Fumbling through the Wilderness - a TL from 1918

[Lyndhurst]

Prologue - The Liberal splinters and the coupon election of 1918

In its British form especially, political liberalism has never survived as a monolith force. A loose coalition of interests characterised by a fierce individualism, to lead it meant not just shepherding a flock as stopping every member running in ten directions at once. Its future always seemingly in the balance, it had never looked bleaker for those Liberals not aligned to David Lloyd George’s Coalition when the general election results were declared on the 28th December 1918.

Lloyd George had, in alliance with discontents in his own party and with Unionist backing, replaced H.H. Asquith as Prime Minister in the winter of 1916 in the hope of providing more robust leadership in the First World War. Although Asquith had become increasingly ineffective as a wartime leader, he remained as the official leader of the Liberals, meaning much of the party machine stayed under his control. Lloyd George was thus in the paradoxical position of being a Liberal who lead a government but not his own party.

Although many contrasted the two men, Asquith and Lloyd George were surprisingly similar. They were both proud, gifted, hardworking men, moved by powerful emotions. It really came down to a question of decisiveness, and Asquith fell fatally short. He clung on to the leadership out of spite, but as he steadily waned in influence he failed time and again to assert himself. The non-Lloyd George Liberals chafed under a reluctant figurehead, casting their hopes around for a saviour. The new Prime Minister appeared far more dynamic and energetic than his predecessor and soon became convinced that the old partisan divides were irrelevant in a world that had endured the slaughter of the Great War. The way forward was to unite those Liberals and Unionists who came under his banner into a new force.

The advantages of a Lloyd George-Conservative alliance were multiple: it meant giving the Prime Minister a solid political base, since there was no way back to the official Liberal Party for him. It also suited the Conservative and Unionist Party; they would permit a Liberal to continue in office but the power belonged to them. They could cash in on the Prime Minister's great prestige as the Man Who Won the War and cynically use him as a shield to defend Unionist policies when the time came. A divided opposition would only benefit them.

And yet, David Lloyd George could be surprisingly sincere when he wanted to be. He struck up an effective working relationship with his nonimal deputy, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, and the man who had permitted Lloyd George to form a government in the first place. The two both hailed from relatively humble, provincial backgrounds, both were non-English, both had made their fortune rather than inherited it.

Going into the 1918 election together, in the heady atmosphere of victory, the two of them knew they had secured an enormous mandate. All Coalition Candidates had received a letter of personal endorsement from Lloyd George and Law, dismissively referred to by Asquith as a "coupon". The results were going to be declared on 28th December to account for soldiers still oversees, but for the non-Lloyd George Liberals, the doom and despair hung over them terribly. After a bitter and ill-tempered campaign, Asquith's certain defeat in East Fife symbolised to many the last rites of independent Liberalism as a great vacuum would emerg on the centre-left, to be filled by rampant socialism or by a Lloyd George Liberal Party when the Conservatives tired of him, when they rejected the hypocrite, the betrayer.

---

It was in this poisonous atmosphere that as he awaited his certain electoral doom, Asquith suffered a devastating stroke on Christmas Day. The last few years had brought personal ruin and although he was bitterly tempted to outlast Lloyd George, he knew he was finished. He was no Gladstone, a dominating leader who overcame division to lead his Party back to power. There would be no Liberal revival. The crushing defeat for the independent Liberals announced a few days later confirmed, and then worsened the deepest fears: only 29 non-couponed Liberals scraped through. Only 3 had any government experience in minor cabinet roles. All the great Liberal personalities that had not joined Lloyd George were defeated: Reginald McKenna, John Simon, Herbert Samuel, McKinnon Wood among them.

For the shattered and demoralised Independent Liberals it all seemed to be over. The abyss of irrelevance beckoned.

Or so it seemed.


OOC: This is my first timeline so I hope you forgive my prose, comment, and enjoy what I have planned! Any questions are welcome.

