Introduction

General elections, fossilising long-term trends and short-term factors, are the events by which we can chart the evolution of the British political system. The shifting loyalties of voters, the changing fortunes of the parties, the success or failure of leaders, shifts in policy platforms and the impact of the media, together with longer-term social and economic changes across the country, are equally revealed and crystallised into immutable evidence of the political past to be excavated and analysed by psephologists and political historians. Elections matter both in their political outcomes, but also in their contribution to our understanding of the evolution of British politics. The fact that they are dotted throughout decades of British history since the Parliament Act of 1911 decreed that a Parliament could not last longer than five years provides handily spaced datum points for the political historian. Twenty-five elections were held in Britain across a twentieth century in which women and working-class men were finally enfranchised, the voting age was lowered to eighteen, the Liberal Party declined and the Labour Party rose to become the second party of government. Yet these datum points are not equally as regular, or as valuable and reliable, as might be ideal for the political historian.

The two world wars resulted in the postponement of the elections which should have been held no later than 1916 and then also in 1940. This magnifies the importance as datum points of the elections that were eventually held in 1918 and 1945. Yet those elections themselves were both impacted by war, in the case of 1918 severely so, resulting in a turnout of 57.2 per cent: a record low in British general elections in the period 1918–2024. This is particularly unfortunate for the historian interested in trying to understand how the parties were responding to the 1918 Representation of the People Act with its dramatic widening of the franchise, or the impacts of the First World War on the socio-economic base of British politics, or the process by which the Liberal Party was giving way to the Labour Party. The fact that three other general elections were held in 1922, 1923 and 1924 indicates the extent to which British politics was in flux in the aftermath of the First World War. By the end of that period the pattern for modern British politics of Conservatives and Labour rivalling each other, and with the Liberals a distant third, had become established. It is then a pivotal period in British political history, and if 1918 is less than ideal as a datum point, then that perhaps places an additional emphasis on the 1922 General Election, with its turnout a respectable seventy-three per cent. This would be the first in a critical series of elections in the early 1920s which saw profound changes in the outcomes of the vote from one to another, evidencing fundamental shifts in British politics.

It is the contention of this book that the 1922 General Election was, indeed, the first ‘modern’ British general election in which the vast majority of the adult population of the United Kingdom was enfranchised, and turned out to vote on a single day, for political parties easily recognisable one hundred years later, in constituency-based, first-past-the-post contests, in an event that felt truly national as a result of a national British media being able to report on the election as it was taking place, and as the results were coming in. In effect, the election took a form and shape still easily recognisable a century later. It is also the contention of this book that the election has not been fully understood by historians, and that has a wider significance because the 1922 election is one of those datum points used to evidence vital long-term trends that were transforming British politics in the early twentieth century. If the datum point is improperly understood then its usefulness as a reference point in charting this process of rapid change is problematic, especially when it is so closely followed by two other datum points (the general elections of 1923 and 1924), and where psephological approaches create an apparent certainty of numbers in the midst of the human realities and chaos and confusion of an election outcome. If the evidence from the 1922 General Election is problematic, in some ways, then, the processes and rates of political change from one election to the next after the First World War may be obscured to the point of creating a false picture. What may appear to be dramatic change in a matter of months may be a more gradual change hidden beneath the illusion of a problematic datum point in 1922.

Why might that election be problematic in some ways, and why might political scientists and historians have had difficulties in interpreting it? Why are there potential issues understanding the data for that election over any other? The problem lies in the fact that to a fundamental extent there was a comprehensive attempt to ‘manage’ the outcome of the election by the leaderships of two of the political parties (that went well beyond the limited evidence of party pacts operating in Scotland and Lancashire which have been previously recognised), in order to shut out Labour hopes of a dramatic national breakthrough at the polls. In that managed outcome the parties were only partially successful and the outcome was a victory for the Conservatives that was almost completely unexpected, with significant long-term consequences for the Liberal and Labour Parties. Those consequences would further become apparent in the 1923 and 1924 General Elections. In effect, in 1922, while the Labour Party would be seen to be breaking through with the electorate in places like Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, the party’s wider traction with the electorate was obscured by the attempt to manage the election. The tide of socialism was rising to an extent even larger than the outcomes of the 1922 election might suggest, and despite widespread Conservative-Coalition Liberal efforts to quell it with ‘local arrangements’, and a common desire for co-operation in the interests of ‘respectable society’.

