in political terms as the new parliament contained a large number of people without previous Westminster experience.² The end of the coalition in October 1922 re-opened the lingering questions about the future of the parties in the British political system. Were the Conservatives capable of gaining a majority in their own right? What might Lloyd George and his adherents do: seek re-unification with the rest of the Liberal Party under Asquith (reduced to just thirty-six MPs in 1918), join Labour (fifty-seven MPs in 1918), or try to form some kind of new party? Equally, what might Asquith attempt to do, and was the Labour Party capable of capitalising on the social and economic problems of postwar Britain to effect some form of political breakthrough, to match its progress in local elections since the end of the war? The questions were numerous, significant and far reaching. With Liberalism divided, the Conservatives unsure of themselves and split by the outcome of the Carlton Club meeting, and with Labour fighting to break through, the outcome of the 1922 General Election was a political roll of the dice, the outcome of which was anyone’s guess.

There were other complicating factors that meant that the outcome of the election was unpredictable, which only added to the difficulties of strategy-makers within the parties. As Frank Owen commented, the outcome of the Carlton Club meeting meant that the coast was clear for a return to party politics but ‘the coast was oddly be-fogged, and the course for any ship uncertain’.³ In 1918 the electoral map had been redrawn (the largest exercise of its kind since 1885 to take account of the rapid growth in population of many areas). It was widely assumed that the redistribution would benefit the Conservatives, but the nature of the Coupon Election of 1918 meant that the impact of the new political landscape of the United Kingdom was still largely a matter of guesswork.

Within the constituencies the changing social and economic base of British politics with the rise of new voters, the postwar slump and decline of stable industries heightened the uncertainties while apparently increasing the opportunities for the left. The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote not just to most women over thirty, but also brought in large numbers of new male voters as it enshrined the principle of universal male suffrage for those over twenty-one, and gave the vote to men aged nineteen and above who had fought in the war. The new provisions meant that the electorate had almost tripled between December 1910 and 1918 from 7,709,981 to 21,392,322. However, in 1918 many of them hadn’t been able to vote as a result of problems with voter registration and the fact that many soldiers were still away serving overseas. Turnout was just 57.2 per cent. Just how this new electorate would vote was deeply uncertain.

With a strong Labour showing in local elections, and in by-elections after 1918, it appeared unlikely that either the Conservatives or the Liberals would be in a position to make the kind of gains to give them a majority in late 1922 which meant that renewed coalition or co-operation in some form was the most likely outcome of the election. Stopping socialism, rather than progressing Liberalism or Conservatism, was the imperative for many on the centre and right of British politics in 1920–22. Following the Carlton Club meeting, most pundits regarded a hung parliament as a racing certainty for the outcome of the 1922 General Election. As the London Correspondent of the Gloucester Citizen commented:

Predictions of the future development of parties are obviously of little use until the General Election is over, and there never has been an election at which there was so great a difficulty in estimating the probable result. That any party will have a clear majority over all other parties I do not think anybody believes.⁴

It is unsurprising that most historians have concluded, like Kinnear, that: ‘In 1922 most politicians regarded coalition as a natural mode of governing and they did not change their minds when the Carlton Club Meeting overthrew Lloyd George … [;] far from damaging the long-term prospects for coalition, the meeting actually made such prospects more likely’.⁵ In October 1922 many politicians on the centre right were convinced that with the divisions in the Conservative and Liberal Parties only some new ‘arrangement’ could save the country from the prospect of a Labour government. Philip Kerr, who had served as Private Secretary to Lloyd George from 1916 to 1921 expressed the worry of many when he wrote to his mother: ‘I suppose Labour will come back with a majority, unless some new coalition, or some electoral agreement is reached’.⁶

If there was a reluctant acceptance amongst the politicians that a ‘new coalition’ or ‘electoral agreement’ might be necessary to prevent a Labour government then that, in the midst of an election campaign, was a difficult proposition to potentially sell to the electorate. It was an even harder task to get Conservative Party activists to accept it, especially in those constituencies where socialism was not considered an immediate threat. Many Conservative Associations, antagonised by Lloyd George’s ‘antics’ and a perception that they were propping up the Coalition Liberals at the national level, had grown increasingly restive during the coalition. At a meeting of Conservative ministers on 26 July 1922 attended by both the party chairman and the chief whip it was reported that:

the Central Office was being placed in very grave difficulty owing to the growing feeling of antagonism to the Coalition, as at present constituted, in the constituencies; and more especially, to the determination in many places, where Coalition Liberals sit, to put up Unionist candidates in opposition to these gentlemen at the next Election.⁷