 

[Lyndhurst]

Between the end of WWI and the first Labour government of the 1920s, the 1918-22 parliament tends to be forgotten. The behemoth Coalition government had largerly no opposition. The Labour party technically held more seats than the anti-Coalition Liberals, but Labour were reluctant to press their claim as the main Opposition Party, suggesting a reticence to take part in government. Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition was counted to be Donald Maclean, appointed by Asquith as "sessional chairman" until he could return to the Commons at a later by-election. Roy Douglas in The History of the Liberal Party 1895–1970 that "the technical question whether the Leader of the Opposition was Maclean or William Adamson, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, was never fully resolved. ...that Adamson did not press his claim for Opposition leadership is of more than technical interest, for it shows that the Labour Party was still not taking itself seriously as a likely alternative government".

The explosive defeat in the 1918 election was followed by four years of confused turf war between the Liberal factions. Although the anti-Coalition Liberals are commonly called "Asquithian", I think this term confuses the matter. The Independent Liberals accepted Maclean as their Parliamentary leader, but they appointed their own Whip (a kind of parliamentary facilitator) to serve alongside the one Asquith had appointed. Many leading anti-Coalitioners were pressing Asquith to resign in the early months of 1919 when he remained very unpopular, and he served as a reluctant figurehead until his return to Parliament at the Paisley by-election of 1920.

Even then, his leadership still lacked energy and focus, and by 1921 many Independent Liberals were either seeking reunion with Lloyd George-ite Liberals (since they vastly outnumbered the Independent Liberals in the Commons, and Lloyd George had stature and drive), or agitating for a new leader such as John Simon or even Maclean himself. The designation of "independent" Liberal is also not 100% accurate, since some uncouponed Liberals (such as George Lambert) inclined towards the Coalition, some (T. Bramsdon of Portsmouth Central) had been elected by promising >not< to support Asquith.

The point is, I think, that Liberalism was diversely represented in the 1918-22 Parliament but could broadly fall into pro/anti-Lloyd George camps. Labour did not want to step into the breach even though they had won more votes and seats at the 1918 election; Labour and the Independent Liberals co-operated for the first few months of 1919 in by-elections, and were on semi-equal pegging, but wanting for leadership and inspiration, the Independent Liberals were soon outpaced. With the right leader and a clear strategy however, from the start the Liberals could bounce back...

 

[Lyndhurst]

Asquith was beat. There was no questioning that. But who would replace him?

On the surface, Lloyd George could easily fill his shoes. He was Prime Minister after all, and his Coalition Liberals were by far the largest Liberal grouping elected. The new Parliament hadn't met yet after the election, so the few uncouponed Liberals who made it through the electoral massacre had not formally organised themselves into any anti or pro-coalition group. The anti-Lloyd George faction existed primarily in the remains of the Asquith cabinet that had retired into opposition in 1916, all its major figures now rejected at the ballot box.

The fear was that if Asquith resigned the leadership of the Party, no viable alternate leader to Lloyd George existed. The Prime Minister could swoop in and leave the anti-coalitioners even more isolated than before. It might very well mean the Liberal Party survived, but not in a way that many could accept; allowing a man as opportunistic and lacking in integrity as David Lloyd George to seize their Party and to surrender to him. More pragmatic people might accept this and move on, waiting to take back control of the Party. But for the Independent Liberals it was a question of principle where Lloyd George lacked it - how could they accept him as leader?

For now the remaining Liberals needed to take stock of what had happened. The new Parliament would meet in the New Year, and then they could properly begin opposing the government. That left just over a month to find a new leader. Reginald McKenna, a man who had been in government since before Herbert Asquith had become Prime Minister, and who was certainly in the running to succeed him by 1915, urged his former chief to delay his resignation until the Executive of the National Liberal Federation had met in January and the party machine could rally round a new leader.

Now they just needed a candidate.

 

[Lyndhurst]

If you wanted a new leader you could be forgiven for thinking that the first place to start was with the loose group of uncouponed Liberals who had made it through in 1918.

