Adrian Lee is a Solicitor-Advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate.
One hundred years ago, on Wednesday 15th November 1922, the British electorate went to the polls and changed the course of political history. Not only had they returned the first officially Conservative Government in 22 years, but the Labour Party also convincingly beat both competing factions of the Liberal Party. Its Leader was now recognised as the undisputed Leader of the Opposition. From 1922, politics in the UK was established as a two-horse race between the Conservatives and Labour.
The General Election of 1922 is historically significant for three other reasons. Firstly, the House of Commons had just been reduced in size by almost 100 constituencies following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 and the departure of 26 Irish counties. Secondly, after the 1922 poll, the Conservatives would spend all but 32 of the next 100 years as the largest party in Parliament. Arguably, the Conservative Party’s electoral dominance in the twentieth century started here. Thirdly, despite years in opposition and then in coalition, the Conservatives not only won in 1922, but did so convincingly with an overall majority of 73.
Remarkably, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Leader, achieved this result whilst leading a bitterly divided party. The origins of the spilt dated back to December 1916 and the establishment of a new wartime coalition government under the premiership of David Lloyd-George, the Liberal firebrand. Conservatives were instrumental in the palace coup, replacing the apparently dithering H.H. Asquith with the Welsh Wizard, and Tory Ministers came to dominate Lloyd George’s Whitehall. Bonar Law himself had served as a highly effective Chancellor of the Exchequer for the last two years of WW1.
At the General Election held on 14th December 1918, the Conservatives agreed to continue their coalition with the Lloyd George faction of the Liberals into the post-Armistice era. This resulted in a huge, combined majority of 161 in the 1918 Parliament. However, another four years of Lloyd George’s style of leadership proved too much for many Conservatives to stomach.
Lloyd George had risen to seemingly insurmountable challenges during the course of his political career. From steering through “The People’s Budget” as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to solving the Shell Crisis of 1915 as Minister of Munitions, and to guiding the nation to ultimate victory in 1918, few in history can match his record for competence and skill in government. Even after the war, he demonstrated his combined tact and cunning in getting Sinn Fein’s Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith to concede the principles of Irish partition and Dominion status.
On the other hand, Lloyd George was a figure mired in controversy. In 1912 he became embroiled in the Marconi Scandal, where he and three of his Liberal ministerial colleagues were accused of profiting from the improper use of information regarding the government’s investment in the Marconi Company.
Throughout his period as Prime Minister, Lloyd George had conducted a sex life that was regarded as outrageous at the time. It was an open secret between Ministers that the Prime Minster’s Private Secretary, Francis Stevenson, was also his mistress. Stevenson was 26 years younger than the Prime Minister and was rumoured to have had two abortions because of their affair. However, their relationship could not satiate his desires for other women. Writing in 1960, Richard Lloyd George observed of his father: “With an attractive woman he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle.”
In mid-1922 a new scandal broke. When it was noticed that the King’s Birthday Honours List included four men with colourful pasts, questions started to be asked. The four inappropriate recipients of honours were Sir Joseph Robinson (recently convicted of fraud), Sir William Vestey (a notorious tax evader), Samuel Waring (accused of war profiteering) and Archibald Williamson (widely alleged to have traded with the enemy in wartime). How on earth could people of such dubious character be recommended?
Investigations were made and the trail led back to the extraordinarily shady Maundy Gregory. Gregory had been established by Lloyd George as an “honours broker” in a Whitehall office. A tariff list had been drafted, with fees charged at £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for a baronetcy, and £50,000 for a peerage. All profits were placed in a slush fund entitled the “United Constitutional Party”. The intention was that this would bankroll Lloyd George’s future election campaigns now that he was cut off from official Liberal Party funds.
The majority of Conservative MPs now wanted to bring the coalition to an end, but some remained loyal to Lloyd George. The coalition loyalists comprised most of the Tory frontbench, including Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, and Austen Chamberlain, the Leader of the Conservative Party, Their reasons for sticking with Lloyd George were varied. Some just enjoyed the offices of state that they currently occupied, but others thought a permanent coalition with elements of the Liberals was the only way to keep Britain from going Red. For a fascinating insight to these wrangles, I would highly recommend the classic study The Impact of Labour (1971) by Maurice Cowling.
Cabinet disagreements over the Chanak Crisis in September 1922 brought matters to a head. Lloyd George and Winston Churchill favoured military action against Turkey for entering the Dardanelles neutral zone. But the Conservatives opposed this. This split ultimately led to the Carlton Club meeting of Conservative MPs on 19th October 1922, where the majority voted for the coalition to be ended.
In fury, the frontbench refused to serve in the next Conservative government. Austen Chamberlain resigned as Conservative Leader and the former Leader, Bonar Law, returned from retirement to form a government and call an election.
Bonar Law is the most unfairly under-rated Conservative Party Leader. Simply because it was his profound misfortune to contract throat cancer and be forced to retire as Prime Minister just seven months after winning power, he has been forever labelled “The Unknown Prime Minister”. This originates from a sarcastic remark by Asquith after attending Law’s funeral at Westminster Abbey and was perpetuated by biographer Robert Blake in title of his 1955 book.
In reality, Bonar Law was a landmark Leader, who had led a united Conservative Party ably from 1911 to 1921 through difficult years of crisis, opposition and coalition. A widower who had lost two sons in WW1, he was the first Conservative Leader drawn from the middle-class, the first Scot, and the first to be born outside the UK (in New Brunswick).
He is disliked today by some for being a member of that triumvirate of unapologetic Conservative Leaders (the other two being Salisbury and Thatcher), who are perceived as lacking progressive instincts. Critics point to his passionate championing of the Ulster cause before 1914 and his belief in Tariff Reform. However, they ignore his skills demonstrated as a Wartime Cabinet Minister and the pragmatic and effective campaign that he ran in 1922. His quiet, but firmly held, Conservative convictions resonated with the electorate. They are perhaps best summarised in the following quotation from Bonar Law’s election address:
“The crying need of the nation at this moment is that we should have tranquillity and stability both at home and abroad, so that free scope can be given to the initiative and enterprise of our own citizens, for it is in that way, far more than by any action of the government that we can hope to recover from the economic and social results of the war.”