The phrase ‘as at present constituted’ was tacit acceptance that while the premiership of David Lloyd George was increasingly toxic, the door to continued coalition, under some other leader, was certainly not closed. The practical outcome of this meeting was to be significant in the circumstances of the 1922 General Election. While it was agreed that Central Office could not fail to aid prospective parliamentary candidates properly selected by the Associations: ‘they would continue to discourage contests in seats held by Coalitionists, so long as the Coalition lasted, and that official recognition would not be given to any candidate adopted under such circumstances’.⁸

After the Carlton Club meeting, however, how could a leadership dismissed as a ‘Second XI’ by former coalitionist Conservatives galvanise a divided party to fight a general election when the likely outcome was either a Labour government or a return to hated coalition. The former was unthinkable and the latter was the kind of practical political outcome which those who had brought down the coalition could scarcely discuss, let alone advocate publicly. The nuance in public debate about the future of the coalition had disappeared in September and October 1922. ‘Coalition’ in the approach to the 1922 General Election was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.⁹ The party leadership could, however, stand by existing local arrangements and the decision of Conservative ministers ‘to discourage contests in seats held by Coalitionists’ and to refuse recognition and aid to any ‘Conservative’ candidate not properly selected in the usual way by their local association. Interestingly, the snap nature of the 1922 contest meant that there was very little time for such properly selected candidates to properly emerge. Perhaps this provides some explanation for the rush to the polls in unseemly haste after the Carlton Club meeting?

Most historians of the period have taken it for granted that Bonar Law, the man whose intervention at the Carlton Club meeting was pivotal in bringing down the coalition, was opposed to the very principal of coalition, but this overlooks some contemporary evidence that suggests that he may have not regarded coalition as a wholly dead possibility.¹⁰ For one thing, Bonar Law had been the man in 1918 who had helped to broker the continuation of the wartime coalition into the peace. Maynard Colchester Weymss, stalwart of the Forest of Dean Conservative Association, noted on 24 October on the impending election and Bonar Law’s assumption of the premiership: ‘He is an out and out Conservative, but how far he is still a Coalitionist is impossible yet to say; I doubt whether he knows himself, at any rate in a speech he made yesterday to his constituents in Glasgow he said words to the effect that at present no one including himself, knew exactly where they are’.¹¹ The observation is noteworthy even if it can be partly offset by the fact that with the Forest of Dean held by Labour since 1918, Weymss was hoping for a united front between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals to get Labour out.¹² Whatever the local influences on the observation of Weymss as to Bonar Law’s attitudes towards coalition, the same question mark must have been in the minds of other Conservatives as they surveyed the political landscapes just after the fall of the coalition. Those suspicions would have been further fuelled in 1922 when the Bonar Law of pre-war days (renowned for the savagery and force of his rhetoric against the Liberals)¹³ seemed almost meek in his references to Lloyd George, even if allowances could be made for advancing age, illness and the impact of the loss of his wife in 1909 and two sons during the First World War.

In their calculations about the election the Conservatives also had to consider the potential difficulties which would arise if there was some new realignment on the centre-left of British politics that might see the emergence of a credible potential opposition to Conservative rule. Lloyd George might abhor socialism but Conservatives could not entirely rule out the possibility that the man who had overseen the people’s budget in 1909–10, and for whom power held a magical attraction, might not make some arrangement with Labour and other ‘progressive’ elements against ‘the forces of reaction’. Veteran Conservative Maynard Weymss in Gloucestershire expressed his concerns on 24 October about the dangers of Lloyd George forming a new party on the left of British politics: ‘he would be a most powerful opponent if he decided to raise a Party in Opposition to Bonar Law … I most earnestly hope for the sake of the country, & for his own sake that he will not do this’.¹⁴ The worry was undoubtedly underpinned by an outpouring of loathing for Lloyd George from many Asquithian Liberals. Public vilification of Lloyd George by the Asquithians suggested that a deal with Labour might be an easier proposition than the task of Liberal re-unification. As Liberal Grandee Lord Crewe commented in a speech soon after the break-up of the coalition, it was not ‘possible to reunite with Mr Lloyd George and members of his late Government merely on the basis of a few Liberal phrases and some abuse on the part of the Carlton Club’.¹⁵

