Chapter 2 The position of the four main parties

The task of defining the electoral relationship between the parties began on 23 October as Bonar Law was appointed leader of the Conservative Party following a meeting at the Hotel Cecil. He then proceeded to Buckingham Palace where King George V asked him to form a government.¹ Chamberlain and the other Tory coalitionists did not attend the meeting at the Hotel Cecil and they would find themselves outside of Bonar Law’s new cabinet. Their apparent inaction over previous days was significant given that they did not necessarily have to accept the result of the Carlton Club meeting. Chamberlain, who received a steady stream of letters expressing outrage, consternation and a sense of betrayal over the outcome of the meeting,² remained convinced that many Conservatives continued to favour coalition in the interests of national unity, and some of them had urged him to call a meeting of the National Union to argue the case before the wider membership.³ While he had suspected that he could win the argument, he had concluded that the resulting split in the party would be devastating. Instead, he preferred dignified silence, but the possibility that he might break that silence with potentially devastating consequences for the party was not lost on Bonar Law. The Carlton Club meeting had ended the coalition, but the breach, if handled with anything other than very great care, might yet end the party. As party leader Chamberlain had been mindful of the forces on the right who wanted to be free of Lloyd George. Now Bonar Law as his replacement would have to be very aware of those Conservatives on the centre left who had favoured co-operation over faction, never mind the electoral calculation.

In trying to frame a platform for the new Conservative administration that would not widen the splits in the party, and with which they could go forward to the country in a general election, Bonar Law had the advice of his inner circle. Leo Amery drafted an election address for the new prime minister the day after Bonar Law became party leader. Amery made no secret of the fact that on some issues his intention was for the prime minister to obfuscate, or only to hint at future lines of policy.⁴ This was backed by the specific inputs of some of the new ministers as the platform was sharpened.⁵ Strikingly, the file in the Bonar Law papers which contains this material also contains historical briefing papers about specific subjects,⁶ and copies of speeches by Disraeli, which suggest that Bonar Law, in trying to frame what Conservatism after the First World War meant, was trying to historically ground his vision.⁷ That same file also contains notes on what the leading Coalitionist Conservatives were up to during the course of the campaign. The juxtaposition in the same file of papers framing policy, tracing the lines of modern Conservatism, and monitoring the activities of the Conservative Coalitionists is noteworthy. Bonar Law in preparing his platform had a narrow path to tread.

There was also the possibility that some kind of deal might be cut with the Coalition Liberals that would make both electoral sense, and make sense in terms of a divided party. It was with the task of exploring some sort of electoral arrangement with the Coalition Liberals that Sir Malcolm Fraser, principal agent of the Conservative Party, approached Robert Sanders, the deputy party chair.⁸ As an under secretary at the War Office Sanders had been one of the generation of young Conservative MPs who had brought down the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting. After the meeting at the Hotel Cecil, Fraser asked Sanders if ‘I would see Freddy Guest [former Liberal chief whip and associate of Lloyd George] and try to do a deal as to seats in the country’.⁹ In effect Sanders was being asked to be part of a dialogue with the Coalition Liberals to effect a national arrangement, which would be to their mutual interest. Fraser visited Sanders that same evening and Sanders’s diary indicates the extent to which things had moved on:

He came to see me in Eaton Square this evening. He thinks this can be arranged, says L.G. is genuinely afraid of the Labour party, that he is going into the election on the liens of the Leeds speech and that he expects relations to be quite amicable after the election.¹⁰

The following day Sanders saw Guest and McCurdy. Sanders later commented in his diary: ‘Think I have fixed up an arrangement by which we discourage opposition in their seats and they advise their followers to support us’ against the Asquithian Liberals.¹¹ Interestingly, he also commented that Lord Rothermere, the press baron, had been brought into the plot with ‘a step in the peerage as his price of his support’.¹² In effect an agreement had been reached which, while not public, and not expressed in detailed form, would see the central parties ‘discourage’ hostilities and rival campaigns at the local level. The plot was sufficiently well developed to bring in, and buy off, Lord Rothermere to support the pact through his newspapers. That evening Lloyd George on the campaign trail in London warned that ‘Unionists alone cannot defend the nation’s interests’.¹³ Bonar Law reciprocated in a speech in Glasgow on 26 October when he signalled that the door was open to a working relationship with the Lloyd George Liberals. The Daily Mirror reported Bonar Law as suggesting: ‘There was no reason … why the two parties should not co-operate if each secured fair representation’.¹⁴

By 26–27 October the two parties appeared to have an understanding to co-operate with each other in the constituencies. However, in a subsequent entry in his diary Sanders went on to say that the deal ‘did not come off’.¹⁵ Strikingly, the date of the diary entry is 25 November, some ten days after the day of election. What had happened during the course of the campaign to scupper the deal? Why had the policy of letting local arrangements stand in the interest of mutual understanding between the parties, perhaps formalised into a national arrangement, not been fully realised? What exactly did Sanders mean?