To understand the 1922 General Election it is necessary to focus on a number of different layers of understanding: what historians and political scientists have made of the election; what the party leaderships saw as the politically necessary and strategically sensible moves to be made in the aftermath of the crisis which had brought down the Lloyd George government in October 1922; how Conservatives and Liberals responded to divided parliamentary parties; how the Conservative leadership responded to press barons and party associations which often had very different imperatives from each other; and how candidates tried to negotiate the political landscapes within their own constituencies by giving promises, and by representing their politics in certain ways. It is the interaction between the Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law and the Lloyd George Liberals (also variously known as the National Liberals and the Coalition Liberals) which is the primary focus of this study. The 1922 General Election was almost labyrinthine in its complexities and levels, making the kind of generalisation necessary for it to serve as a reliable datum point of the shifting sands of British politics as problematic as the 1918 Coupon Election. Never was a British general election more deserving of the label ‘it’s complicated’, and with political identities in flux never was it more true to say that a general election was, in reality, hundreds of separate local contests each peculiar to itself. In the consensus view of interwar British politics the 1922 General Election emerges as a comparatively quiet and uninteresting contest that heralded a short-lived and rather dull Conservative government that was the antithesis of the fireworks and drama of the Lloyd George years. For Robert Blake in 1955 it was clear that ‘few elections in modern times have been fought in an atmosphere of greater confusion and obscurity than the General Election of 1922’.¹ Charles Loch Mowat commented in the same year: ‘The campaign was quiet … Issues of principle were … glossed over’.² That was certainly true of the Conservative and Liberal parties, but less so in the case of Labour. Noteworthy largely for a number of breakthroughs by the Labour Party in urban centres, especially Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, the election suggested that Labour might be about to emerge as the second party of government in British politics. This consensus narrative formed in the 1970s, and it has not been seriously questioned since. And yet that period from around 1920 to 1924 remains central to the work of the historians of British political parties and the biographers of the ‘big beasts’ of interwar British politics. It was during this period that the Liberal-Conservative duopoly gave way to a battle between Labour and the Conservatives, and a political scene dominated by Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. As Chris Cook notes in his ‘study of constituency politics and electoral change’ from 1922 to 1929: ‘Between the fall of the Lloyd George Coalition in 1922 and the General Election of October 1924 British politics was transformed’.³ For David Powell that period was one of ‘the most confused and disturbed in British political history’ as a fundamental realignment of British politics took place.⁴ Given the importance of this period the consensus narrative needs more careful evaluation because it obscures potential differences of emphasis, and subtleties of analysis that need to be understood and which do tie that election in with some of the big shifts happening within British politics during this period.

For historians of a Liberal Party, divided since 1916 between the adherents of Asquith and Lloyd George, the period following on from the ‘dismal results’⁵ of the election was marked by on-going decline fed by continuing personal rivalries and long-standing ‘basic contradictions’ about the nature and future of liberalism in the post-Victorian age.⁶ The biographers of the leaders of the two wings of British Liberalism have expressed some mystification at the behaviour of the two men during the campaign. Kenneth Morgan argued in 1979 that: ‘The National Liberals [under Lloyd George] fought a half-hearted and irrelevant campaign in 1922. Their leader was disengaged in mind’.⁷ Martin Pugh almost a decade later went further in his concerns at Lloyd George’s half-hearted campaigning: ‘The 1922 election came too soon for Lloyd George to organise, or even decide what to say’.⁸ For Trevor Wilson, in his study of the decline of the Liberal Party, the fall of the coalition and what followed were part of Lloyd George’s pivotal role as the chief secondary factor, behind the First World War, in the downfall of that party.⁹

The behaviour of Asquith was perhaps even more inexplicable. As Stephen Koss notes, Asquith in 1922 decided to ‘hedge his bets’ by publicly leaving open the door to co-operation with the Conservatives after the election. His luncheon date, with Sir George Younger, the long-term chair of the Conservative Party organisation, in the midst of the campaign on 6 November caused great surprise and no little comment.¹⁰ In 1922 British Liberalism seemed virtually rudderless despite the hands of both Lloyd George and Asquith on the party-political tiller. Even more surprisingly in 1922 Lloyd George, the one-man political dynamo who electrified British politics across the early decades of the twentieth century, appeared to have entirely spent his energies. The great ship of British Liberalism was going nowhere and would shortly be revealed to be in a sinking condition.