It was also difficult for many politicians to think in ways which were overtly along party-political lines. Many of those elected in 1918 were new MPs without a grounding in the pre-war adversarial politics of home rule for Ireland and the People’s Budget. Conservatives and Coalition Liberals came from the same social strata. Many were friends as well as political allies: their diaries and letters detail the kind of social engagements and friendships that underpinned the politics of coalition. During the war the rhetoric of party had given way to the rhetoric of ‘the national interest’, ‘England’, ‘for Britain’ and ‘the nation’. The coalition had survived for four years despite considerable grumbling and unhappiness because it was perceived as still being ‘in the national interest’. Its opponents had only succeeded in breaking the bulk of the Unionist Party away from the coalition when foreign policy blunders had led to a renewed danger of war with Turkey. That possible war, and the foreign policy that went with it, were personally associated with Lloyd George. A Turkish war was perceived to be wholly against the public interest, although potentially very much in the favour of those who wished to maintain the coalition: a political trick to use the danger of war to reinforce the position of the prime minister over his colleagues and the parties. Given the legacies of 1914–18 this was unforgiveable. Lloyd George’s willingness to risk war, in the interest of solidifying the coalition, was what had finally broken the parties apart.

This process by which the majority of the parliamentary Conservative Party distanced itself from the coalition and then finally broke with it does, however, require more detail and nuance than is common in most analyses where ‘Lloyd George’, ‘the coalition’ and ‘the Coalition Liberals’ are used as semi-interchangeable terms. The principal problem for most Conservatives, and Conservative MPs in particular, was Lloyd George. The Welsh wizard became their bête noire, obsessing and possessing party members in equal measure. In the spring and summer of 1922 many Conservative MPs were willing to continue with the coalition so long as it was under a Conservative prime minister.¹⁶ Indeed, Lloyd George recognised the fact when in February 1922 he offered to step down as prime minister: a politically astute move which Chamberlain’s sense of morality and loyalty would not allow him to accept. That offer, and the idea that Lloyd George might step down after a general election, effectively remained on the table during the last months of the coalition. This was evident on 26 July 1922, in a meeting between Chamberlain and senior Conservative ministers. A memorandum drawn up following the meeting noted that Leslie Wilson (chief whip) and George Younger (chair of the party):

took exactly the same view as to the necessity for terminating the present Coalition at the end of this Parliament, and if possible, making an arrangement which would maintain the continuance of the rapprochement between the rank and file, between the Unionist and Co-Liberal Parties; and that they both believed the Unionist Party would be consolidated if a Leader of that political complexion were at the head of the Government. If they were assured that the attitude of the Prime Minister to a change was a benevolent one, it was obviously their opinion that such an offer ought not to be disregarded, and that it offered a solution of the present difficulties which, in their view, was the only one which would reasonably ensure a joint victory when an appeal is next made to the constituencies.¹⁷

This sense that the coalition should continue but that Lloyd George needed to be eased out maintained the uneasy relationship between the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals during the Summer and Autumn of 1922, and it was only the sense that Lloyd George might not be prepared to step aside and that he would use his influence over senior Conservatives like Chamberlain, and even run the risk of war to engineer a khaki Coupon Election, that finally brought down the government.

