3

Years of Consolidation, 1935–39

By the mid-1930s two very different interpretations of the Liberal National party were already in place. According to the mainstream Liberals, the Liberal Nationals were not in fact a party at all. The whole concept was built on sand and the organisation consisted of little more than a collection of self-interested individuals who had betrayed the real party to which they owed their preferment and who were now attempting to deceive the British electorate as to their true credentials. This point of view was well expressed by the Liberal leader, Herbert Samuel, as early as October 1932:

That group was supported by no organisation in the country. It had failed in its attempt to establish such an organisation. It was a plant without root, stuck precariously in the soil; it would not flourish; it would soon wilt and wither. He did not believe there was a single Liberal Association throughout the land outside their own constituencies which would adopt as a candidate for parliament anyone holding the views of Sir John Simon and his friends.1

By contrast, the Liberal Nationals themselves argued that they had as much claim as any other body to the mantle of Liberalism and that their party, supported now by a solid and permanent infrastructure, represented the majority of Liberal opinion in the country. They were performing valuable work inside, and influencing the direction taken by, the National Government, while their former Liberal colleagues had reduced themselves to a position of impotent futility on the opposition benches. When the Liberal National movement had first started, conceded Simon,

most people thought it might be a mere flash in the pan. But at the end of four years the majority of Liberal members who were elected to the present House of Commons were staunch and declared supporters of the National Government, receiving the National Government’s whip, voting in the National Government lobby, and contributing every ounce of their influence and weight to sustaining the National Government’s cause. This had been accompanied by an ever-increasing indication of support of representative Liberals in all parts of the country.²

The events of 1935, and in particular the imminence of another general election, would go a long way to put these rival assessments to the test.

A general election was in the air for most of the year, particularly following the reorganisation of the government in June. That reorganisation itself provided a significant illustration of the administration’s ‘National’ credentials. It was all but inevitable that this would be the occasion for Ramsay MacDonald to step down from the premiership. The Prime Minister’s powers were in visible decline. His eyesight was failing, his ability to concentrate waning and his former oratorical skills in danger of descending into rambling incoherence. ‘His speech seems to have ceased to connect with his brain’, recorded one MP as early as November 1932. ‘He meanders on and on and at the end of a long sentence it is impossible to grasp what the fellow is driving at.’³ It was also inevitable that he should be succeeded by Stanley Baldwin, a step which could not fail to underline the government’s overwhelmingly Conservative composition. Baldwin, noted Simon, would make ‘an entirely acceptable chief – he represents our general outlook completely and there is nothing of the high and dry Tory about him’.⁴ This may have been true, but the significance for the National Government of a nominal Conservative in 10 Downing Street could not be escaped.

It was also highly probable that John Simon would be the leading casualty of any resulting cabinet reshuffle. As one senior minister put it to Baldwin in February, ‘I can’t disguise from you that I don’t think we can carry on with Ramsay as Prime Minister or Simon at the F.O.’⁵ The Foreign Secretary was widely regarded as the weakest link in the higher ranks of the government. ‘As far as I can make out’, Churchill reported to his wife, ‘everyone of every party, official and political, wants to get rid of Simon.’⁶ The argument that a serious situation might result from disturbing the existing balance of party representation inside the cabinet carried less weight than had once been the case. In April 70 Conservative MPs protested against Simon’s continuing tenure of the Foreign Office.⁷ The senior Tory backbencher, Austen Chamberlain, judged that he had become ‘a positive danger … Nobody in any quarter has any faith in him – least of all the Cabinet and F.O!’⁸ Predictably, Lloyd George was also busy arguing that the Foreign Secretary’s removal was essential if the European situation was ever going to improve.⁹

Simon’s failings were now well established. His colleagues noted an inability to devise and carry out a clear-cut policy with undeviating conviction. ‘I wish Simon had more “faith” in himself and in his task’, confessed William Ormsby-Gore, ‘and [did] not think quite so much what so and so in the Cabinet will say. He’s astonishingly gifted, industrious and well meaning – but he’s terrified of “Cabinet instructions”.’¹⁰ He could analyse international issues with perception and set out the pros and cons of every possible policy line. But he could also invariably see the drawbacks of any proposed course of action. The result was often close to paralysis. He suffered, as Eden put it, from ‘too penetrating a discernment and too frail a conviction’.¹¹ Yet in his defence it must be added that Simon faced an unenviable task. It had fallen to him as Foreign Secretary to deal with a crisis in the Far East that represented the first major challenge to the international status quo of the post-war era, and with the advent to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, all at a time when Britain’s military resources were at their lowest ebb. No easy answers existed to the diplomatic conundrums of these years. ‘The truth is’, Simon reflected during his last months at the Foreign Office, ‘that we are living through such difficult times that criticism is the easiest thing in the world and the least useful.’¹²

What to do about Simon, judged Neville Chamberlain, would be Baldwin’s chief difficulty in the construction of the new government.¹³ Discussing the forthcoming reconstruction with MacDonald on 30 April, the Conservative leader argued that the Foreign Secretary would either have to be moved or dropped altogether.¹⁴ A fortnight later he seemed ready to offer him a sinecure office, to ‘look after defence and be Deputy Leader H of C’.¹⁵ In the event Simon did even better. He returned to the Home Office, a post he had briefly occupied during the First World War. Though this rated lower in the ministerial pecking order than the Foreign Secretaryship, steps were taken to emphasise that Simon was not being demoted – ‘done in’ to use Hore-Belisha’s words.¹⁶ The Home Office was now coupled with the deputy leadership of the House of Commons, a position previously occupied by Neville Chamberlain. It was all meant to emphasise the continuing reality of the National Government. Simon had to be kept on board if this idea was to retain any credibility. Liberal Nationals had interpreted the campaign to remove Simon as ‘at bottom another move in favour of a pure Tory policy’.¹⁷ But by the end of May Simon was able to reassure a Liberal National party meeting that he had received Baldwin’s promise that the new premier would maintain the National Government, that the party’s proportional strength in that government would not be diminished and that the Liberal Nationals would have an input into the policy upon which the government would campaign at the General Election.¹⁸ Indeed, it was part of the bargain finally struck with the new Prime Minister that the elevation of a Conservative to the premiership should be balanced by the addition of an extra Liberal National to the cabinet. Ernest Brown now became Minister of Labour. Hearing details of the reshuffle, Leo Amery, still excluded from the government’s ranks, judged that ‘all the emphasis’ had been laid on ‘the retention of the “National” i.e. the coalition character of the Government’.¹⁹ Simon, by contrast, believed that the Liberal National contingent had ‘done so well that they have more than earned their places’.²⁰ The presence of four Liberal Nationals in the Cabinet provided ‘a good basis for the coming [election] campaign’.²¹

But even more compelling evidence that the government’s ‘National’ designation was not merely cosmetic and that the Liberal National components within it were not simply the prisoners of the Tories – not just a ‘poor ration of foie gras on a tournedos rossini’ in Roy Jenkins’s characteristically extravagant metaphor – comes from the attitude of the Conservative party itself.²² Partnership with the National Labour and Liberal National parties enabled Baldwin to lead the Conservatives towards that centre ground of British politics which he himself found most congenial. The price to be paid, however, was growing unease on the right wing of his own backbenches. Many Tories criticised the government for succumbing to the charms of an effete liberalism – what one called ‘MacStanleyism’ – when it was perfectly capable, in terms of its strength inside the House of Commons, of pursuing a straightforward Conservative course. According to Amery, ‘incompetents’ had been put in charge ‘at vital points’ so that ‘the “national” label may be justified’.²³ In like vein the Morning Post complained that the government had ‘departed from some very good Tory principles in the past four years’, while the Conservative journalist Collin Brooks noted growing dissatisfaction with the government’s ‘Socialist character’. ‘There has been little or nothing said to suggest that Baldwin and his colleagues have any faith left in private enterprise.’²⁴ Churchill was more succinct. The country, he asserted, lacked two things. The first, reflecting his low opinion of Baldwin, was a prime minister and the second a Conservative party.²⁵

Right-wing unease focused above all else on the issue of India as the government sought to give legislative enactment to the Irwin Declaration of 1929, which had promised to move India towards Dominion status within the Empire. The Government of India Act, which finally made its way on to the statute book in the summer of 1935, was the single most important – and controversial – piece of legislation put forward in the parliament of 1931. The bill occasioned 1,951 parliamentary speeches, a total of 35½ million words of debate on its 473 clauses, filling more than 4,000 pages of Hansard. India – the jewel of the Empire – was certainly important; but for many it was the symbol of something bigger – an unnecessarily timid and conciliatory brand of Conservatism which derived from contaminating the Tories’ own ideological purity by on-going contract with Labour and Liberal politicians. So the right-wing revolt over India represented more than a single-issue campaign. It became a vehicle for those who wished to return to conventional party politics, or at least to a restructured National Government in which Conservative influence would be more visibly preponderant. As one Tory with recent experience of India had earlier explained, ‘I’m afraid that [the disquiet over Baldwin’s policy towards India] represents the position in our party on many things. Many think that S[tanley] B[aldwin] is weak and woolly, and is letting the Party down.’²⁶ Thus, India was but the starting point for the campaign of Churchill’s erratic son, Randolph, when the latter stood as an independent Conservative candidate in a by-election in Wavertree, Liverpool in February 1935. The younger Churchill began his challenge with an attack on the administration’s policy towards India, but soon broadened it out into an indictment of the National Government itself.²⁷

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One of the first domestic issues facing the new government was the timing of the general election. The process by which a decision was reached on this matter again showed evidence of a collective decision-making structure which indicated that the government’s National credentials were more than merely nominal. Baldwin, MacDonald and Simon still enjoyed the status of the ‘three leaders’ of the government.²⁸ Several members of the cabinet, and in particular the Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, were keen to secure a renewed mandate for a policy of rearmament in the face of a patently worsening international situation. Chamberlain received general support from Simon for the proposition that rearmament should be the central plank of the government’s campaign. But he judged a speech on the subject by the new Home Secretary ‘so vague and nebulous’ that he felt obliged to take the lead himself.²⁹ Despite resistance from MacDonald, now Lord President, and an equivocal attitude on the part of Baldwin, the Chamberlain-Simon line carried the day and an election was called for mid-November.³⁰ Joint policy discussions between Liberal National headquarters and the Conservative Research Department had in fact been going on since the spring. The Liberal Nationals had entered these negotiations warily, worried that once the Tories had a programme worked out they would ‘force [it] down the throats of their Liberal National and National Labour allies at the point of the pistol’. Gradually, however, such fears were assuaged.³¹ The Conservative leadership was still keen to keep its Liberal National allies on board. The ‘Liberal vote’ remained a critical factor in the government’s calculations. By late October Simon recorded that Baldwin, MacDonald and himself were ‘busy on the National Government manifesto’.³²

