"...the five year "interregnum," as it became known, between the spring 1885 poll and the autumn 1890 election that returned Liberals to power uninterrupted for a generation, was referred to disparagingly by Chamberlain in his later diaries as "the wilderness." Little did he know that the groundwork he laid as head of the NLF and the most popular public voice in the party was more important during the Tory minority government than ever before - indeed, by the summer of 1887, it looked as if Joseph Chamberlain's chance to one day rise to Downing Street in any capacity, let alone as head of government was effectively at an end. Having been boxed out of high Cabinet office under Harcourt - despite his reforms at the Board of Local Government setting the stage for much of the ballooning in British localism during his later Premiership [1] - and now in opposition, Chamberlain grew restless, impatient, and weary of national politics. But he still felt called; the NLF would likely collapse into infighting despite its well-oiled machinery due to his mercurial nature and singular centrifugal nature as leader. Despite both being radicals on the left of the Liberal Party, he severely distrusted Harcourt but also viewed the likelihood of a Childers or Cavendish Cabinet as a disaster in the offing, the former for his reputation for disaster at every Cabinet office he held - whether it be as First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of War or Chancellor of the Exchequer, Childers had been unpopular in every role - and the latter because Chamberlain feared he would be little more than a catspaw for Hartington, whom he could now freely detest without it threatening a Liberal Cabinet. Dilke, for his part, was too flamboyant, radical and confrontational a man, and prone to scandal, to be a future water-carrier for the burgeoning radicalism Chamberlain continued to work to harness; nor could Lord Ripon in the Lords be the future of the Liberal Party, seeing as he was far too sympathetic to Irish nationalist grievances to be sold to the public. No, it had to be Chamberlain then; it had to be he, with the NLF at his back, that led the Liberals out of the jungles and back into government.
For other Liberals, this was madness - Chamberlain was as much a reason for their struggles as a solution, in their view. His party-within-the-party, though an innovation that had powered previous electoral victories and created a forum for new ideas and participation of working class men who might otherwise be tempted by Churchill's paternalist conservatism a la francaise, was to the old guard a threat; Lord Hartington in particular, along with his brother, were quiet movers behind the scenes to head off Chamberlain, whom the elder of the Cavendish brothers still blamed for the failure of the Kilmainham Treaty during the Land Wars, despite Chamberlain helping spearhead it, and the collapse of Hartington's hard-won majority thereafter. The influence of the Cavendish brothers was flexed when the Earl of Granville stepped aside as Liberal leader in the Lords; with the constant fighting between Liberals in the Commons, both amongst leaders like Harcourt and Childers and among the junior MPs, a respected figure needed elevation to leader the party in the Tory-dominant body of peers. Ripon was of course an unacceptable option for his radicalism; the Earl of Stanley, a former Prime Minister, was discounted for his prior Toryism; and Rosebery, of course, was so personally disliked by Hartington that the former PM made sure that his potential leadership arrived stillborn. [2]
It came down to the Earl of Kimberley and the Earl of Spencer, two men whom the grand old man himself, Gladstone, waded in out of retirement to endorse. Gladstone's reemergence in 1887 seemed to further dim Chamberlain's star; the attention afforded Gladstone by his old colleagues, and rumors of Gladstone's potential return to the Commons after five years writing and traveling the world, were a direct threat to the ambitions of Liberal leaders. Gladstone's son Herbert, an MP for Leeds, was rumored to be setting the stage for his father's triumphant return from political irrelevance, furthering deepening divisions among various Liberals; on the matter of hoping the leader who had managed to lose "unloseable" elections a generation earlier stayed retired, Chamberlain and Hartington were in rare alignment. More than anything, though nobody expected the 77-year old Gladstone to position himself as a future Prime Minister, it was broadly seen as an effort for him to become a kingmaker and steer one of his two sons to Downing Street, which Chamberlain was greatly concerned by - not only for his own future endeavors, but for those of his son Austen, who was due to return to Britain from Berlin in the next year and whom Chamberlain pere hoped to steer into a Parliamentary constituency. In the end, coolness from many Liberals dissuaded the elderly Gladstone from making the return, but his brief foray into attempting to return helped tip the preference of leadership of the Liberal Lords to Spencer, whom was viewed as being the somewhat-lesser Gladstonian figure from peers wary of Gladstone's influence. The appointment would be fortuitous; Spencer was a man well-regarded throughout the Liberal Party, an Old Whig but yet not hostile to the Radicals of Chamberlain's wing. He was popular, fair, and had not caused controversy in any office previously held. Most importantly, as Liberals in the Commons devoured one another in the press and in backrooms, he was a steady man at the helm in case the tenuous Smith government were to collapse and the Queen needed to invite him to form a caretaker government.
The rise of Spencer in 1887, then, marked the moment when Chamberlain felt the most depressive about his potential to achieve greatness; with the factionalism endemic to the Liberals of the Commons, Spencer was the clear future Prime Minister should the Tory administration fall. The era foretold by the election of 1878 that Chamberlain had helped usher, of a time when Cabinets would not only be led from the Commons but dominated by them, where popular democracy would power Britain, seemed to be waning; not only was Foreign Secretary Salisbury the clearly dominant figure in the Smith Cabinet despite his travails under the controversial and detested Earl of Carnarvon, now even the Liberals seemed to be sliding back into the clutches of the land aristocracy through their own inability to cooperate on behalf of the people. For the radical, now in his fifties and unsure of his personal future and that of his movement - which was still ascendant in hindsight, if not immediately clear at the time - the outlook was dim. Chamberlain shocked the public when later that fall he resigned his seat in Parliament and announced his intention to travel the world for a year. To the public of 1887, it seemed that the flame of Chamberlainic liberalism had burned hot and bright and fast; the age of the Radical Liberal seemed to be passing, especially with the industrial economy sound and the burgeoning City of London growing wealthier through its investments as ever, a trend that would accelerate even further in the late 1880s boom times, with the Great Depression (outside of poor farming communities overwhelmed by cheap American grain that even tariffs reintroduced by the Exchequer that year could not fend off) seemingly a thing of the past.
Little did anyone know, of course, that Chamberlain would come back from his world tour not to fade further into political obscurity, like his peers Harcourt, Childers, Cavendish and even Earl Spencer all would in time, but to become the dominant figure of turn-of-the-century Britain and one of her greatest and most impactful Prime Ministers..."
- Chamberlain's Britain
[1] A biography of Chamberlain in TTL is hard to write without acknowledging that he's going to be PM eventually
[2] Thus heading off yet another OTL Premiership