As late as 6 October Lord Derby, the Grandee of Lancashire Conservatism, could be found talking to Leslie Wilson, the chief whip, to advise him that the coalition could not be maintained without splitting the party, but that a good working relationship with the Coalition Liberals was essential if they were not to let in Labour at the next general election.¹⁸ The electoral reliance in any general election of the Conservative Party on the Coalition Liberals was highlighted four days later in a meeting of senior Conservatives in the dining room of No.11 Downing Street.¹⁹ Polling by the party indicated that in an election Labour would gain 200–250 seats, the Asquithians 50, the Lloyd George Liberals 50, with the rest being Conservative in a house of 615 members. The October prediction provides an interesting comparison with that which had been suggested in December by Sir Malcolm Fraser, the Principal Agent of the Conservative Party, who had suggested that an election in early 1922 would likely have returned 306 Conservative MPs and 96 Coalition Liberal MPs.²⁰ The figures suggested that the electoral stock of the Coalition Liberals was falling fast, and that the outcome of any election was on a knife edge with a coalition (Con-Lib or Lab-Lib) the most likely outcome. Chamberlain was convinced that ‘no Government after the election could be formed without some sort of Coalition’.²¹ Chamberlain was convinced of the necessity of remaining on good terms with the Coalition Liberals. The possibility that Lloyd George might be invited to retire was raised (probably by Younger and Wilson) but both Chamberlain and Balfour could not, in the name of honour, consider such a move. This prompted discussion of a second set of party figures which suggested that if the Conservatives went into an election on their own Labour would be secure around 150 seats, the Coalition Liberals 50 and the Asquithian Liberals around 70. This would leave the way clear to a small but workable Conservative majority. Chamberlain, Robert Horne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, each took strong exception to the figures. The split within the upper echelons of Conservative leadership, never mind within the wider party, was evident.

Chamberlain was dismayed at the division within the party and the prospect of having to tell Lloyd George to retire. The chief whip, Leslie Wilson, was similarly perturbed by the unwillingness of key members of the party hierarchy to dispense with Lloyd George’s services. He was not the only one. Party chairman George Younger was deeply troubled at what he considered to be the loyalty, bordering on fanaticism, on the part of some Conservatives.²² It was this sense that Lloyd George held sway over senior Conservatives to the detriment of the party that really animated Younger. As Michael Kinnear has noted, Younger was a man of Conservative principles rather than a fixed platform and his one abiding goal was ‘party survival’.²³ Thus on 11 October Younger, Wilson and Sir Malcolm Fraser, Principal Agent of the Party (all of whom had been at the meeting with Chamberlain on the day before) went to see Bonar Law the ex-leader of the party in a ‘private capacity’.²⁴ Their purpose was to sound out Bonar Law about the dangers facing the party and to encourage him to come forward as an alternative leader if Chamberlain refused to see sense.

With a crunch fast approaching, in the form of the meeting at the Carlton Club, Wilson on the 12 October found Chamberlain dejected but committed to a course of standing by Lloyd George.²⁵ Four days later he met him again to report that they were ‘receiving numberless resolutions from Constituency Associations, Provincial Divisions, Clubs, and other Conservative bodies’ against the continuation of the coalition.²⁶ Officials were resigning from the party, members cancelling their subscriptions and 184 Conservative MPs looked likely to stand as independent Conservatives at the next election if the coalition was maintained. For Wilson the party was on the verge of breaking up and he made this plain to Chamberlain. Wilson advised Chamberlain to end the coalition and:

go to the country much on the lines of the Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists, that if we came back with a majority, a Government should be formed under a Conservative Prime Minister with such Coalition-Liberal Ministers as would serve under him. It appeared to be fully agreed all round that it was undesirable to alienate the Coalition-Liberal sympathisers and supporters generally, if this were possible.²⁷

When the break came at the Carlton Club it was with Lloyd George, and the Conservatives under his sway, that the Conservative backbenchers broke with, rather than the idea of working with the Liberal Coalitionists. By the late summer of 1922 a majority of Conservative backbenchers considered that Lloyd George was bad for the country, but also bad for their party with his malign influence over the party leadership. The sense of desperation with the leadership eroded loyalties to Chamberlain in the midst of the Anglo-Turkish crisis. As William Bridgeman, Conservative MP and Minister for Mines, wrote to his mother a few days before the Carlton Club meeting, Chamberlain ‘seems infatuated with Ll. G. and an unselfish desire to sacrifice himself (and us) to his devotion’.²⁸ The issue with the coalition was the issue of Lloyd George rather than coalition with the Liberals per se. In their complaints against the government Conservative politicians tended to be very specific in their concerns. As Bridgeman explained to his mother: ‘We cannot go to an election as Members of a government asking for another term of office under L.G. It is his foreign policy which upsets me’.²⁹ Lloyd George had to go at all costs.