With hindsight and the benefit of modern psephological analysis another victory for the National Government appears to have been all but inevitable. The size of its majority deriving from its victory in 1931 was such as to render a Labour triumph virtually impossible. The government had defended 48 seats at by-elections during the course of the parliament, of which only nine were lost, and there was no extended period during which the swing to the opposition was sufficiently strong to imply a Labour victory at the next general election. Some of these nine losses, moreover, should have occasioned no surprise. The exceptional circumstances of 1931 had seen the government successful in many Labour strongholds which were always likely to revert to their natural political allegiance in the course of time. It is striking that in only two of the nine seats lost by the government was Labour victorious in constituencies which it had not also won in 1929 – a year in which Labour had done well, but not well enough to secure an overall parliamentary majority. Contemporary Conservative strategists failed, however, to interpret the situation this rationally. By early 1935 the tally of by-election losses had been sufficient to reduce Tory headquarters to a state of near panic. One veteran observer ‘never knew our Central Office people so rattled as they were in February. They looked on no seat as safe.’³³ Such thinking inevitably emphasised the continuing importance of association with the Liberal Nationals in order to attract votes to which mere Conservatives unaided could not hope to aspire. Orthodox Liberals, of course, had a vested interest in denying the truth of such a proposition. Following a by-election in Lambeth, Norwood in March 1935, Baldwin got hold of a report from Lloyd George claiming that National Government candidates were now failing to attract any Liberal support. But the Tories’ Principal Agent, Robert Topping, produced contrary evidence to suggest that one in three of those who had voted Liberal in 1929 were still supporting the government.³⁴ The important thing was ‘to gather to the help of the Tories a large voting strength of Liberals and unattached folk who like [Baldwin’s] sober and sincere accents, and who are afraid of the menace to small owners and investors associated with Socialism’.³⁵ Should the ‘Liberal vote’ be lost, however, then it was believed that the consequences for the government might be catastrophic. As the Conservatives’ Chief Publicity Officer explained a few months before the General Election: ‘Even if the Socialist party did not obtain the support of a largely increased section of the electorate we could still lose the next election or at any rate arrive at a stale-mate position if the bulk of the Liberal vote went over to them.’³⁶

The General Election of 1935 offered the first real test of the Liberal Nationals’ credibility as a national political party. Few of those voters who had offered their support in 1931 had done so in the knowledge or even expectation that they were backing a new force in British politics. The position should now have been much clearer though, as will be seen, lines of distinction remained blurred in some constituencies. Equally, the General Election afforded the orthodox Liberal party the chance to reassert its claim to be the one and only representative of true Liberalism. Yet, as had been the case during the intervening years, the Samuelites remained curiously reluctant to take up this challenge. There were some justifications for this cautious approach. It allowed Liberals to keep up the pretence that the split of 1931–32, like many previous fissures in the party’s history, was no more than a passing family spat and that the Liberal Nationals would one day return, repentant, to the fold. As the Liberal Magazine put it in January 1934, ‘with one or two exceptions the Liberal Nationals are bound in the course of time to reunite with the normal Liberal Party’.³⁷ Furthermore, clashes between the two groups would inevitably split the Liberal vote to the advantage of neither. The result would probably be a further erosion of Liberal strength in the House of Commons. Finally, if Liberals challenged Liberal Nationals but failed to defeat them, the claims of the mainstream party would be discredited and the effect would be worse than if Liberal Nationals had been left undisturbed in their constituencies.

But the policy of peaceful co-existence with the Liberal Nationals also had its downside. Writing as early as November 1932 Archibald Sinclair, the Liberals’ former chief whip and future leader, had drawn attention to his party’s need to stress its claim to be the Liberal party rather than merely one representation of the Liberal creed. ‘If you will forgive me for saying so’, he reminded his leader, ‘we don’t want to be called Samuelite Liberals as opposed to Simonite Liberals, we want to emphasise the fact that we are the Liberal Party.’³⁸ There was a danger that leaving Liberal Nationals in place and unchallenged in constituencies where a significant Liberal tradition persisted could only encourage a perception that the breakaway group was indeed the authentic voice of the Liberal creed, or at least an acceptable version of it. This, of course, was an image which the Liberal Nationals themselves were understandably keen to foster. ‘It must be noted’, their house journal later suggested, ‘that the Liberal Nationals had not split off from the rest of the Liberal Party. The Party as a whole formed part of the First National Government [August – November 1931] and the small section which now forms the Opposition Liberal Group subsequently split off from the Party.’³⁹

Overall, it was the arguments against confrontation which prevailed. Though the ultimate decision on whether to field a candidate rested with each local party association, Liberal headquarters gave no encouragement to oppose sitting Simonite MPs. The party was in any case in no condition to fight on a broad front. Its position in Scotland, where the Liberal Nationals had succeeded in capturing control of the Scottish Liberal Federation during the crucial six months between April and October 1935, was particularly weak. Samuel had spoken optimistically in 1933 of fielding at least 400 candidates to give the electorate a genuine opportunity to return a Liberal government. But with local organisation often crumbling there was no realistic prospect of this happening. When the election came, only 161 Samuelites entered the fray. As a result, the 1935 General Election witnessed just two inter-Liberal contests, in the North Wales seat of Denbighshire West and the two-member constituency of Oldham in Lancashire. Differentiating between Liberals and Liberal Nationals was made no easier by the fact that from late May to the election in November the Samuelite Liberals offered broad support for the government’s defence policy. This made good sense in the context of publicly admitted German rearmament and served to distance the Liberals from the Labour party but, with the election campaign focussing heavily on foreign and defence policy, it made it no easier for the voter to distinguish one version of the Liberal creed from another.

In the event Liberal National candidates contested 44 seats. Nowhere were they opposed by Conservatives. Indeed, Liberal Nationals and Tories worked much more closely together than had been the case in 1931. A letter of support from Runciman to all Conservative candidates had in fact been drafted by Sir Joseph Ball of the Conservative Research Department.⁴⁰ As befitted the leader of a national political party, Simon embarked on an extensive speaking tour which took him from Peterborough to Aberdeen and from Manchester to Devizes. Meanwhile, Lady Simon played a prominent role in her husband’s own constituency of Spen Valley, where she addressed over 40 women’s meetings. Whatever his thoughts about the pressing needs of national defence, Simon chose to focus his own campaign on domestic issues, stressing once again the dangers of socialism. In a radio broadcast he appealed to Liberals to recognise that their political beliefs were broader than the opposition Liberal party and argued that all Liberals could safely place their trust in Baldwin.⁴¹ Simon presented the distinction between the two Liberal groups in terms of their contrasting influence:

A handful of Liberals in opposition, however able and sincere, sniping here, censuring there, with intermittent intervals of pontifical approval, can never influence the course of policy. Inside a government, with responsibility to be shared, they may be a real co-operative element and Liberals in the country can share in that responsibility.⁴²

Speaking at Manchester’s Reform Club on 7 November – a venue whose significance prompted a formal protest from the Manchester Liberal Federation⁴³ – Simon insisted upon his own unchanging Liberalism. Indeed, should the government in future ever pursue an illiberal policy, he pledged himself to oppose it.⁴⁴ It was a message reiterated by many other Liberal National candidates. ‘I stood as a Liberal’, insisted Clement Davies in Montgomeryshire. ‘I was nominated by the Liberals as a Liberal. I remain a Liberal.’⁴⁵

The contests in Denbighshire West (Denbigh) and Oldham were of particular interest. Henry Morris-Jones, the member for Denbigh, had been only partially successful in carrying the local Liberal party with him in his transition to Liberal Nationalism since 1931. A number of local activists, particularly in the Colwyn Bay area, had refused to accept the MP’s change of allegiance. Having survived a number of hostile votes within the local party organisation, Morris-Jones knew that he could take nothing for granted when the annual meeting of the West Denbighshire Liberal Association took place in October 1935. After a ‘boisterous’ meeting lasting for two hours, local Liberals secured the adoption of J.C. Davies, Director of Education for Denbighshire and a former MP for the division, in opposition to the sitting member.⁴⁶ This decision compelled Morris-Jones to come out openly as the Liberal National candidate and to drop the pretence that he was the constituency’s Liberal nominee, although he could still count on the backing of most of the key officers of the West Denbighshire Liberal Association.

In the course of the campaign both Morris-Jones and Davies sought to lay claim to the mantle of true Liberalism. Taking his case to his critics’ stronghold in Colwyn Bay, the former explained his position on what remained the central point of division between the two Liberal factions. He was, he stressed, as much a free trader as anyone present at his meeting and he wanted to see all tariff barriers removed. But the realities of the international situation could not be ignored. In a world which had largely abandoned free trade, it made no sense for Britain alone to persist with it. Morris-Jones, moreover, could claim indirect backing from an unlikely quarter. In launching his so-called ‘New Deal’ proposals, David Lloyd George had called for ‘the implementation of a policy of Protection, the use of tariffs “ruthlessly and to the full” to effect the reduction, and ultimately the elimination, of tariffs in the USA’.⁴⁷ Morris-Jones, of course, was speaking in a part of the country where the former Prime Minister’s influence remained at its strongest. It would have taken a bold man indeed to suggest that Lloyd George’s apparent conversion to the policy of protection deprived him of his Liberal credentials. Morris-Jones was keen to jump on to a parallel bandwagon. One of the constituency’s former Liberal MPs, Lord Clwyd, added his weight to the sitting member’s campaign. Under existing international conditions, explained Clwyd, he was in favour of a National Government and his desire was to strengthen the influence of Liberalism in the interests of peace. ‘I am, therefore, a supporter of your candidature.’⁴⁸ In response, Davies’s campaign centred around his claim that he was the only true Liberal – without prefix or suffix – in the field. He presented the contest as one between Liberalism and Toryism masquerading as Liberalism. But if this was meant to clarify the issue for the electors, Davies tended to undermine his own efforts by also following Lloyd George’s lead on the issue of tariffs. ‘I am and always have been’, he stressed, ‘a free trader, but I quite recognise that under present circumstances free trade is not practical politics.’⁴⁹

As a two-member constituency Oldham offered obvious scope for Conservatives and Liberal Nationals to demonstrate the reality of their political partnership. Recent electoral history, notwithstanding the unique circumstances of 1931, suggested that this was not natural Conservative territory. As a result, although two Conservative MPs had been comfortably returned in 1931, the local Tory association decided in June 1935 to put forward just one candidate at the next election and to throw its weight behind a Liberal National for the second seat, ‘both being supporters of the National Government’.⁵⁰ The credibility of the Liberal Nationals’ challenge and, in particular, of their claim to represent the authentic voice of Liberalism in Oldham, was boosted by the selection of J.S. Dodd as their candidate, for Dodd had unsuccessfully contested the seat for the mainstream party in the General Election of 1929. By the end of October, however, W. Gretton Ward had been chosen as the Liberal candidate for the constituency, satisfying the call of the Oldham Chronicle that the ‘rightful heirs of the Oldham radical tradition’ should not allow the contest to go by default.⁵¹ But the fact that the Liberal party only succeeded in putting one candidate into the field in this two-member constituency raised interesting questions about how Liberal voters would use their second votes.