Evidence of the deal could perhaps be found in the behaviour of Freddie Guest as he arrived back in his East Dorset constituency on 26 October. His first meeting was with the local Conservative and Unionist Association rather than his own Liberal supporters. At that meeting, as he recalled the following day to the Executive Committee of his own Liberal Association, Guest gave a pledge of support to a future Bonar Law government if that was the outcome of the election:

He had informed them that if adopted he intended to stand as a Liberal Anti-Socialist Candidate. They had asked him if he would give to Mr Bonar Law the same loyal co-operation which they had given to Mr Lloyd George, and he had replied that provided Mr Bonar Law avoided reaction on the one hand and revolutionary changes on the other, he saw no reason why he should not co-operate, and that he had instanced cases which he would regard as ‘reaction’, such for example as any attempt to restore the veto of the House of Lords, or to adopt a policy of scuttle with regard to our imperial obligations, which he would resolutely oppose … The result of his meeting with the Unionist Committee had been that they had decided officially to support his Candidature at the impending election presuming he was adopted by his own friends. (Applause.)¹⁶

The last word, and reaction of the members of the East Dorset Constituency Liberal Association on 27 October as they were told that their prospective Parliamentary Candidate had already been to see the Conservatives is particularly telling.¹⁷ Such was the strength of feeling in favour of continuing to work with the Conservatives that Guest’s endorsement as the Liberal Anti-Socialist candidate for East Dorset was carried by over one hundred votes to four in the subsequent meeting of the General Council.¹⁸ The details of Guest’s comments to his local association also suggested the potential lines along which a deal might work, whereby Coalition Liberals might give their qualified support to a Bonar Law ministry as the price of continued co-operation.

Throughout the early part of the campaign rumours swirled around Westminster about the possibility of a collaboration between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals at the polls. For example, the Western Mail on 24 October, perhaps reflecting the lines of a deal sketched out on the previous day as part of the Fraser-Sanders initiative, hinted at the likely lines of the working relationship between the former coalition partners:

There may be co-operation between the Conservative and National Liberal parties during and after the general election, but it will not be based upon the Coalition pact of 1918, under which certain lines of policy were laid down, the Premiership was assured to Mr. Lloyd George, and the terms of co-operation in electoral contests strictly defined.¹⁹

Whatever arrangements might be made for an electoral truce of sorts between the parties at the local level it was very unclear whether good relations would be maintained. Added to the difficulties at the National Level in maintaining the spirit of coalitionism were those within the constituencies. For example, the Western Mail also reported on 24 October that in Caerphilly, one of the new seats created in 1918 and held by Labour, plans for Liberals and Conservatives to get behind a single candidate had been jeopardised by the fall of the coalition: ‘It is not year clear whether the pact recently made between the Conservatives and Liberals in the Caerphilly Parliamentary Division will hold good … A few months ago the Conservatives were allowed to select a candidate, the Liberals undertaking to support him as a Coalition candidate’.²⁰ The appearance of separate parties fighting an election raised question marks over the continuation of such arrangements that the party leaders struggled to contain. In some constituencies local associations were only too ready to end co-operation and to put forward their own candidates. That could threaten the hoped-for co-operation between the parties.

During the last week of October party leaders slowly began to outline the relationships between the parties and the likely direction of politics after the election. Lloyd George, speaking to a meeting of supporters, MPs and candidates at the Hotel Victoria on 25 October, declared that Labour ‘has declared relentless war upon us. In self-defence therefore, you have to fight and to resist the onslaughts of the Socialist Party in this country’.²¹ He dismissed the Asquithian Liberals because of the hostility of their leader and their willingness to run candidates against some thirty sitting Coalition Liberal seats. Speaking of the Conservatives, Lloyd George was careful to argue:

If Die-hard candidates are put up either directly or indirectly to attack Coalition-Liberals throughout the country, then we shall have no alternative but to spread the war. If we fall, we will fall fighting, and fighting where we can hit the hardest. And we can do it, but the responsibility will be theirs. We shall certainly not confine our fighting to our own seats.²²

Of course, to have any sort of effect the threat to ‘spread the war’ had to be credible both in terms of the capabilities of the Coalition Liberal Organisation and perceptions of those capabilities on the part of the Conservative Party. The latter was perhaps more problematic than the former. In a paper written on 20 October 1921, the general secretary of the Coalition Liberal Party advised that in England and Wales eighty-one seats currently held by Coalition Liberals were considered winnable, with a further thirty-three possible but doubtful.²³ The development of new constituency organisations meant that another twenty-nine seats could be contested with three considered winnable. With the addition of Scottish seats, twenty-five of which had returned Coalition Liberals in 1918, the Coalition Liberal Party were ready to consider contesting around 170 seats. The further expansion of the Coalition Liberal organisation in the constituencies over the next twelve months opened up some further possibilities for seats in which party candidates might be put forward, if not with the hope of winning, then with the realistic possibility that it could spoil the chances of another party. While the general secretary’s assessments as to the potential fortunes of the Coalition Liberals at a general election were internal to the party, for Conservative readers the pages of the Lloyd George Liberal Magazine contained plenty of indications in the form of ‘constituency notes’ that the threat to ‘spread the war’ in October 1922 had to be taken seriously. While it was possible to field a slate of around 170 candidates, the general secretary of the Coalition Liberal Party in a memorandum to the chief whip of 11 September 1922 estimated that thirty-eight seats was the minimum likely return for the Coalition Liberals at the general election.²⁴ The question was whether to try and consolidate around this caucus and contest a small number of seats, or whether to aim for a larger number that might risk a wider war with the Conservatives that might damage both partys’ chances, allowing Labour to claim some unexpected wins. In late October the actions of Conservative diehards in some associations risked this wider war, which both Conservative and Coalition Liberal party hierarchies had no wish to ignite.

It didn’t help that during the campaign there was on-going warfare within Coalition Liberal ranks against Charles McCurdy, the chief whip and Scovell the general secretary of the party. An attempt in the midst of the campaign to replace Scovell with Alfred Cope (1877–1954), a career civil servant and fixer for Lloyd George, created confusion and a considerable distraction at Party headquarters.²⁵ McCurdy objected to the move on the grounds that it would be madness to get rid of Scovell at this point, and might derail the campaign. Scovell, in consequence, would stay on until after the poll with Cope as his shadow and eventual replacement.²⁶ As a backdrop to fighting an election the tensions between Scovell and Cope were less than ideal.