However, this did not prevent a sense of ‘the national interest’ colouring the rhetoric and thought of many within the Conservative Party even amongst its veterans. While the danger of war might trump all other considerations in terms of attitudes towards the Lloyd George coalition, in domestic policy the danger of Labour and the need to shut out the socialists was the very embodiment of the national interest for both Conservatives and many Liberals. This sentiment, with the implication that Conservatives and Lloyd George Liberals should continue to work together in the national interest, found considerable expression at the Carlton Club meeting and it was to do so thereafter.

Support for the idea of continued coalition, in some form or other, continued to be openly expressed in Conservative ranks after the meeting at the Carlton Club threw out Lloyd George along with the coalition, and this has rather been overshadowed by the actions of the diehards in the consensus narrative on the history of the Conservative Party. The diehard wing of the party with Lord Salisbury at its heart was energetic and open in their efforts to bring down the coalition in October 1922. On 17 October Salisbury held a meeting for over one hundred Conservative parliamentarians at 21 Arlington Street that had been fully reported in the press, in particular Lord Salisbury’s denunciation of Lloyd George as a man whose ‘convictions were not Conservative’, who had not ‘the same respect for tradition and [who] did not understand the immense importance which they attributed to the maintenance of law and order and the reasonable administration of finance, with regard to the due capacity of the country’.³⁰

It was not surprising that in the aftermath of the Carlton Club meeting there were some like Hugh Cecil, Salisbury’s brother and veteran Conservative Member for Oxford University, who saw the overthrow of Lloyd George as ‘cast[ing] out Satan’, with their sole aim afterwards of securing a Unionist majority, but there were many others who were only too happy to continue working with Lloyd George Liberals.³¹ Robert Blake, pointing to the very strong support at the Carlton Club meeting for continued coalition, questioned in the 1970s:

The real problem is not why 185 members voted against the coalition on October 19, 1922 … but why the minority of 88 voted for it. Historians have not looked closely at this side of the question. What, in other words, was the motive force behind the Conservative coalitionists?³²

Undoubtedly, Lord Blake is correct in his assumption that it was the desire to stop socialism, which for some Conservative members trumped narrow party interests. That significant minority played a now overlooked role the day before the Carlton Club meeting, in trying to push the idea that the party should remain in the coalition, that an immediate general election be called, and that then, when the electoral map of postwar Britain was clearer, the party could vote on whether or not to continue the coalition.³³ For many within Conservative ranks an election in late 1922 just might hand the country over to the Bolshevists. This was the principal theme in defence of ‘honest co-operation’ underlying the pro-coalition voices at the Carlton Club meeting including Austen Chamberlain, as party leader, and Arthur Balfour, as respected elder statesman and former prime minister.³⁴ The strength of pro-coalition feeling within the Conservative Party in the lead up to the rupture of the coalition must have been duly noted by Lloyd George and others within Coalition Liberal ranks.

If they did not notice the strength of continued support for the coalition within Conservative ranks before the Carlton Club meeting then it was certainly much in evidence after it. That support, combined with the split in Conservative ranks caused some Conservatives who had been supportive of Lloyd George to be careful in their pronouncements. Some dissident Coalition Conservatives, meanwhile, were courted by fellow Conservatives and members of their associations. For example, Sir William Bull (MP for Hammersmith South), received a letter from a fellow Conservative asking him to support Bonar Law and reassuring him that the prime minister was very eager to include in any future administration those Conservatives who had voted in favour of the continuance of the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting.³⁵ Scottish Conservative, John Gilmour (Glasgow Pollok),was similarly courted by Bonar Law with the offer of the post of Secretary of State for Scotland.³⁶ Gilmour, however, was not about to let ambition get in the way of his principles. He wrote to his constituency chairman that he was not prepared to accept office if that meant having to accept an end to all possibility of co-operation with the Coalition Liberals and their leader.³⁷