Dodd and Gretton Ward, together with their respective followers, presented the electorate’s choice in starkly differing terms. The former argued that it would be ‘supreme folly’ to split the anti-socialist vote as, he claimed, had happened when he had contested the seat in 1929. The real struggle was between ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-socialist’ forces and ‘the sooner this is recognised also by those [Liberal voters] who supported him six years ago, the better it will be for the country’.⁵² But Dodd was also insistent that he remained as much a Liberal as he had ever been. ‘We have not changed our opinions in the slightest degree’, he insisted. ‘I am still just the same Liberal I was in 1929 when 20,000 people voted for me. I had not changed my opinions by 1931 and I have not changed them by 1935.’ The first plank of Liberal politics, he claimed, was personal liberty. This was the absolute and direct antithesis of socialism, so a Liberal must be an anti-socialist before he was anything else. And, in the circumstances of the time, the only guaranteed way to thwart the socialists was to support the National Government.⁵³ By contrast Gretton Ward, like Davies in Denbigh, strove to present himself as the only real Liberal in the contest and he revealed that he had received ‘one or two rather tempting offers if only [he] would join a certain other party’.⁵⁴ Ward claimed that the Liberal National candidate was living a lie. He had fatally entangled himself with the Conservatives and, if elected, would be obliged to support measures which no true Liberal could honestly endorse. Indeed, the National Government itself was a deception. It was a Conservative government and, if re-elected, the least Liberal elements within it would dominate its policies and direction even more than had been the case so far.⁵⁵

Such Liberal interventions did not, of course, complicate the campaigns of the remaining Liberal National candidates, enabling them in many cases to draw a continuing veneer of ambiguity over their political affiliation. In Huddersfield William Mabane had succeeded, with only a few voices of protest, in carrying the local Liberal party with him as he moved into the Liberal National camp. Now, insisting that he remained a supporter of the National Government, he was re-adopted with just two dissentients as the ‘Liberal’ candidate for the constituency by a body still calling itself the Huddersfield Liberal Association.⁵⁶ Thereafter, the local Conservatives agreed not to field a candidate of their own and to throw the full weight of their party organisation into Mabane’s re-election campaign. In the industrial seat of Walsall in the West Midlands the path of Joseph Leckie was even smoother. With the full backing of his local constituency party, Leckie’s defection to the Liberal Nationals probably went unnoticed by the majority of those who had supported him in 1931. In essence the MP behaved as a Liberal National at Westminster while posing as a Liberal in his constituency. The Walsall Liberal Association remained affiliated to, and continued to send delegates to meetings of, the National Liberal Federation, the leading organisational body of the mainstream party. Leckie’s re-adoption for the General Election of 1935 was achieved without difficulty. He addressed the Walsall Unionist Association’s annual meeting in March and warned that the only alternative to the National Government’s continuation was a Socialist administration which would herald disaster. By October a provisional agreement was in place to renew the Conservative co-operation which had been offered in 1931. The local Liberal party chairman argued that Leckie had fulfilled all the promises he had made four years earlier and a motion to support him at the forthcoming election was passed unanimously by the Walsall Liberal Association’s General Committee.⁵⁷ In the campaign itself W. Graham, the Labour candidate, did his best to convince voters that their MP had betrayed true Liberalism. ‘What could be more humiliating’, he enquired, ‘than for the once great Liberal Party in this borough to see its representative slink into Parliament with the support and to do the bidding of the most reactionary Tory caucus of all time? What remained of the Liberal Party must not allow itself to be fooled again, as in 1931.’⁵⁸ But no prominent Liberal came to the constituency to confirm this message, while others took a different line. Indeed, Leckie received valuable backing from William Brown, who had himself been the town’s Liberal candidate between 1913 and 1918.⁵⁹

In the rural constituency of Eddisbury in Cheshire the Liberal National MP, Richard Russell, had had only marginally more difficulty in sustaining his position. He was, on the surface, an archetypal Liberal of the Gladstonian tradition – a Methodist lay preacher, staunch opponent of gambling and committed advocate of free trade. The Liberal association in the constituency remained affiliated to the Lancashire, Cheshire and North-Western Federation of the mainstream Liberal party, even though it was clear by 1932 at the latest that the MP himself had thrown in his lot with the Simonite grouping. Over the intervening years there had been repeated rumours that discontented local Liberals would try to organise a new association, loyal to the Samuelite party, but this had never come about, largely because of fear of exacerbating existing divisions within the constituency. ‘There was undoubtedly a strong anti-Russell feeling in the division but leaders who ought to be prepared to act as Officers were not forthcoming.’⁶⁰ Not surprisingly, there was no sign of a challenge to the sitting MP from the orthodox Liberal party as the General Election of 1935 drew near.

No doubt discerning voters in constituencies such as Huddersfield, Walsall and Eddisbury were aware that something significant had happened to the nature of their parliamentary representation. Yet the fact remained that they, along with those of a more limited perception, had only one option open to them if they wished to record a vote for Liberalism of any description when the country went to the polls. In a handful of other seats the position was even more ambiguous. The designation of a few Liberal candidates clearly remained flexible. Henry Fildes, Liberal MP for Stockport 1920–23, had been nominated again for the seat in 1931, despite an equivocal attitude towards free trade and the fact that he would not give a direct answer to the allegation that he was really a supporter of Sir John Simon.⁶¹ In the event he had dropped out of the contest before polling day. Yet in 1935 the Stockport Liberal Association was still keen to secure him as their candidate. Fildes, however, preferred to stand in Dumfriesshire for the Liberal Nationals.⁶² In Bristol North Robert Bernays stood, with the backing of his local association, as an independent Liberal supporting the National Government. He had remained on the government benches when the Samuelites had gone into opposition in November 1933, but had so far resisted the advances of the Liberal Nationals, largely because of a personal antipathy towards Simon whose foreign policy he had frequently criticised in the House of Commons. As he explained to Baldwin, he could not call himself a Liberal National because to do so ‘would involve accepting the leadership of Sir John Simon and, by implication, supporting the manner in which he handled foreign affairs which in fact I deplored’.⁶³ The Conservatives, who had not contested the seat since 1923, could see no purpose in splitting the anti-socialist vote on this occasion, so Bernays was allowed a straight fight against his Labour opponent.

A somewhat similar situation developed in Wrexham. Here the sitting Liberal MP, Aled Roberts, had followed the lead of Herbert Samuel and crossed the floor of the Commons in the autumn of 1933. But the long-term power broker of local Liberal politics, Alderman Edward Hughes, well understood that the party’s precarious hold on the constituency was entirely a function of Conservative support. Since the 1920s, long before the Liberal Nationals themselves had come into existence, he had regarded Labour as the ultimate enemy and had consistently espoused what became the Liberal National analysis of three-party politics – that Liberals in Wrexham could only prevail in electoral partnership with the Tories. With the approach of another general election and amid fears that this semi-industrial seat suffering from high unemployment would revert to Labour control, Hughes therefore strove to bring Roberts round to his way of thinking. ‘If I were in your shoes’, he argued, ‘I would be prepared to take certain risks. I would state frankly that I was a convinced Free Trader but that I realised that tariffs had become an accomplished fact and that the only thing to do – while they so remained – was to fight for a universal lowering of tariff walls and to use our tariffs as a weapon in that direction.’ The MP’s precise party affiliation would, Hughes admitted, be a problem, but ‘I have no confidence in the Samuelite label’.⁶⁴ Though no Liberal National organisation yet existed in the constituency, it was clear that Roberts was being steered towards that party’s stance. In the meantime, following negotiations with the leaders of the local Tory party, Hughes was able to repeat what he had previously achieved in 1924 and secure the withdrawal of the Conservative candidate.

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Polling took place on 14 November. Granted the size of the National Government’s majority in 1931, it was inevitable that it would lose some ground to Labour. But, with an overall majority of 255 seats in the new House of Commons, its position remained secure. Simon, in what would prove to be his last Commons election, scraped home in Spen Valley by a mere 642 votes against his Labour opponent. His band of Liberal National followers returned 32 members, but eight seats held by the Simonites at the dissolution were lost to Labour in constituencies as varied as Shoreditch and the Western Isles. Among successful Liberal Nationals, Richard Russell was returned unopposed in Eddisbury, Leckie defied national trends and increased his majority in Walsall, while Mabane emerged with a considerably reduced but still very comfortable majority of over 13,000 in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, in Bristol North, Bernays, still insisting upon his independence but already in communication with the Simonite leadership, was also returned on a reduced majority. By contrast, Aled Roberts lost his seat in Wrexham. Though no Tory stood against him, the Chairman of the Wrexham Conservative party advised Conservative voters to abstain rather than support the Liberal MP. Labour re-captured the seat with a majority of over 5,000.

It was the first time since the Coupon Election at the end of the War that a government had appealed to the country and been confirmed in power. This Simon attributed to the reassuring personality of the Prime Minister, the success of the government both domestically and internationally (an assessment of his own performance at the Foreign Office which would not have secured universal endorsement), the divisive policies of the opposition and the fact that the concept of a national administration – ‘the way of co-operation rather than of conflict’ – appealed to the outlook of the ordinary voter.⁶⁵ He also took comfort from the fact that proportionately his group had retained its strength better than either of the other components of the National Government.⁶⁶ In fact the situation was more complex. While the tally of Liberal National seats had held up well, the swing to the opposition in Labour-Liberal National contests was almost universally stronger than in seats where Labour opposed the Conservatives. At 16 per cent, the swing away from the Liberal Nationals in London seats was particularly high.

But perhaps of greater importance than the performance of the Liberal Nationals was the continued erosion of the strength of the mainstream Liberal party. The Samuelites were reduced to just 21 MPs, with Samuel himself at Darwen among the defeated along with Isaac Foot in Bodmin and Walter Rea in Dewsbury. In Montgomeryshire one independent Liberal wrote of the ‘pent-up disappointment of genuine Liberals’ who had viewed ‘with dismay and anger the so-called “Liberals” of the Simonite group consistently voting with the Tory majority’ and thereby helping to keep in power a government with just the ‘thin veneer of “National” hypocrisy’.⁶⁷ But while Liberals failed to take up the Liberal National challenge it was difficult to see how this situation was going to be remedied.

In the two constituencies where Liberal Nationals and Liberals did clash it was the former who came out on top. A lively contest in Denbigh turned ‘very bitter’ in its last days and there was talk of a remarkable late swing to the independent Liberal candidate.⁶⁸ In the event, however, Morris-Jones held on. Polling more than 17,000 votes, he had a majority in excess of 5,000 over his opponent. The MP estimated that he had captured something over 7,000 Liberal votes.⁶⁹ The impact of such figures was, Morris-Jones concluded, decisive in what was ‘really a Liberal seat’, one which ‘would – had it not been divided – be the last to fall in the Liberal decline which has come and is coming more’.⁷⁰ The Times made special mention of Morris-Jones’ triumph and, somewhat misleadingly, hailed him as ‘the only Government Liberal who fought a Liberal’.⁷¹ Both Oldham seats were held by the National Government. The Conservative candidate, H.W. Kerr, came top of the poll with over 36,000 votes. Dodd, for the Liberal Nationals, was in second place, 2,000 votes behind and narrowly holding off the challenge of the first of the two Labour candidates. The Liberal, Gretton Ward, with just over 8,500 votes was bottom of the poll and lost his deposit. The vast majority of those Oldham electors who had voted Conservative had also supported the Liberal National. But the most interesting feature of the result was in the distribution of Liberal second votes. It was an indication of the confusion now lying at the heart of British Liberalism that these were well spread out between all the other candidates. Some 3,000 seem to have followed the advice of Lloyd George’s Council of Action and supported a Labour candidate; others used only one of their votes. But enough – 1,138 – went to Dodd to ensure his return to Westminister.⁷² What can only be guessed is the number of one-time Liberal supporters who had accepted the full logic of the Liberal National case and divided their votes between Dodd and his Tory partner, Kerr.