While the 1922 General Election was part of an era of decline for the Liberal Party, for the historians of the Conservative Party the era is characterised by a sense of rebirth as, in Maurice Cowling’s view, the Conservative Party made a conscious decision about replacing the Liberals with the Labour Party as their principal rival.¹¹ For Robert Blake, victory in the 1922 campaign was part of a process of ‘clambering back’ from the wilderness that the party had been cast into following the 1906 general election.¹² And yet, as can be seen in Blake’s The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, the circumstances in which the coalition had ended tend to catch the eye of the historian rather than the campaign which followed.¹³ Nevertheless, at the outset of the election the omens for Conservative victory ‘cannot have seemed good’.¹⁴ The eventual victory of the Conservative Party under Andrew Bonar Law was therefore, in Blake’s eyes, a ‘personal triumph’¹⁵ and in the opinion of R. J. Q. Adams, a vindication of Bonar Law’s reluctant decision to guide the Conservatives back towards sustainable independence no matter what the personal cost.¹⁶ His campaign, characterised, and in some cases dismissed, as ‘tranquillity’ was the perfectly pitched message following the hustle and bustle of the Lloyd George administration.¹⁷ And yet, even in the midst of this quiet campaign Bonar Law was at one point suspected of ‘cosying up to the Liberals’ under Asquith.¹⁸

By contrast Labour historians have seen the 1922 General Election as a pivotal moment in Labour’s drive to power: part of the inevitable political flowering of the growth of the wider labour/union movement, as Ross McKibbin sees it.¹⁹ For Francis Williams writing in 1950, in the midst of the Attlee governments, the 1922 General Election was a vital test of how far Labour had come since 1918 with the Labour Party emerging from the election as a practically ‘new party’.²⁰ Andrew Thorpe writing at the time of the dawn of the Blair government in 1997, almost fifty years after Williams, provided detail on the impact of the 1922 election on the Labour Party: ‘By 1922 it had asserted its independence, was clearly the opposition to the Conservatives, had asserted the primacy of parliamentary over other methods of achieving change, and felt comfortable with policy and … had credibility on political issues’.²¹ David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald’s biographer, confirms both the sense that Labour was hoping for much from the 1922 election and, in the event, they were not to be disappointed.²² As David Thackeray has noted, the party which emerged from the 1922 General Election was very much MacDonald’s Party.²³ The outcome of the election was a demonstration of the progress and strength of the Labour central organisation which complemented, in Worley’s view, an otherwise multi-faceted Labour identity which could vary and adapt itself from constituency to constituency according to local socio-economic conditions and circumstances.²⁴

Beyond the conundrums and differences of emphasis raised by the historians of the different political parties, and the biographers of the leading politicians, election specialist Michael Kinnear, who completed his thesis at Oxford on the 1922 General Election, noted a distinct change during the course of the campaign that was pivotal to its outcome:

The election of 1922 fell into two distinct halves: Until nomination day, the parties recovered from the shock of the Carlton Club meeting, but a possible debate over the fall of the old coalition failed to develop. The electors had a brief period of repose after the tumult of the Lloyd George years, but in the second half of the campaign new issues appeared which knocked many voters out of their complacency. It can be argued that both the period of quiet confusion and of renewed strife were necessary to produce a Conservative majority in this election: The first showed the voters the contrast with the unsettled days of the coalition, and the second made them realise how precarious was their newly acquired peace.²⁵

The further one drills down into the historiography of the 1922 General Election, the more subtle points and differences emerge, which suggest the need for a re-evaluation as we try to come to terms with its part in the transformations which mark British politics between 1918 and 1924.