Expressions of support within the party for the principle of coalition were often combined with public endorsements of Bonar Law that amounted to a declaration of loyalty to the leadership and a marker in favour of continued co-operation: both principle and practical politics carefully combined to leave the options open for members defending their seats and their political futures. In some cases, the declarations of support in favour of continued co-operation were clear and unequivocal. Sir Leslie Scott, Conservative MP for Liverpool Exchange, issued an election manifesto, with the encouragement of F. E. Smith, the pro-Lloyd George former Conservative Lord Chancellor, that pulled no punches:

Resignation

You returned me last March as a Conservative [as he faced a by-election on his appointment as Solicitor General] and a supporter of the alliance between moderate men of the Conservative and Liberal Parties. At a meeting of Conservative Ministers and Members of Parliament a resolution was carried in favour of separation. I could not in conscience retain my office and suddenly abandon those who have worked with us so long. I resigned my office.

A Conservative

But I am not less a Conservative. Having resigned my office, I can in conscience accept the decision of the party; and I am prepared to support Mr. Bonar Law in the belief that his Government will tackle the problems of the day in a moderate and reasonable spirit, and with a firm hand. I want to see the Conservative Party pull together. But when a Liberal agrees with me in principle I decline to treat him as an enemy.³⁸

Supporters of the coalition within Conservative ranks co-operated with each to encourage support for the continuation of a close working relationship with the Lloyd George Liberals, and to voice that support in a variety of open and coded forms. For example, Robert Horne, coalition dissident and former chancellor of the exchequer, prepared an appeal to the electorate (which was scrutinised by a number of fellow dissidents in draft form). In the draft he carefully set out that while he remained convinced of the significance of working with Lloyd George in the interests of anti-socialism, if the outcome of the general election was a Conservative government then he would be only too happy to support Bonar Law.³⁹ Within the Conservative Party the Coalitionists were the object of some suspicion and derision, with Horne finding himself the target of a poem deriding him for being a ‘diehard’ Conservative supporter of the coalition.⁴⁰

Other, less high-profile Conservative sympathisers with the old coalition, expressed their views in more coded forms. For example, Sir Harry Hope, veteran Scottish Conservative MP explained to his Constituency Association at Stirling on 21 October:

The Unionist Party had always looked at the welfare of the State before that of party … During the war the Unionist Party did all that it could in the national interest: it acted in no party spirit … The Unionist party had not in front of them a party policy. Their task at the present time – and their leaders had realised it – was not to work for their party but to work for the country’s good, and with those many problems still unsolved he was perfectly sure that Unionists would welcome the support of moderate opinion, so that they could walk steadily forward, solving problems as they came before them.⁴¹

This was followed by Lord Derby at Manchester making his appeal to Lancashire Conservatives not to engage in fratricidal strife with the Lloyd George Liberals. He said: ‘Although Conservatives and Coalition Liberals did not go along the same roads they should march along parallel roads. There should be co-operation, but not coalition. Unionists recognised all that Mr Lloyd George had done and were determined to give him fair play’.⁴² Throughout the party, and all the way to polling day, there were repeated expressions of support for coalitionism.

Even in safe Conservative seats further south, well away from the urban and industrial centres in Scotland, the north and South Wales, where the Labour Party was pressing the established parties hard, candidates could be found making warm noises about Mr Lloyd George and the possibility of continuing good working relationships. In Taunton on 21 October, Sir Arthur Griffith Boscawen, Minister for Agriculture under Lloyd George, but supporter of Bonar Law at the Carlton Club meeting, was happy to suggest: ‘The Coalition was necessary during the war and the years which immediately followed, and he still hoped for co-operation with the Coalition Liberals with whom on most questions there was no quarrel’.⁴³ To the east, as far afield as Kent, public expressions of support for the coalition were evident. Moore-Brabazon (Chatham) and Hohler (Gillingham) both spoke warmly about the coalition during the campaign, with Hohler stating that he still favoured its continuation.⁴⁴ While Moore-Brabazon probably had an eye on drawing to him Coalition Liberal votes in order to defeat a strong Asquithian Liberal challenger, Hohler was under no such pressure. For electoral advantage, or as expressions of genuine sympathy for the idea of continued coalition, there was no mistaking that ‘coalitionism’ remained important in the thinking of many Conservative hopefuls in 1922.