Overall, it was a remarkable achievement by the National Government. For the last time in the twentieth century the winning side had secured more than 50 per cent of the popular vote. Of course, within the sea of almost 400 successful Conservative candidates, the contingent of Liberal National MPs in the new House seems of only limited significance. Furthermore, it is easy to point to the artificiality of even this level of Liberal National representation. It is an open question how many of them could have held on to their seats in the face of a Tory challenge. But such observations largely miss the point. Perhaps as many as 150 of the Conservatives elected in 1931 had owed their success to their ‘National’ credentials. The survival of many of them in 1935 owed much to Baldwin’s ability to convince the country that his version of Liberal Toryism was now firmly entrenched in the vital middle ground of British politics. In this, the Conservatives’ on-going partnership with the Liberal National wing of British Liberalism was of considerable importance, even in constituencies where no Liberal National candidate was standing. The Labour party had secured a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote in 1935 than in 1929, but captured 134 fewer seats, largely because of the capacity of ‘National’ candidates to monopolise the anti-socialist vote, instead of dividing it, as in 1929, between Conservatives and Liberals. The 1935 result suggested that the National Government was still managing to attract a substantial proportion of the ‘Liberal vote’.

*          *          *

The very fact that the Liberal Nationals had fought, and survived, a second general election did much to confirm their claim to be a genuine force in British politics. Nonetheless, the executive of the National Liberal Federation had taken advantage of the election campaign to reiterate Samuel’s charge that such pretensions were illusory. It pointed out that not one of the national or district representative bodies of the Liberal party supported the Simonites. ‘In spite of repeated attempts, Sir John Simon and his friends have always conspicuously failed to obtain any serious support for their proposals to establish either district or national organisations for their followers. They have never ventured to hold a national conference.’⁷³ There were, however, signs that this situation was changing. As Simon confided to his diary, ‘I have been very busy with the Liberal National organisation, which is now greatly strengthened both as regards personnel and funds’.⁷⁴ With the election out of the way such efforts were intensified. The first issue of the Liberal National Magazine was published in March 1936 as a means of propagating the party’s ideas and policies. Its aim was ‘to help in every possible way those who are working for the Party; and to do all it can to stimulate the effects of their efforts among the public’.⁷⁵ A second periodical entitled The Liberal began publication in June. Its title may have been presumptuous, but its slogan, ‘Be an Effective Liberal and join the Liberal National Organisation’, was not without resonance at a time when the mainstream party seemed to have been reduced to impotence. By this time England had been divided up for organisational purposes into nine areas, each with its own local headquarters. A Liberal National Council had been formed in South Wales and one in North Wales was in the process of being established. A Scottish National Council, comprising two district councils with offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively, had already been set up.⁷⁶ The Liberal National Magazine carried monthly reports of the political and social activities of these regional bodies.

The holding of a successful first National Convention in June 1936, attended by over 700 delegates, marked the culmination of a period of intense organisational activity. ‘Conference a great success in numbers and quality’, noted Henry Morris-Jones.⁷⁷ Then, at the end of the convention, around 150 women attended the first meeting of the Women’s Division of the Liberal National Council. The following year saw the establishment of a Liberal National League of Youth. The scope of their organisation, suggested The Times, indicated that the Liberal Nationals were a ‘lively political force’.⁷⁸ By the end of 1936 the Liberal National Organisation had had to take over additional office space in numbers 3, 5 and 7 Old Queen Street. ‘We shall then be in a better position to deal with the rapidly expanding work arising out of the development of our organisation throughout the country.’⁷⁹

Addressing the convention in June, Lord Hutchison justified what was being done. In many of the ‘opposition Liberal’ organisations Liberal Nationals were treated as heretics and had in some cases been ‘excommunicated from the community’. A new organisation was therefore a necessity to accommodate those Liberals who took the view that the only alternative to a socialist regime was a National Government. A succession of speakers insisted that the Liberal Nationals were the true heirs of the Liberal tradition of their forefathers. Simon even quoted Asquith’s words to support his case. ‘Liberalism is flexible’, the great leader had declared back in 1920, ‘adaptable, and brings principles which are immortal and eternal to the ever-shifting growing requirements of a progressive society such as our own.’ These thoughts, suggested Simon, could be the motto of the new party. If other Liberals agreed with this analysis, added Hutchison, ‘then … come along, our organisation will open its door and will welcome you all’.⁸⁰

There were some signs that this was happening. It was a brave Liberal who could discern much future for the mainstream party, now led by Sir Archibald Sinclair. An exercise in rebranding which saw the National Liberal Federation replaced in June 1936 by the Liberal Party Organisation did little to conceal the party’s parlous condition. Facing the prospect not just of continuing decline but of disappearing altogether, it was hardly surprising that many Liberals began to take the Liberal National option more seriously. Among a number of prominent defections that of Robert Bernays, MP for Bristol North, finally announced in September 1936, was the most significant. Some well-known Liberals considered adopting a Liberal National strategy, even if they stopped short of advocating joining up with their former colleagues. According to Lord Lothian, ‘it may prove to be the best, perhaps the only course, for Liberals to join one or other of the two main parties and liberalise from within’.⁸¹

Soon after the General Election, the Liberal party experienced renewed humiliation at a by-election in Ross and Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands. Just 4 per cent of the poll was secured in a seat with a strong Liberal tradition. Within a few months the defeated Liberal candidate, Dr Russell Thomas, had decided to join the Liberal Nationals. He was disturbed by his former party’s tendency to ‘flirt with the Parties of the extreme Left’ in a way that was ‘antagonistic to what is best in Liberalism’. Now that earlier disputes over free trade had largely subsided, Thomas also gave voice to a new division in the ranks of Liberalism, a division which would serve as an increasingly powerful recruiting agent for the Liberal Nationals as the decade progressed:

I feel that their [the Sinclairites’] blind devotion to what is called ‘collective security’ with a tendency to ignore the facts of the European situation, and to hinder the rearmament of our country, shows a lack of realism I can no longer support. Nor can I uphold a policy which may embroil us in war, unprepared as we should be, with, paradoxically, peace as the new casus belli.⁸²

In Wrexham the result of the General Election convinced Edward Hughes that the time had now come to embrace the Liberal National cause without reservation. At a well attended meeting at the Queen’s Hotel, Chester, in June 1936, at which the principal guest was the Liberal National cabinet minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, the ground was prepared for a new divisional association in Wrexham. One speaker explained the situation as he saw it: ‘In East Denbighshire Mr Aled Roberts had unfortunately not felt able to come forward as a Liberal National, and the seat was lost … but he thought it could be won again’.⁸³ A local Liberal National association was duly set up on 14 October with Hughes as chairman.

If, however, Liberal Nationalism were to expand significantly beyond the constituencies of those MPs who had defected back in 1931, the experience of Wrexham would need to be repeated many times across the country. Such an expansion was clearly now the goal of the party leadership. Hore-Belisha used the pages of the Liberal National Magazine to explain the party’s ambitions:

The circumstances in which the Liberal National Party came into being dictated that, although they were a majority of the Liberal members, they were deprived of intimate contact with a widespread, far-flung and long established apparatus of organisation. Consequently they had not the means of acting as the representatives of a vast and vocal electoral opinion, expressed through the usual conferences. Liberal National members had associations in their own constituencies but not in other constituencies. There was therefore no system of recruitment, and it is not surprising that Liberals in many constituencies felt themselves without the opportunities of active and corporate political life. These deficiencies we propose to remedy.⁸⁴

From the spring of 1936 there was considerable evidence of Liberal National growth and development in many parts of the country. In May, for example, a Liberal National association was set up in Yorkshire. It was reported that an active branch association already existed in Sheffield and that it was hoped that this would expand to embrace towns in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, including Chesterfield.⁸⁵ Often the task was eased by the complete or partial collapse of the local infrastructure of the mainstream Liberal party. Liberal Nationals found themselves stepping into an organisational void in which local Liberals were often prepared to support a Liberal candidate of any description. According to a report from the Liberal Nationals’ Northern Area invitations were being received from local associations in constituencies, ‘which have come to be considered derelict from the Liberal standpoint’, to assist them in re-organising their forces.⁸⁶ It seemed to cause little local disquiet when the Liberal National Association in Asquith’s old seat of East Fife celebrated the jubilee of the former Liberal leader’s connection with the constituency. ‘One of the most remarkable features’, noted James Henderson Stewart, the local Liberal National MP, ‘is that it is the old Asquithian Liberals, many of whom were present at the ceremony …, who are the strongest in their support of the principle of National Government at this time.’⁸⁷ It was reported from Llanelly, where Liberals had been the main challengers to Labour throughout the 1920s, that a well attended meeting of the constituency Liberal association had agreed, with just two dissentients, to support a Liberal National candidate at the forthcoming by-election in March.⁸⁸ The situation in many West Midlands seats was very similar:

It is no exaggeration to say that in nine-tenths of the West Midlands constituencies Liberals, denied self-expression in the polling booth, met the socialist menace by giving support to the Government candidate last November. This is satisfactory as far as it goes, but Liberals everywhere are looking for a means of crystallising their strength, and making it effective in public affairs.