The greater availability of private family papers, and the digitisation of many newspapers, facilitate that re-examination. Two of these ‘new’ private paper collections are particularly interesting. The papers of Lieutenant-Colonel G. J. S. Scovell, largely complete and within their original file structure, were acquired by the privately held Lloyd George Archive in 2016 following a house clearance and auction. From 1919 to 1922 he served as general secretary of the Coalition Liberal Party Organisation playing a critical role in the development of that party and its preparations for the 1922 General Election. Meanwhile the papers of Sir Leslie Wilson, Conservative chief whip in 1922, sat largely unknown and unused in the Fryer Library in the University of Queensland until their use by Luke Stanley in a 2019 article in Parliamentary History.²⁶ These sources, from figures close to the heart of events, but sufficiently minor to ensure that their papers were not subject to sanitisation or picking over by biographers official and unofficial, allow us to re-examine our understandings of the 1922 election which were formed several decades ago.

Let us first begin by examining the conventional narrative. Lloyd George resigned as prime minister on 19 October 1922, just three hours after Conservative MPs meeting at the Carlton Club voted to end the coalition government elected in the 1918 Coupon Election by 187 votes to 88, according to widely reported but incorrect accounts.²⁷ Returning to Downing Street after resigning, Lloyd George discussed his political options with three ex-Coalition Liberal ministers including H. A. L. Fisher and Alfred Mond. Despite their urging to come out openly as a Liberal, Lloyd George still wavered even as he prepared to make a previously arranged speech at Leeds on 21 October. The wavering and the advice from ex-ministers was interesting. Lloyd George had options in front of him: to declare as a Liberal and hope to achieve some sort of re-unification between the two wings of the party; to carry on with the Lloyd George (Coalition) Liberals which had emerged as a semi-separate splinter group from the main Liberal Party between 1916 and 1920; or perhaps to try and establish some new force in British politics, by reaching out to some of those Conservatives who had voted in favour of maintaining the coalition government at the Carlton Club meeting. In October 1922 several different paths lay before Lloyd George and the Coalition Liberals, and for that matter before their former Conservative Party partners.

On 20 October Lloyd George caught the train to the north of England from St Pancras Station making a series of speeches in some of the constituencies en route as he prepared to give a major speech at Leeds. As Michael Kinnear notes, each speech along the way seemed to herald a different position, evidence that even after his meeting with Liberal ministers Lloyd George simply did not know what strategy and tactics he should adopt for the forthcoming election, which seemed to be the inevitable outcome of the decision at the Carlton Club: ‘During his tour on 20 October he moved from a modified acceptance of the situation at Bedford, in which he did not denounce those who had deposed him, to an appeal at Wellingborough for support against “a mere party game”’.²⁸ By the time he reached Sheffield, Lloyd George appeared ready to direct his oratory towards the Tory diehards who had brought down the coalition. All was set for the big speech at Leeds which offered the former prime minister the perfect platform to define future policy and to launch his election campaign.

At Leeds, with the newspapers in attendance, the former prime minister’s speech failed to ignite his followers or the campaign.²⁹ He had left St Pancras Station for the campaign trail northwards declaring: ‘My sword is in my hand’.³⁰ By the end of the Leeds speech it appeared that he had managed to lose it before arriving at the venue. As the Daily Herald ran: ‘Sword Left in Train: Mr. Ll. George Disappoints his Followers’.³¹ The former prime minister spoke largely about his record in office and said absolutely nothing to suggest that he had clarified the future direction of the former Liberal coalitionists. It appeared that Lloyd George had lost his dynamism, and perhaps his political direction altogether. In the Leeds speech Bonar Law, who had led the attack on the continuance of the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting, was praised for his simplicity of approach and there was nothing to suggest that Lloyd George might be preparing for barnstorming attacks on the Conservative Party as a foretaste of the election that was yet to come. Chris Cook argues that the speech was Lloyd George effectively stalling for time, trying to evaluate the political options before committing himself and his party one way or the other.³²

