Anyone who cares to read The Great Outsider: The Life of David Lloyd George, Roy Hattersley’s account of the life of the last Liberal prime minister, is led to the unmistakable conclusion that Lloyd George was not a pleasant man. His years seemed to have been marked by a single-minded pursuit of what he wanted, whether in politics, or in his succession of relationships with women.
Lloyd George’s tactic was not to argue on the basis of philosophy or policy, but to launch personal attacks on anyone who opposed him, even if they were within his own party
Single-mindedness brought profound reform, including the groundbreaking introduction of old age pensions, but also brought the destruction of his party.
At the end of the First World War, Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, anxious to retain his position at the head of a National Government, threw in his lot with the Conservatives, splitting his party but retaining the premiership in a coalition.
In the previous, pre-war, General Election, the Liberal Party had won 272 seats against 271 for the Conservatives. In 1918, Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals won just 127 seats, while 36 more were won by Liberals opposed to the Coalition – a net loss of more than a hundred Liberal seats. By contrast, the National Conservatives, led by Andrew Bonar Law won 332 seats with a further 47 seats being won by Tories opposed to the Coalition. From a pre-war situation of parity, the Liberals slipped to one of huge numerical inferiority; a decline from which they have never recovered.
By 1922, there was increasing disquiet within Tory ranks about involvement in the Lloyd George led Coalition Government. The combined Tory Parliamentary strength was 313 members in the Coalition and 65 opposed; Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals were down to 120 seats, with a further 35 non-coalition Liberals in the House.
On 19th October 1922, Conservative MPs met at the Carlton Club to debate their support for Lloyd George. The vote against the Coalition continuing was 187-87. Andrew Bonar Law was invited to form a government and immediately went to the country.
In the General Election of November 1922, the Conservatives, now united, won 344 seats, the Liberals, still divided won 115, the former opponents of the Coalition gaining 62 while Lloyd George was reduced to having a parliamentary bloc of just 53 seats.
There were to be elections in the two subsequent years, the Liberals staged a minor comeback in 1923, when the Conservatives won 258 seats, Labour 191, and the reunited Liberal Party 158. However, a year later, the end of Liberal politics was complete. On 29th October 1924, the Conservatives won 412 seats, Labour 151 and the Liberals a mere 40.
Through subsequent elections the Liberal Party remained a peripheral party, even the collapse of the Labour Party in 1931 did not allow a Liberal revival. By 1945, they were reduced to twelve seats and slipped into single figures in the 1950s and 1960s.
Perhaps the decline was inevitable, perhaps the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s left no room for the Liberal Party, but their long decline dates from involvement in a Coalition government, an involvement prompted by a man for whom politics was about himself.
In some ways he seems not dissimilar from the current occupant of Number Ten. A man in whom the 1922 Committee have been losing their condidence.