Only the Liberal Nationals, it was argued, now had the potential to keep Liberalism itself alive and effective in conditions which would otherwise threaten its extinction:

Twelve months ago it might have been difficult to bring this fact home to the average Liberal in constituencies which are sometimes considered derelict from the Liberal standpoint, but, now the atmosphere has cleared, we find over and over again that we are preaching to the converted.⁸⁹

Speaking in Sheffield, Simon was able to declare that he and his party had now got the organisation ‘necessary if they were going to build up the Liberal opinion of the country in support of broad national purposes as they all meant to do’.⁹⁰ A ‘great power’ was forming, confirmed Hore-Belisha with forgivable exaggeration.⁹¹

Securing a new batch of local Liberal National constituency organisations was, of course, only half the battle. Their impact would be limited unless the Conservatives allowed Liberal Nationals a more generous share in the representation of the National banner than had been the case in the General Elections of 1931 and 1935. This would not be easy to secure. It would mean existing Conservative organisations having to play second fiddle to newly constituted Liberal National bodies, with Tory headquarters always able to take cover behind the autonomy of its local associations in the question of candidate selection. In the wake of the 1935 General Election, therefore, leading Liberal Nationals were understandably keen to maximise estimates of the size and importance of the vote they had delivered on behalf of the National Government. The actual figure secured by Liberal National candidates was around 860,000, but many of these were undoubtedly Conservatives voting for a Liberal National in the absence of a Tory alternative. According to Hore-Belisha and Simon, however, the Liberal National partnership was delivering something like three million extra votes to the National Government’s cause. The calculations used to reach this figure were simplistic, but not entirely devoid of merit:

The National Government in 1935 polled three million votes more than the Conservative Government in 1929. The Opposition Liberal Party polled four million votes fewer than the Liberal Party in 1929. It is not an exaggerated inference therefore that the three million additional votes polled for the National Government were Liberal votes … Indeed, without these Liberal votes there would not be a National Government today.⁹²

But when Hutchison suggested that the true figure might be as high as four million, Sinclair could not resist the challenge. Addressing the Home Counties Liberal Federation, he ridiculed these Liberal National claims:

To arrive at the four million you first take the number of votes cast for Simonites last November (ignoring the fact that probably at least half of these were Tory votes). This gives a figure of 880,000. You divide this by 44, the number of Simonite candidates, and get 20,000 as the average number of votes each candidate polls. You then assume that if Simonites had contested 600 constituencies instead of only 44, they would have obtained 20,000 votes in each constituency, a total of 12,000,000. But you then remember that some of these would have been the votes of your Tory and National Labour allies, so to be on the safe side you divide by three and behold the Liberal National vote is four million.⁹³

At the end of the day, however, it was not the independent Liberals but the Conservative party which needed to be impressed by the Liberal Nationals’ creative arithmetic. Worryingly, there were indications that the Tory leadership were still not thinking of their electoral allies as a permanent feature on the political landscape. Addressing a private meeting of Conservative MPs in May 1936, Baldwin expressed the opinion that the example of the Liberal Unionists in an earlier generation would be repeated and that the Liberal Nationals would one day be absorbed by the Tories.⁹⁴ When Baldwin’s words entered the public domain, his prophecy ‘agitated every honest Liberal National heart’.⁹⁵ The best the Liberal National Magazine could do was to point out that no reporters had been present at the Conservative leader’s meeting and that he might therefore never have used such tactless words. Indeed,

it is difficult to believe that Mr Baldwin can have advocated such a step in view of the fact that he is also reported … to have pointed to the necessity of the continuation of National Government, which would clearly cease to exist were the Liberal Nationals to be absorbed in the Conservative Party.⁹⁶

Perhaps the most forceful statement of the Liberal National case was made by one who had not yet announced his conversion to the party’s ranks. Robert Bernays, the independent Liberal member for Bristol North, wrote to The Times on 20 May 1936 to support the recent call of Lord De La Warr, a junior government minister representing the National Labour party, for a ‘strong centre group’. Bernays declared that, ever since declining to follow Samuel on to the opposition benches in 1933, he had felt the need for some definite and coherent organisation, determined to work within the ranks of the government’s supporters for a searching programme of social reform and the maintenance of the greatest possible measure of collective security. Such policies, he believed, already enjoyed substantial backing. ‘But we have neither organisation nor leadership and so, working in isolation as we do, we are not able to exercise our rightful influence in shaping the programme and policy of the Government.’

Bernays was ready to look beyond the immediate situation. Baldwin, notwithstanding his unguarded reference to the fate of the Liberal Unionists, had so far behaved honourably towards the government’s non-Conservative supporters. But he was evidently nearing the end of his political career. Unwell for much of 1936, the Prime Minister was unlikely to remain in office after the forthcoming royal coronation. His resignation, argued Bernays, was bound to endanger the ‘liberalizing influences in the Government’. Though the succession of Neville Chamberlain was by now widely anticipated, Bernays claimed that it was impossible to foresee with any certainty who would take over in Downing Street, ‘or to what wing of the National Government his successor will incline’. In such circumstances it was vital that the progressive forces supporting the government should do everything in their power to maintain as wide and as united a front as possible to guard against all eventualities. Bernays called for much closer co-operation between the ‘left-wing forces of the National Government’ than had been seen hitherto. This would involve weekly meetings of the Liberal National and National Labour groups to work out a joint line and an agreed speaker on all the important issues of government business. ‘A really powerful group consulting together, acting together, sitting together, bringing their influence to bear upon debates with fire and conviction, would revolutionize the viewpoint of our Conservative colleagues’ and perhaps in time even attract the adherence of left-wing Tories and independent Liberals. But if such steps were not taken, the grip of the ‘hard-shelled Tories’ would progressively tighten and lead to a government stripped of the remaining elements which gave it the right to call itself ‘National’.⁹⁷ Behind the scenes Simon urged Chamberlain to make a public declaration of his own commitment to preserving the broad basis of the government. Simon professed not to doubt that Chamberlain was fully signed up to the National project, ‘but in view of the possibility of a change at the top, I find a certain anxiety in some Liberal quarters lest this may be accompanied by a return to strictly party government’.⁹⁸

The Liberal Nationals’ difficulties were well illustrated with the death in October 1936 of Sir Godfrey Collins, Secretary of State for Scotland and one of the party’s four representatives in the cabinet. Collins was replaced by the Conservative, Walter Elliot. Though the Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, was elevated to the cabinet, Liberal Nationals felt that they were due at least an additional under-secretaryship. Simon’s failure to secure this renewed suspicions of his inability to stand up for his colleagues. Insult was added to injury when the party failed to hold on to Collins’ seat in Greenock. Indeed, there was some question as to whether the Liberal National candidate at the by-election was a Liberal National at all. Vivian Cornelius had stood previously as a Conservative and was to do so again. On this occasion his candidature was approved by the Greenock Unionist Association – two earlier Liberal nominations having already been rejected – before being submitted to the Liberal Nationals. Yet not even Simon’s endorsement of his ‘progressive outlook’ could save Cornelius from going down to defeat at the hands of his Labour opponent.⁹⁹

The Liberal National leader did his best to reassure his party that he had received promises from both Baldwin and Chamberlain that the National character of the government would be confirmed and that the Liberal National quota of posts would not be whittled away. These assurances were ‘explicit and on record’.¹⁰⁰ But Liberal Nationals would have been less content had they known of Chamberlain’s private thoughts on the matter:

If [Baldwin] seeks to buy off Simon’s claims for Liberal advancement by promises to be fulfilled by his successor, he will find an insuperable obstacle. I may or may not succeed him, but in any case I am not going to agree now to anything that would hamper my freedom of action hereafter.¹⁰¹

In the event Baldwin masterfully overcame the constitutional crisis occasioned by the abdication of Edward VIII in December before presiding over the coronation of the latter’s successor as George VI the following May. This enabled him, unusually among Prime Ministers of the twentieth century, to take his leave of the political stage at a moment of his own choosing. The succession of Neville Chamberlain was never seriously questioned. His closest cabinet colleague, Samuel Hoare, urged the Prime Minister-designate to make his government as little like that of his predecessor as possible. ‘Keep the National character, of course’, conceded Hoare, ‘but remember, as I know you will, the solid fact that so far as the House of Commons is concerned you depend on the Conservatives … This being so, I should be inclined to bring in one or two of the right.’¹⁰² Chamberlain was certainly a more abrasive and less consensual figure than Baldwin. Yet fundamentally both men belonged to the same moderate wing of the Conservative party and Chamberlain proved as committed to the concept of National government as his predecessor had been. The new cabinet of 21 contained four Liberal Nationals. Simon moved from the Home Office to the Exchequer; Hore-Belisha was promoted from Transport to the War Office; Leslie Burgin entered the cabinet to replace Hore-Belisha at Transport; and Ernest Brown retained his post at the Ministry of Labour. The one casualty was the elderly Walter Runciman, eased out reluctantly from the Board of Trade which he had occupied since November 1931, and declining to accept the lesser post of Lord Privy Seal.¹⁰³ Simon expressed dismay at Runciman’s fate, but any regrets could only have been based upon clinical calculations of his party’s strength, for the two men had always disliked one another.¹⁰⁴

With Chamberlain also bringing De La Warr from the National Labour group into the cabinet, the new appointments caused some disquiet on the Conservative benches where the feeling existed that the two minority parties were already in receipt of office and preferment out of proportion to their influence and value. The reshuffle, thought Amery, was dominated by no other consideration than giving the appropriate number of places to the representatives ‘of the so-called Parties’. ‘N[eville]’s idea’, he added, ‘is that he wants to impress on the public that he is not swinging to the Right and then pursue his own policy.’¹⁰⁵ Among new junior appointments, one Liberal National gain caused some consternation among the party’s own membership. Robert Bernays, only recently recruited from the orthodox Liberals, was preferred over William Mabane, the MP for Huddersfield who had adhered to the Liberal Nationals since 1931, for an under-secretaryship at the Ministry of Health. Such ‘queue-jumping’ was bound to ‘create much dissatisfaction in the Party’, especially in view of Simon’s admission that ‘the Tories think so highly of [Bernays]’.¹⁰⁶

But the most striking of the Liberal National appointments was that of Simon himself. At the Home Office the Liberal National leader had done much to refurbish his reputation, particularly among his Conservative colleagues, after the difficulties he had experienced in three and a half years as Foreign Secretary. It was a department in which he was fully at home, having served there in Asquith’s wartime coalition in 1915. It also gave scope for his innate liberalism. Though there were only limited legislative achievements, Simon’s Factories Act of 1937 was a welcome and overdue measure of reform, improving safety provisions, fixing a shorter working week for women and young people and ensuring proper lighting and better welfare regulations. ‘At the Home Office’, predicted the Manchester Guardian at the time of his appointment, ‘one would expect to find him a humanitarian and, in a department powerful for either good or evil, a guardian of personal freedom.’¹⁰⁷ But Simon found it necessary to limit that freedom in order to confront the excesses of the British Union of Fascists. He handled the situation wisely and his Public Order Act was passed to general approval, taking much of the steam out of Oswald Mosley’s movement. Of one Commons performance the political correspondent of the Spectator was particularly appreciative:

I cannot recall ever having witnessed a more skilful performance than Sir John Simon’s conduct on Monday of the Committee stage of the Public Order Bill. Always urbane, never at a loss for the right argument, ready to meet points when they were sound, never wavering on essentials, he disarmed his opponents, encouraged his friends and succeeded through a gruelling Parliamentary day in avoiding a division on any of the questions that seemed likely at one time to raise controversial issues.¹⁰⁸

Simon’s most valuable contribution at the Home Office probably came in relation to the Abdication Crisis at the end of 1936. Primary credit must be given to Baldwin, but there were legal and constitutional aspects for which the Prime Minister was not ideally equipped and, according to the Cabinet Secretary, it was Simon as Home Secretary who had ‘become a very great strength to the Cabinet’ and ‘who steered us through the Duke of Windsor crisis and its many pitfalls’.¹⁰⁹ Morris-Jones, generally sparing in his compliments as far as his party leader was concerned, was forced to concede that the Home Secretary had shown himself to be the ‘ablest legal mind we have, an honourable man and a great patriot’.¹¹⁰ It was some testimony to the restoration of Simon’s political standing that, as Baldwin’s premiership drew to a close, the talk was not, as it had been in 1935, of whether the Home Secretary would survive the ensuing reshuffle, but of which great office he would occupy next. Chamberlain had certainly revised the somewhat jaundiced opinion he had held of Simon earlier in the decade. Discussing the forthcoming changes with Baldwin in mid-January 1937, he revealed that he now favoured Simon rather than Hoare for the post of Chancellor. It would, responded the out-going premier, be ‘most valuable’ to have the Liberal National leader fully satisfied.¹¹¹ Simon’s satisfaction was beyond question. His new post brought him, as he took pleasure in pointing out, to the ‘next post to PM’.¹¹²

The consolidation of the Liberal Nationals’ strength within the cabinet did not, of course, resolve the on-going question of their limited parliamentary representation. Indeed, it made it ever more anomalous. Bernays took up this issue again in January 1937. It was vital, he stressed, to preserve a separate Liberal National identity, otherwise the National Government would become ‘a fraud on the electorate’. In this task the Conservatives must play their part:

If the Liberal Nationals are to continue as allies they must be given opportunities for growth and expansion. There must be a more reasonable distribution of seats … I realise the difficulty of persuading local Conservative associations to make any sacrifice in Party representation, but a plain and unequivocal recommendation by the Leader of the Conservative Party, on occasion, when the Liberal Nationals have obvious claims to the seat, would be unlikely to be ignored.