It was, however, somewhat surprising that Lloyd George would need to stall for time. The coalition government had been approaching its end since late 1921 as Lloyd George and Chamberlain considered bouncing the parties into a general election to renew the coalition. In December 1921 Sir Malcolm Fraser, the chief agent of the Conservative Party, had advised Austen Chamberlain in a report seen by Lloyd George that if both parties went to the country, in say February 1922, they would ‘probably get back with a majority’ but at the cost of splitting the Conservative Party ‘from top to toe’, such was the opposition to continued coalition.³³ Fraser considered that in the event of an election the number of Labour MPs was likely to increase and many of the Conservatives returned would do so as Independent Conservatives with little loyalty or affection for a Lloyd George government. Senior Conservatives, including Neville Chamberlain, Sir Percy Woodhouse and Sir Alex Leith, expressed their opposition to an election in early 1922.³⁴ Sir George Younger, the party chairman, felt forced to write to constituency chairs to advise them that, while the decision to seek an early election lay with the prime minister, in constitutional terms, Conservative Central Office was strongly against such a course.³⁵ Younger took to the press to campaign against such a move.³⁶ While Younger might suggest to the public and constituency chairs that there was no crisis, the sight of the chair of the Conservative Party openly campaigning against an election to maintain the coalition reassured no one. Chamberlain was in despair at being caught between parts of his own party and Lloyd George busy on the international stage at the Cannes conference.³⁷

Forcing fusion between the new parties would negate the centrifugal forces at the heart of the coalition where each party blamed the other for key parts of government policy. The failure in early 1922 of a further attempt on the part of both the Coalition Liberals and the leadership of the Conservative Party to effect some form of fusion between the two parties underlined the growing instability of the coalition government. Events over the spring and summer of 1922, with the failure of the Cannes conference (6–13 January 1922), and the failure of the government’s Near Eastern policy bringing the prospect of an Anglo-Turkish war, did nothing to revive the coalition’s fortunes with voters and the members of the Conservative Party.

By early October, with headlines such as ‘Ministry’s Failing Credit’ the signs had been unmistakeable that a large section of the Conservative Party wanted to end the coalition between the parties.³⁸ In the days before the Carlton Club meeting (made a three-line whip in the telegram to MPs from Leslie Wilson), a full-scale effort by the leaderships of both parties had been underway to try and rescue a deteriorating situation.³⁹ The looming Newport by-election,⁴⁰ which would be won by an Independent Conservative, together with the political fallout from the failure of Lloyd George’s Near Eastern policy, had caused great excitement. The situation in Newport had suggested a breakdown in coalition arrangements with the Coalition Liberal Party organisation reportedly helping the independent Liberal candidate, and the local Conservative Association clamouring for Conservative Central Office to back the Independent Conservative.⁴¹ Chamberlain had lamented this ‘beautiful illustration of the results of a split’ but conceded ‘at every stage we are being forced further and further apart and it is difficult to see what the end will be’.⁴² The press meanwhile had talked about the ‘growing estrangement’ between Conservatives and the coalition.⁴³ The national press had understandably highlighted ‘General Election Signs’ and had questioned the prospects for ‘An Immediate Election’.⁴⁴ By 13 October Austen Chamberlain, as leader of the Conservative Party, had been forced to give a rallying-call speech in Birmingham in which he had called on all ‘Constitutional and Conservative’ parties to help defend the ‘social and economic order’.⁴⁵ Senior Conservatives such as Lord Derby warned Chamberlain that while broad sections of the Conservative Party had no problem working with Coalition Liberals, distrust of the prime minister was making the continuance of the coalition incredibly difficult.⁴⁶ Chamberlain in response had raised the prospect that Lloyd George might voluntarily step down from the premiership in favour of a Conservative and worried that in any election in which the two parties did not fight as a coalition Labour might secure 200–250 seats.⁴⁷ His public and private attempts at reassuring the party had not been well received within the Conservative Party and The Times had reported that junior ministers were considering their position.⁴⁸ The profound sense that the coalition was about to break up had not been eased by a further rallying-call speech at Manchester by Lloyd George on 14 October.⁴⁹ Chamberlain knew that he was facing a revolt by Conservative junior ministers in the government and was privately conceding that his position as party leader was all but untenable.⁵⁰ By the eve of the Carlton Club meeting the betting was very firmly in favour of a rejection of the coalition with a split in the Conservative Party, and a general election the likely outcome.⁵¹ The outcome of the Carlton Club meeting was deeply unsurprising, and Lloyd George’s resignation as prime minister, just three hours after its conclusion, was further evidence of it. Thus, it would seem surprising that Lloyd George on 20 October, as he prepared to take the train and get on what had become the campaign trail, was not fully ready to put into action the political strategy that he had long had time to think about.