If the party leaders thought that some new arrangement was the most likely outcome of the election, with the tide of die-hardism perhaps turned back by some Labour gains, then best not to make ‘honest co-operation’ after the election more difficult through a heated campaign. Perhaps best to avoid clear political separation between the platforms of both parties, and to maintain in many constituencies the harmonious relationships between Conservatives and Lloyd George Liberals. Diehard Tories in the south of England might have little to fear from Labour, but in the Midlands, industrial north and Scotland it was a different picture. Keeping Labour out of the townhalls had become an imperative and one that ‘die-hardism’ elsewhere in the party and on the Conservative backbenches at Westminster imperilled. The situation invited local constituency associations to take rather a dim view of the shenanigans of MPs at the Carlton Club meeting, even though Bonar Law remained a figure of great respect.

Bonar Law in turn must have been only too aware of the feelings amongst some parts of the Tory grassroots, aware of the need not to split the anti-socialist vote, and to leave open the door to future co-operation, especially with Lloyd George privately talking up the chances of a sizeable number of Coalition Liberals being returned at the election.⁴⁵ As the Hull Daily Mail commented on Bonar Law’s re-emergence as leader of the Conservative Party: ‘There’s a strong strain of bold obstinacy in the new Premier-elect of Scottish-Canadian composition, and the main consideration with everybody now is the solidarity of the Unionist Party’.⁴⁶ With the party already divided at Westminster between those who had supported the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting, and those, like Samuel Hoare, who were against further co-operation at almost any price, the last thing Bonar Law wanted was to have the divisions extend down to constituency level, between diehards and those prepared to work with others in the interests of shutting out Labour in the forthcoming election. In terms of framing policy for the forthcoming election, Bonar Law’s task, in trying not to exacerbate divisions, solidify the party/electoral base and leave open the door to post-poll co-operation, was horrendously difficult. A certain constructive ambiguity, of devolving issues to the level of individual associations, and of continuing to rely on already agreed ‘local arrangements’, as well as having a campaign of very short duration offered the best possible way forward in such confused circumstances.

Bonar Law’s task had been eased considerably on 20 October, the day before Lloyd George’s Leeds speech, by the conclusions of the group of senior Conservatives that he had entrusted, in the aftermath of the Carlton Club meeting, with the task of framing a platform for the election. The group consisting of Curzon, Derby, Amery, Lord Cave and Douglas Hogg, argued that the election should be fought almost exclusively on the grounds of a change of government with a fresh approach and fresh leadership.⁴⁷ Conveniently, and perhaps not unexpectedly, tariff reform as a traditional, if divisive, Conservative policy was to be left off the agenda, at least for now.

It was, perhaps, almost a relief to Bonar Law that the Scottish Conservatives, and then the Lancashire Conservatives, came forward to press for the continuation of local arrangements of co-operation with the Lloyd George Liberals. Responsiveness to the local grassroots (with Lancashire a bastion of ‘Free Trade’ sentiment and Scottish Conservatives fearful of radical socialism)⁴⁸ was a useful position to hold in terms of the politics of a divided party, useful in terms of trying to shut out Labour, and useful in terms of potentially maximising the number of Conservative MPs returned at the election. The Conservatives had been the dominant block in the coalition at Westminster, and they would have most to lose from three- or four-way fights involving Liberals (Asquith and Lloyd George) and Labour. It was also useful in terms of fighting the local elections and in building some potential bridges for future co-operation with the Lloyd George Liberals. There would be those, however, who tried to rock the boat of co-ordination and try to trigger significantly greater levels of exchange between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals.

For example, in Scotland the Sunday Post on 22 October attacked MPs of all parties for failing to deliver the economies promised in 1918. It called on electors to challenge associations if they tried to put forward for re-election those MPs who had failed to ease the financial burden on the nation and on the taxpayer: ‘If the bulk of the present MPs are welcomed by the Associations, then it is the bounden duty of the electors to set up rival candidates in every constituency’.⁴⁹ Right from the outset, the policy of constructive ambiguity, and letting local arrangements stand, was under pressure and that pressure would intensify during the campaign.