But Bernays went further and seemed to envisage a degree of independence within the National Government alliance to which the Liberal Nationals had not as yet aspired. The group should become ‘a vital Left Wing of the National Government’. The country, he claimed, was essentially ‘Liberal’ and the task of the Liberal Nationals ought to be to work for the progressive Liberalisation of government policy. They must convey to both the government and the country that they were not just the patient oxen of the Conservative party and that there might be moments when they would feel it their duty to retire to an independent position. This display of autonomy would assist the government as a whole by attracting additional non-Conservative voters to the National cause:

It too often happens that on such essentially Liberal questions as the struggle for freer trade, the strengthening of collective security, the need for economy in financial administration, or the threat to personal liberty, the voices that ought to be raised from the Government Liberal Benches are hesitant. Such a position may satisfy the Conservative Whips but it must inevitably be damaging to the Liberal National cause in the country.¹¹³

William Mabane picked up Bernays’ point about parliamentary representation a few weeks later. Writing in the Liberal National Magazine, the MP for Huddersfield argued that co-operation could only be real if, in appropriate constituencies, the banner of the National Government was carried by Liberals and not by Conservatives. So far, however, the progress made in this direction had not been satisfactory. ‘Conservatives are apt to agree with the notion in principle and then suggest that the sacrifice should be made in any constituency but their own.’¹¹⁴

Over the 1935 parliament as a whole there were some superficial signs that the Conservative-Liberal National parliamentary imbalance was being addressed. A National Co-ordinating Committee had been established in March 1933, having among its aims to preserve the identity of the two junior parties in the National Government by finding more opportunities for their candidates or, as many Tories saw it, to give away seats to the Liberal National and National Labour parties.¹¹⁵ Announcements were made that Liberal National candidates had been selected to fight a number of constituencies at the next general election, none of which had been contested by the party in 1935. These included the Clayton division of Manchester, Chesterfield, Dewsbury, Doncaster, Gower, Hackney South, Hanley, Motherwell, Sheffield Hillsborough, South Shields and Swansea East. It was an exercise which rank and file Conservatives looked upon with contempt. After the selection of a Liberal National in South Shields, the neighbouring Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, recorded:

The man Pilkington made a Conservative speech, assured us that he was an out and out supporter of the Nat Govt, supported Neville’s foreign policy, etc. etc. He lead us to understand that he was a man of unimpeachable honour, honest God-fearing etc, – of course I did not like him or his manner of speech – he smelt of ‘Liberalism’ and the lower middle class and chapel – but the South Shields people appeared to be quite satisfied with him and no doubt he is good enough for them.¹¹⁶

But in any case the extent of Conservative sacrifice involved was extremely limited. Both Dewsbury and South Shields had been contested by the National Labour party in 1935; in Gower the government candidate had been described as ‘National’ without further qualification; in Swansea East the Labour member had been returned unopposed. Only in seven constituencies had the previous government candidate been a Conservative and in none of the seats listed had the government candidate been victorious. Granted the strong National performance in 1935, it would have needed an unlikely anti-Labour swing at the next electoral contest for this crop of Liberal National nominations to result in any additional parliamentary strength.

In more promising constituencies the Liberal Nationals had a harder fight on their hands to assert themselves. In the broader interests of the National Government the party probably had no alternative but to stand down in Ross and Cromarty when the sitting Liberal National MP, Sir Ian Macpherson, was elevated to the peerage as Lord Strathcarron at the beginning of 1936. The National Labour minister, Malcolm MacDonald, son of the former Prime Minister, had lost his seat at the General Election and now slipped gratefully into the vacancy created by Macpherson’s ennoblement. But a vacancy in the Conservative-controlled two-member constituency of Preston seemed to offer obvious scope for a division of the electoral spoils, especially as a Liberal had won one of the Preston seats in each of the General Elections of 1922, 1923 and 1929. Without consulting the local Tories, the newly formed Preston Liberal National Association invited Sir John Barlow, a member of a prominent local family and himself engaged in the cotton industry upon which Preston was heavily dependent, to address them with a view to his adoption as their candidate. Preston Conservatives, however, refused to co-operate and brought forward their own nominee, Captain Edward Cobb. Barlow was left with little choice but to withdraw. Relations between the two local parties rapidly deteriorated with the Liberal Nationals warning that the seat might well be lost. Eventually they decided not to take any part in the by-election and announced that the only advice they were prepared to give to the Liberals of Preston was to act according to their own judgement.¹¹⁷ As one activist put it, ‘the Liberal Nationals have given unstinted support to the Government and many of them think that they should have more consideration in the matter of seats. Where there is a double-membered constituency like Preston, surely it would be a graceful and politic act to allow one nomination to come from the Liberal supporters of the Government.’¹¹⁸ Yet it was a sign of the essential reality of power in the Conservative-Liberal National relationship that Simon ended up writing a letter of support to the Conservative candidate, Cobb.

Even in seats held by Liberal National MPs, the party’s continued tenure could not be taken for granted. The death of the Liberal National member for Walsall, Joseph Leckie, necessitated a by-election in November 1938. The Walsall Liberal Association quickly agreed to support a Liberal National candidate, but finding a suitable local man proved no easy task, especially when the association’s chairman refused to accept the nomination. In this situation leading Walsall Conservatives began to press for the adoption of a Tory candidate amid suggestions that a tacit agreement had been reached back in 1931 that the seat would revert to the Conservatives once Leckie ceased to be the MP. On this occasion it was only the intervention of Conservative party headquarters in London which reasserted the principle that Walsall should still be regarded as a Liberal National seat.¹¹⁹ Eventually, Sir George Schuster, a distinguished public servant and colonial administrator, agreed to stand as the Liberal National candidate, even though he had had no previous association with the party.

A similar, but even more difficult situation arose in East Norfolk. A vacancy occurred at the end of 1938 following the succession to the peerage of the sitting Liberal National MP, Viscount Elmley, as Earl Beauchamp. A joint meeting of the East Norfolk Liberal and Conservative Associations on the last day of the year decided by 95 votes to 51 to adopt a young London solicitor, Frank Medlicott, as Liberal National candidate for the impending by-election. Before the joint meeting, however, a separate meeting of the Conservative Association had rejected Medlicott by 89 votes to 83 and, on a show of hands, decided to instruct Tory branches in the division to support J.F. Wright, a so-called Conservative and agricultural candidate. Wright had the backing of a body described as the East Norfolk National Conservative and Agricultural Association which had been formed less than a fortnight earlier. The ostensible reason for this decision was that a ‘Liberal caucus in a purely agricultural constituency is giving the official National “ticket” to a solicitor from London who, it is said, “does not know a cow from a rabbit”!’¹²⁰ Before long, however, rumours abounded that questions of party rather than policy lay behind the opposition to Medlicott. It emerged that, before Medlicott’s selection, E.W. Langford, a former President of the National Farmers’ Union, had been prepared to stand as the Liberal National candidate but had failed to secure the backing of the Norfolk branch of the NFU. Its executive, ‘by the terms of its resolution, made it clear that it would not support him because he is a Liberal National’.¹²¹

Speaking on Medlicott’s behalf Geoffrey Shakespeare described a rebellion on the part of a small minority of Conservatives in East Norfolk, designed to secure a return to party politics under the guise of helping agriculture, and indicated that considerable intimidation had been employed to prevent loyal Conservatives from outside the constituency coming in to help the Liberal National candidate.¹²² Broadening the issue, Shakespeare pointed out that there were currently ‘well over 100’ Conservative MPs who owed their positions to Liberal National support. ‘If a loyal Liberal National candidate was to be thrown over in favour of a minority candidate like Mr Wright, an open opponent of part of Mr Chamberlain’s domestic policy, how could the national unity be maintained?’¹²³ In the end it took a letter to Wright from the Prime Minister himself, together with two meetings between the chairman of Wright’s National Conservative and Agricultural Association and David Margesson, the government’s chief whip, before Medlicott was allowed a free run against his Labour opponent. Even then, considerable bitterness persisted. One of Wright’s leading supporters suggested that the constituency would now be saddled with Medlicott for the foreseeable future with the result that rural and agricultural East Norfolk would, in effect, be unrepresented.¹²⁴ The Times commented on the broader picture:

In every association between parties the numerically weaker allies have always the more difficult tasks. Their strength is hard to ascertain. Their prominence in the Government arouses jealousy, not indeed among their colleagues, but among partisan stalwarts, of whom, even in days when the traditional party divisions are obsolete, there are still many survivors. Short-sighted persons show a vivid understanding of the help which Conservatives render to their allies and total oblivion of the help which their allies may well render to them. But the continuance of loyal co-operation … is essential to a Government whose great strength both at home and abroad is that it can claim to speak for more than one party.¹²⁵

If the Liberal Nationals’ relationship with the Conservatives remained unresolved in the late 1930s, that between the severed wings of the Liberal party showed signs of greater clarification. The new leader of the orthodox party could take little credit for this development. Convinced that the Liberal Nationals had no other option in the long term, Archibald Sinclair believed that the vast majority of them would one day return to the fold.¹²⁶ In any case, he regarded the reunion of the old Liberal party as a far more attractive option than the idea of a Liberal-Labour alliance being canvassed by some of his more left-wing supporters. As late as 1937 Sinclair seemed to rule out endorsing direct electoral challenges in Liberal National constituencies: ‘We at headquarters cannot – at any rate yet – countenance attacks upon seats held by Liberal National members of Parliament. They have not yet done it to us openly, and we should have to consider very carefully before we took the initiative against them.’¹²⁷ In line with the leader’s thinking, the annual Liberal Year Book continued throughout the decade to list Liberal National bodies among the Liberal party’s principal organisations, as if refusing to acknowledge that two separate parties now existed.