For whatever reason, the Lloyd George who made a series of speeches as he travelled north on 20 October was not the Lloyd George of old, or the Lloyd George that the crowds and press expected. This set a pattern for the entire election, with Lloyd George making a limited number of public appearances which failed to set the campaign trail alight. The campaign appeared half-hearted, with the party and its leader looking tired and largely bereft of ideas. It is unsurprising that Michael Kinnear should put this down to Lloyd George being worn out after six years as prime minister, and perhaps also out of a concern that in the past his aggressive oratory had sometimes produced misunderstandings and facilitated deliberate misrepresentations.⁵² But as Kinnear also points out, Lloyd George was perhaps anxious to maintain good relations with the Conservative backbenchers, and we must ask why this might be so, and what it might suggest about Lloyd George’s strategy. What also does it perhaps point to in terms of the Conservative Party?

Following the Carlton Club meeting on 19 October Lloyd George and his cabinet presented their resignations to King George V. Lloyd George advised the king to invite Bonar Law to form a ministry. At the 1918 general election the Conservatives had gained 379 seats in a 707-seat House of Commons. Setting aside the issue of the existence and demise of the coalition, the Conservatives were in a position to form a government of their own, and their parliamentary position had been further entrenched by Sinn Féin’s boycott of Westminster, and the eventual removal of the majority of Irish seats from Westminster politics under the 1921 Irish settlement. Following Lloyd George’s resignation King George V did indeed ask Bonar Law to form a ministry, which he delayed until 23 October, by which time he had been elected leader of the Conservative Party. Although the expectation was that Bonar Law would call an election there was no immediate requirement to do so. Indeed, there was widespread speculation that any election would be delayed until after final ratification of the Irish Bill, should there be opposition to it.⁵³ In the event there was none, but there was no absolute imperative to call an immediate election, and certainly not one as soon as 16 November 1922. Might Bonar Law then have had other reasons to hold an election so soon beyond allowing the country the chance to make its views known?

On the same day as Lloyd George made his Leeds speech, Lord Derby appealed to Lancashire Conservatives not to split the moderate vote by opposing the Lloyd George Liberals. The call to maintain a party truce between Coalition Liberals and Conservatives was echoed north of the border by the Scottish Conservatives who declared that they would not run candidates against their former colleagues in the coalition.⁵⁴ This was perhaps unsurprising. As the Oswestry MP William Bridgeman noted it was the Scottish Tory MPs who had most visibly been upset by the outcome of the Carlton Club meeting, fearing that they ‘might lose their seats’ at the next election as a result of the decision to end the coalition.⁵⁵ In response, the Scottish National Liberals declared that they would reciprocate the favour.⁵⁶ Conservative Central Office endorsed the arrangement, and had no objection to an equivalent party truce in Lancashire where similar concerns about the rise of Labour were prevalent. This developed into a wider endorsement by Conservative Central Office of those associations where they wished to maintain ‘local arrangements’ or pacts between Conservatives and Coalition Liberals. This championing of the rights of the associations to make their own arrangements was a strategic move, both in terms of a divided party and considerations about the likely outcome of the general election, that could be hidden behind the respect of the Central Party for the views of the members.