Other Liberals, however, were more ready to accept reality and thereby to try to regain the initiative in Liberal politics. An important step was taken with a motion moved at the National Liberal Federation in June 1936 by the Oldham Liberal Association, still smarting from its experience at the polls the previous November. The motion, incorporated in the Liberal party’s new constitution, said that no constituency Liberal association should be entitled to affiliate or adhere to any other political organisation, the object of which was to secure representation for its members in parliament. It was clearly designed to smoke out those local organisations which had maintained the semblance of continuing to belong to the Liberal party, while in practice giving support to an MP who had defected to the Liberal Nationals. The result was an increasing trend to re-establish Liberal associations in constituencies where for several years Simonite organisations had been able to claim that they were the only representatives of organised Liberalism.

One of the first to be affected was Walter Runciman’s seat of St Ives in Cornwall. Feelings ran high as a result of Runciman’s decision during the 1935 General Election to speak on behalf of John Rathbone, the victorious Conservative candidate in neighbouring Bodmin, thus helping to secure the defeat of the local Liberal grandee, Isaac Foot. Foot was then instrumental in the creation of an independent Liberal association in St Ives, spurred on by knowledge of the failing health of Runciman’s father, whose demise might soon catapult the sitting member into the House of Lords and precipitate a by-election. The potential for an escalation of inter-Liberal conflict was evident. Learning of the growing opposition within his constituency, Runciman shared his thoughts with Lord Hutchison at Liberal National headquarters: ‘the moment has arrived for the Samuelites to be reminded that if I am attacked in St Ives we cannot leave Dingle Foot [Isaac’s eldest son] to sit uncontested at Dundee. I hate the idea of reprisals, but I fear it is inevitable.’¹²⁸ In fact Dingle Foot took the initiative himself by coming to speak against Runciman in St Ives. According to the local Liberal National agent he had thereby broken a tacit understanding, observed by all types of Liberal MP for the past five years, and created a precedent ‘which he may sincerely regret’. He was ‘the first Liberal Member of the House of Commons to speak in another Liberal Member’s constituency at a meeting called to oppose the sitting Member’.¹²⁹

In the event, Runciman moved to the Lords with a viscountcy after being dropped from the cabinet in May 1937. The resulting by-election, a straight fight between Alec Beechman for the Liberal Nationals and Isaac Foot for the Liberals, served as a defining moment in the relationship between the two parties. Both men could claim impeccable Liberal credentials. Foot, an unyielding opponent of protective tariffs, had been elected to parliament at his fifth attempt as member for Bodmin in 1922. Losing his seat in the Liberal disaster of 1924, he returned to parliament in 1929 and continued to represent Bodmin until defeated in 1935. Beechman won the Military Cross and received nine wounds in 15 minutes at Passchendaele. After the war he went up to Oxford where he was the first post-war undergraduate president of the Oxford Liberal Club, before being nominated as Liberal candidate for Oldham in 1931. Though Foot’s Liberalism was deeply rooted in Cornish Methodism, it was by no means clear that his commitment to free trade was still the asset it had once been. Cornish market gardeners had prospered under safeguarding duties, while local quarrymen had also seen the benefits of a tariff on imported stone. But for most electors the main issue seemed to be support for or opposition to the National Government. In a close contest Beechman retained the seat for the Liberal Nationals by just 210 votes. Significantly, it was widely remarked that the seat could not have been held by a Conservative and that Foot’s challenge could not have been resisted except by a Simonite ‘on a very advanced programme’.¹³⁰

The revival of independent Liberalism in Huddersfield was rather less dramatic. The sitting Liberal National MP, William Mabane, had for several years skilfully muddied the waters as far as his precise party affiliation was concerned, even persuading the local Liberal association to maintain its subscription to the Liberal Party Organisation. But discontent had been mounting for some time and came to a head when, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Liberal Nationals in February 1939, Mabane proposed the creation of a Liberal National association in every constituency in the county. This was bound to mean that several existing Liberal associations, loyal to the mainstream party, would now be challenged by rival organisations. Such a clear display of Mabane’s loyalties was hard to ignore and, when the following month he came to address the annual meeting of what still called itself the Huddersfield Liberal Association, he was roundly condemned by Ernest Woodhead, himself a former Liberal candidate for Huddersfield, in the course of what was supposed to be a vote of thanks to the MP. A meeting of independent Liberals was arranged for early April where Ashley Mitchell, a veteran of four electoral campaigns in the Liberal interest, declared that the present situation in which there was ‘no Liberalism in Huddersfield at all’ could be tolerated no longer. With support offered from party headquarters in London, it was agreed with just one contrary vote to create the Huddersfield Borough Liberal Association – the Liberal Nationals would not relinquish the title ‘Huddersfield Liberal Association’ – and to affiliate the new body to the Liberal Party Organisation. Under the headline ‘Liberalism Resurgans’ the Huddersfield Daily Examiner enthused at the ‘sense of a spring released, of Liberalism, stifled and repressed, rejoicing to find expression’.¹³¹

In many other constituencies, however, it proved harder to re-establish an orthodox Liberal identity after several years of inactivity. In Huntingdonshire, held by the Liberal National MP, Dr Sidney Peters, a Liberal association was revived with new rules in August 1936 and immediately affiliated to the Liberal Party Organisation. Two years later, however, the majority of local branches were still ‘not functioning very well’. The constituency party secretary had repeatedly urged ‘old friends’ to get moving, but the inevitable reply was that, until there was an independent candidate in the field, they did not see any prospect of holding gatherings of any sort.¹³² The position had not improved by 1939, with the secretary reporting that the association was ‘still in a state of “suspended animation”’. The President explained that ‘there was no doubt their inactivity lay in the fact of the divided Liberalism that was unfortunately in existence not only in this county but elsewhere … there was no doubt it was the reason for Liberalism being so weak’.¹³³ In Montgomeryshire it was suggested that the position of the sitting Liberal National MP, Clement Davies, was ‘anything but secure’.¹³⁴ Yet in the summer of 1938, when the Liberal branch associations in the county were canvassed as to whether they would prefer to affiliate to the Liberal Party Organisation or to the Liberal National Organisation, it was reported that the majority did not reply, ‘as they were really indifferent and had not functioned for several years being really unorganised’.¹³⁵

In Simon’s seat of Spen Valley the Liberal party’s 1936 resolution to exclude from membership associations affiliated to the Liberal National Council at least helped to clarify the situation. The Spen Valley Liberal Association now formally affiliated to the Yorkshire Liberal National Area Council and to the Liberal National Council in London.¹³⁶ But there were no corresponding signs of a revival of independent Liberalism in the constituency and it was admitted that many disgruntled Liberals had already been driven into the ‘Socialist fold’. The best advice on offer to ‘all Liberal-minded people who wish to help promote real Liberal ideals’ was that they should send whatever subscription they could afford and appeal for personal membership of the Liberal Party Organisation.¹³⁷ Similarly, suggestions of a Liberal revival in Southampton proved exaggerated. Writing in the December 1936 issue of the Westminster Newsletter, Ramsay Muir reported that orthodox Liberals had won back control over the Southampton Liberal Association. In fact, a sparsely attended meeting had decided by a majority of just one not to affiliate to the Liberal National Organisation. Hearing this news, the sitting Liberal National MP, Sir Charles Barrie, summoned another meeting at which he won a vote of confidence from about 70 of the 80 members present. Then, early in the New Year, the association duly voted to affiliate to the Liberal National Organisation.¹³⁸ Two years later the local Liberal National secretary was noting a ‘wonderful advance’ in the membership of the various ward committees.¹³⁹

In some instances local Liberals still seemed to look upon the Liberal Nationals as temporarily estranged colleagues rather than as potentially deadly rivals. When in March 1938 a proposal was brought before the General Council of the Manchester Liberal Federation to omit the name of a known supporter of the National Government from the federation’s list of vice-presidents, the president drew a persuasive, but misleading, parallel with earlier times:

Those who remembered the difficult times between 1918 and 1922 would remember the prominent and noble part played by the Manchester Liberal Federation in bridging the difficulties between one section of Liberals and another. The toleration displayed at that time largely led to the reunion of the Party with an increase in its House of Commons membership. The President thought it would be a great mistake if the Federation took any action which would make it more difficult for any section of the Party to return in the future.¹⁴⁰

By a substantial majority vote the Liberal National vice-president was allowed to retain his post. Elsewhere, any hope of clarifying the distinction between the two Liberal parties was compromised by the growing tendency of Liberal councillors to join forces with the Tories in anti-socialist municipal alliances. When orthodox Liberals behaved in this way in local government, their protests at the Liberal Nationals for acting similarly on the national stage carried little conviction. More importantly, it was scarcely surprising if the average Liberal voter remained confused.

By the second half of the decade contrasting attitudes towards the National Government’s foreign policy were serving to consolidate the distinction between Liberals and Liberal Nationals. The closing of ranks in this matter in the early months of 1935 did not long survive the General Election in November. The government’s apparently cynical abandonment of the League of Nations at the time of the Hoare-Laval crisis in December was bound to result in renewed lines of division. The clear opposition to appeasement demonstrated by leading Liberals, including Sinclair himself, has subsequently attracted understandable commendation.¹⁴¹ At the time, however, Sinclair’s stance served as a catalyst for further defections to Liberal Nationalism. In Wrexham Edward Hughes, soon to set up a local Liberal National association, was brutally frank in his readiness to sacrifice Abyssinia in order to avoid war. ‘Things are looking black this morning’, he wrote as the crisis approached its conclusion. ‘I hope the Government will steer clear of a War this week and not involve this country in complications in the interests of a lot of Niggers in Abyssinia.’¹⁴²

By 1938 Chamberlain’s increasingly personal diplomacy, culminating at the Munich Conference in September in the sacrifice of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland in a vain attempt to satisfy Hitler’s appetite for territory and aggrandisement, was polarising opinion across the country as a whole. But not all Liberals rallied behind the party’s official stance. Well known figures such as the journalist J.A. Spender and even the party’s former leader Lord Samuel openly backed the Prime Minister. Trying, unsuccessfully, to attract a new recruit, Simon wrote to Spender, justifying the government’s position in explicitly ‘Liberal’ terms:

I am very greatly distressed at the line taken, and still more by the general attitude shown by the Opposition Liberal rump in the Commons. Anyone would think they had never heard of Asquith, and they apparently are quite ignorant of the circumstances in which Czecho-Slovakia was created – as part of a French plan to keep Germany under control … I am always repeating to myself Asquith’s watchword of ‘Patience’ and indeed the most remarkable personal aspect of this whole business has been the quite amazing patience and self control which Chamberlain has shown.¹⁴³

Chamberlain even offered Samuel a seat in the cabinet. This advance was also resisted, but the Liberal Nationals did derive some advantage from Munich when Runciman was recalled to the government, at the expense of the Tory Lord Hailsham, as a reward for his efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Czech crisis.

If Spender and Samuel managed to remain within the ranks of the mainstream party, Munich did prompt one high-profile defection to the Liberal Nationals. In Bradford South the sitting Liberal MP, Herbert Holdsworth, had become increasingly critical of his party’s stance on issues of foreign policy. In the wake of the Munich settlement, he took the plunge, justifying his action in an open letter to Sinclair:

The Prime Minister needs the goodwill of all if he is to succeed and I am forced to the conclusion that it is my duty to offer him my support in his efforts to attain ‘Peace for our time’. With this purpose in mind I intend to apply for the Liberal National Whip … I supported the actions of the Prime Minister in the agreement reached at Munich. I am convinced that the alternative to that agreement was war. You obviously believe otherwise.¹⁴⁴

Holdsworth was unable to take his constituency party with him. The South Bradford Liberal Association remained under the control of the Sinclairite party, but many prominent activists put loyalty to their MP before commitment to the party in whose interest he had twice been elected. Furthermore, the Bradford Telegraph and Angus urged caution upon those Liberals who now wished to challenge the sitting MP at the next election. They

will now have to make up their minds as to whether they will oppose a man who is still a Liberal and by so doing let in a candidate who is not a Liberal and who is opposed to the fundamental beliefs of Liberalism. For although Mr Holdsworth finds himself at variance with certain of those who were his Liberal supporters, he still professes belief in Liberalism.¹⁴⁵

Even where support for appeasement did not provoke further defections to the Liberal Nationals, it could still have the effect of weakening efforts to revive independent Liberalism. By the end of 1938 the former MP and now President of the Montgomeryshire Liberal Association, Lord Davies of Llandinam, was leading the opposition to the sitting Liberal National member, Clement Davies or, in the MP’s words, ‘playing dirty and holding the Liberal Caucus while I was away in Africa’.¹⁴⁶ Lord Davies was keen to bring matters to a head in advance of the General Election which, it was widely anticipated, Chamberlain might now call to cash in on the wave of emotional relief which swept the country in the wake of Munich. But when it was decided to seek clarification of the MP’s views, not all members of the Montgomeryshire Executive were ready to agree. According to one, ‘it was everyone’s duty to support the present Government in their policy of Appeasement’.¹⁴⁷

The Liberal Nationals’ relationships with the Tories on the one hand and with the orthodox Liberals on the other figured prominently at their national gatherings in the last years of the decade. The party’s annual conference in 1937 at the Central Hall, Westminster, saw Simon claim that a new Liberal party had been created on the ruins of the old, while Lady Runciman, chairman of the Women’s Division, pointed to the extraordinary ‘Liberalization’ of the Conservative party.¹⁴⁸ But Runciman himself, now elected President of the Liberal National Council, reminded delegates that Liberal Nationals were determined to retain their distinctive identity and not be swallowed up inside Conservatism. On the following day a resolution was adopted stating that the number of Liberal National MPs was in no way proportionate to the volume of the government’s Liberal supporters throughout the country. Edgar Granville, MP for the Eye division of Suffolk, regarded the resolution as ‘most constructive and most helpful’. The future of the party depended, he said, on preserving its identity on conditions of equal partnership in the government. He understood that it had around 50 candidates selected for the next election, but suggested that the figure ought to be 150, a call backed by James Henderson Stewart, MP for East Fife.¹⁴⁹

Speaking at the Scottish Liberal National Association’s conference in the autumn, Simon insisted that the old political battles were a thing of the past. The contests of the future would not be between old-style Conservatism, which had been completely transformed over the previous 20 years, and the old Liberalism, which remained stuck in its trenches, unable to move and forgetting that the very essence of Liberalism was that it was a movement.¹⁵⁰ He took up again the theme of the transformation of the Conservative party at the Liberal Nationals’ annual conference in June 1938, their last before the war. Speaking with the authority of one who had sat in the great Asquith cabinet before 1914, Simon suggested that the National Government’s achievements in terms of social reform did not suffer by comparison with those of the earlier administration. It was certainly a bold claim. But the National Government’s record in slum clearance, raising the school-leaving age to 15, extending pension and unemployment provision, bringing the royalties from coal-mining into state ownership, and passing a Factory Act and a Holidays with Pay Act was certainly creditable in the economic circumstances of the 1930s. Simon teased his ‘old Liberal friends’ who had dissociated themselves from these achievements. Like those Englishmen who had missed the Battle of Agincourt, ‘Liberals in England now abed must think themselves abashed’.¹⁵¹

*          *          *

By the coming of war in September 1939, therefore, the Liberal Nationals had become an established feature on the political landscape. Some doubts persisted. Henry Morris-Jones was worried about his dependence on Conservatives in Denbigh. Hore-Belisha, notwithstanding his public pronouncements, saw no long-term future for the party and spoke privately of the eventual need for fusion with the Conservatives. Certainly, Liberal Nationals had to be careful about straying too far from the Tory line. Almost unnoticed, a Liberal National policy statement published in January 1938 contained a commitment to provide pensions for spinsters at the age of 55. When a Labour spokesman drew attention to this point in the House of Commons, the Liberal National leadership had to back-pedal as elegantly as it could. ‘Ministers forming part of the Government’, explained Runciman and Hutchison, ‘naturally endorse the policy adopted by the Government to which they belong, and no other.’ But this did not prevent members of the party holding ‘more advanced’ views than those which the government with its wide-ranging responsibilities felt able to put forward.¹⁵² Even more strikingly, Captain Frederick Boult, the prospective Liberal National candidate for Hanley in the Potteries, was asked to stand down after proposing a vote of thanks to Simon in which he allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him and said he looked forward to his leader becoming Prime Minister. ‘My language was too flowery’, he later explained, ‘and in addition I stated that I looked forward to seeing Sir John Simon in course of time Prime Minister. But I only meant when our present Prime Minister decides to lay down his burden.’¹⁵³

Overall, however, the mood was one of optimism. In terms of Liberal politics the impetus was with the Liberal Nationals rather than with their rivals in the mainstream party. The attitude of local Conservative associations still posed a serious barrier to further significant expansion, but the fact remained that the party was now active in more constituencies than ever before, and it approached the next General Election, scheduled for 1940 at the latest, with some degree of confidence. By-election results suggested a third successive victory for the National Government in which the Liberal Nationals could at least expect to maintain their position. The threat of absorption into Conservatism, earlier hinted at by Baldwin, no longer appeared to be on the immediate political agenda. In April 1938 Neville Chamberlain made a public statement that he hoped to see the present association of parties continuing ‘for the rest of our political lives for the benefit of the country and, I hope, the world’.¹⁵⁴ By contrast, the position of the Sinclair Liberals remained precarious. A mini-revival in the party’s electoral fortunes in 1937 proved to be no more than a typical mid-term reaction against an incumbent government. Many of their remaining parliamentary seats were vulnerable to even a moderate swing of the political pendulum. It is thus at least a plausible proposition that, but for the advent of war, the Liberal Nationals might have succeeded in displacing their rivals as the leading exponents of the Liberal creed, a position many were in fact already claiming. Pointing to renewed signs of division among Sinclair’s followers over the government’s National Service Bill, the Liberal National Magazine in May 1939 confidently predicted that ‘the small minority of Liberals still in opposition’ would soon rejoin ‘the main body … under Sir John Simon’s leadership’.¹⁵⁵ By this date the Liberal Nationals were increasingly inclined to refer to the orthodox party as the breakaway group, the band of Liberal MPs who had not stayed with the concept of National Government to which all had subscribed back in 1931.

In contrast to the increasingly moribund infrastructure of the orthodox party, the Liberal Nationals were quietly gaining in strength. Increasingly, the party was getting involved in local elections with activity reported in such constituencies as Luton, Norwich, Oldham, Plymouth and Pontefract. Negotiations were in progress in the early months of 1939 which, it was hoped, would result in an additional number of the party’s candidates being adopted in Scotland. Outside parliament, attempts were being made to build for the future. It was reported that membership of the Liberal National League of Youth was increasing ‘very rapidly’ in the London area. ‘Meetings of a political and social character are held weekly. Some of the branches have organised football teams, darts teams, keep fit classes and debating circles.’¹⁵⁶ A Liberal National Forum was established in the autumn of 1937 to provide opportunities for the discussion of topical issues by party supporters during the winter months. The first address was given by the novelist, C.S. Forester, on ‘The Spanish Conflict and its Implications’. The Forum would survive, with an interval for the war, for the next three decades.

These domestic developments were, of course, played out against the background of an ever-worsening international scene. The Liberal Nationals remained throughout staunch defenders of the government’s policy of appeasement. In time this would redound to their considerable disadvantage, as a simplistic analysis of the complex problems of the 1930s branded all supporters of the National Government in a blanket indictment as ‘guilty men’ for having brought the country to the very verge of military disaster.¹⁵⁷ When Chamberlain returned from Munich, rashly predicting ‘peace for our time’, Hutchison issued a statement on behalf of the Liberal National Organisation expressing ‘grateful thanks’ for the Prime Minister’s ‘untiring efforts for peace’ and ‘congratulations’ on his ‘marvellous achievement’.¹⁵⁸ In the parliamentary debate on the Prime Minister’s agreement with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, William Mabane made one of the more effective defences of the government’s actions.¹⁵⁹ Robert Bernays claimed to have gone through ‘great mental agonies’, but eventually pulled back from resigning his junior office.¹⁶⁰ Opinion in the party, as in the government as a whole, began slowly to change as evidence mounted of the full extent of Hitler’s intentions and of the true nature of his regime. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Liberal National Magazine noted that the Führer’s ‘violent measures against all the Jews in Germany have shown that racial passion counts for more with him than British friendship’.¹⁶¹

When the war crisis arrived the following September, Simon played an important, if at the time largely unappreciated, role. Germany invaded Poland in the early hours of 1 September, apparently activating the British guarantee of Polish independence, but for the next two days Chamberlain appeared to hesitate. He was anxious to synchronise declarations of war with the French, but the suspicion was inevitably aroused that he was looking for a Munich-style solution to this latest act of Nazi aggression. By the evening of 2 September, something like half the cabinet was in a state of open revolt and looking to Simon to make their views known to Chamberlain. ‘The language and feeling of some of my colleagues were so strong and deep’, noted Simon, ‘that I thought it right at once to inform the Prime Minister.’¹⁶² Brushing aside the objections of the French ambassador, Simon insisted that, by the time parliament met at noon on the following day, it was imperative that Chamberlain should be in a position to make a definite announcement – either that Hitler had agreed to withdraw his forces or that a state of war existed. It was thus at the Chancellor’s suggestion that the expiry of the British ultimatum to Germany was fixed for 11 a.m. ‘So ended this remarkable day’, recorded Simon, ‘the last day of peace, possibly, that I shall ever see.’¹⁶³ In this last prediction he was unduly pessimistic. It was not, of course, a moment to consider the implications of the situation from a party point of view. But those implications were nonetheless real. Existing lines of political development were now diverted; the General Election anticipated for the autumn of 1939 or the spring of 1940 never took place; the Liberal Nationals’ annual conference scheduled for Harrogate in September was cancelled; and the circumstances that had brought the party into being nearly a decade earlier soon receded into an earlier age.