South of the border, despite some expression of support for local party pacts in areas such as Bristol, sitting Coalition Liberals appeared vulnerable, with a general sense of pessimism over the chances of a party that had only begun to take shape in 1920, as it was clear that Lloyd George and his followers were personae non gratae with the wider Liberal Party. In 1975 Chris Cook concluded that Lloyd George ‘was powerless to prevent’ the approaching debacle.⁵⁷ Echoing Kinnear’s statements about Lloyd George’s apparent inability after six long years in office to respond to the challenge of the 1922 General Election, Cook argues that the Coalition Liberal MPs were ‘without a power base’ and that Lloyd George was ‘a leader with nothing to lead’.⁵⁸ Morgan concurs that Lloyd George ‘cut a somewhat pathetic picture’ and that the Coalition Liberal Party was really ‘a disorganised affair’.⁵⁹ It was not, however, some sense of pessimism which dampened Lloyd George’s political temper and his oratory on his journey to Leeds. He too could see both the danger from Labour, and Conservative unease at what the 1922 General Election might bring. Local pacts were even more in the interest of the Coalition Liberal Party than the Conservatives in the interests of the fight against socialism.

If Lloyd George’s campaign appearances lacked fire, then so too did those of the famously dour Bonar Law. In his speech on 23 October, as he became leader of the Conservative Party and took up the king’s invitation to form a government, Bonar Law spoke warmly of Lloyd George’s contribution to the postwar government. It was hardly the stuff of bitter party controversy. The general election campaign from this point lasted little more than three weeks and the first part of it until 2 November was marked by a period of comparative quiet, partly as a result of the parties having to get their constituency machines in order before the poll. Borough council elections also helped to suppress the exchanges between Liberals and Conservatives, both in terms of absorbing the attention of party activists at the local level, but also the need to maintain arrangements to keep Labour out of office. Although the campaign after this point was enlivened by a number of personal spats between senior figures, including one between Churchill and Curzon, and one between Lord Birkenhead and Leslie Wilson, there was a sense that personal animosities were filling the vacuum left by the absence of heated political debate about the future direction of the parties and the country. Moreover, the on-going threat of war with a resurgent nationalist Turkey acted as a further restraining influence on the crossfire between Coalition Liberals and their former Conservative partners, although Beaverbrook’s Daily Express used the situation in the Near East to castigate Coalition Liberals and their Conservative allies as ‘War-Mongers’, who had been willing to plunge the country into a further conflict to keep Lloyd George in office.⁶⁰

In terms of the programmes put forward to the electorate there were comparatively few issues to really set the parties apart from one another, and between the Coalition Liberals and Conservatives there was a considerable amount of admiration expressed for each other’s achievements in navigating the country through the war and the difficult period immediately thereafter. Although Bonar Law favoured the introduction of tariffs to safeguard staple industries, he made it clear that the question would have to wait for another election, and a fresh mandate.

Labour’s proposal to introduce a capital levy to target those who had done well out of the war caused a reaction amongst middle-class voters. The public didn’t understand it and had little enthusiasm for it, especially with the newspapers suggesting to the middle classes that it impinged on the interests of business.⁶¹ There was some alarm in Labour circles at its reception, with clarifications being issued to candidates and agents during the campaign to help defuse it as an issue with the media and at public meetings.⁶²

The outcome of the poll on 15 November came as a surprise. A clear Conservative majority, an increase in the Labour vote share and disappointment for the Asquithian and Lloyd George Liberals. After such a dull campaign there was widespread expectation that the eventual result would be inconclusive with perhaps a minority government emerging. The outcome was a clear victory for the Conservatives with the Labour Party emerging as His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition.

The result for the Coalition Liberals, and the rival Asquithian Liberals, proved to be disastrous. British Liberalism had entered a decline which would not be arrested despite the re-unification of the two wings of liberalism in 1923, and Lloyd George’s return to form as the firebrand of British politics after his seemingly atypical performance in 1922. In hindsight it appeared that only Bonar Law’s charitable nature had saved the ‘Coalie Libs’ from almost total annihilation as they ran a lacklustre campaign under a tired leader.⁶³ However, was the lack of heat between the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals, and the limited evidence of on-going close working relationships between the two parties in some areas, really part of wider hopes to manage the outcome of the election? And, if so, why was this attempt at management so tentative as to result in an unexpected outcome in the general election, and to leave few traces for later historians to pick up on?