But they were scattered and disorganised. Most survived through hard campaigning or in most cases, plenty of luck. Some inclined towards the Coalition, some were firmly against, and some even gravitated to Labour. At best, they had all held ambivalent feelings about Asquith's continued leadership, and more than a few were quietly relieved when the news of his stroke came.

His stroke gave Asquith an excuse to retire gracefully, if rather reluctantly, rather than be forced out by an increasingly restive Party. It would also prevent an undignified decline. More recent historiography has interpreted his decision to go as not entirely unwilling – the former Chief Secretary to Ireland, Augustine Birrell, had written to Asquith shortly after his election defeat that he was “better off out of it for the time, than watching Ll. G. lead apes to Hell”. (1)

With the old man set to retire, the vacuum he left behind had to be filled quickly. Only 3 of the 30 or so uncouponed Liberals had any government experience, and even then at a minor level.

The most senior was Francis Acland, a former Undersecretary in the Treasury and the Foreign Office. He and the former government whip, William Wedgwood Benn, both regarded Asquith as far too Whiggish and old-fashioned to meet the challenges of the postwar world, but for the time being they remained publicly loyal. The final member of this group was George Lambert, who after a long career in the Admiralty Office had grown friendly towards the Coalition, and would soon defect when it appeared likely that Asquith would resign and no viable replacement could be found.

Either Acland or Wedgwood Benn might have had a chance, but whether they had the skill, the patience, and the stature to rebuild a shattered movement largely by themselves was another thing entirely.

The problems facing the Independent Liberals were immense. Not only did the Coalition have an enormous majority that could last for several elections, David Lloyd George was at his mesmeric height. A statesman of international renown who would now embark on dealing with the defeated Central Powers at the Paris Peace Conference, he seemed to have almost outgrown domestic politics.

Such a reputation wouldn’t last forever but for now everyone else was in his shadow. One of the few benefits Asquith had was the status of a former Prime Minister, having been one of the very few men alive to have tasted and used such enormous power. Although he was exhausted as a political force, at the same time contrasts would be made between him and his successor, and that person and David Lloyd George. The Liberals weren’t just choosing a new leader: they were offering up a potential Prime Minister.

The great personalities of the last Asquith cabinet had either gone over to the Coalition or departed the political scene after 1916. After 1918 only three remained in the running: Herbert Samuel, John Simon, and Reginald McKenna, all defeated in the election. Other grandees, like Edward Grey and Richard Haldane, had left for the Lords, effectively retiring from frontline politics.

Herbert Samuel had been a relative latecomer to high office, reaching Home Secretary by 1915 after a number of junior ministerial office. He was now deeply involved in setting up the League of Nations Mandate in Palestine and would become the first High Commissioner in 1920.

John Simon was a brilliant lawyer, but lacked the personal touch and had few followers. Although a formidable intellect, his resignation of the issue of enforced conscription in 1916 had confirmed his status as a loner in the Party.

That left Reginald McKenna. Efficient and with a good eye for detail, he had served in government since 1905 in a variety of posts: Education, the Admiralty, Home Secretary, and finally Chancellor. McKenna was also unfortunately thin-skinned, an unappealing combination of being combative and fastidious.

Perhaps this was all stemmed from when as First Lord of the Admiralty, his estimates on naval spending had been intensely criticised by Lloyd George and Churchill, way back in 1906. Even then, McKenna had had little patience for their abundant personalities, thinking it got in the way of actual governing and policy-making, although he acknowledged they were effective.

They just didn’t have to be such bloody show-offs, as he later put it.

But across the temperamental divide McKenna could be relied upon to do a job well in difficult circumstances, dealing in turn with suffragist and suffragette violence, rioting miners, and Irish Unionists agitating against Home Rule. Indeed, having proposed an opt-out for any Ulster county and with an Irish family, the failure of Home Rule would hang over his head for many years to come.

McKenna had considered abandoning politics altogether after his defeat; he was lining up to become the Chairman of the Midland Bank. But after Asquith’s stroke on Christmas Day, it was his incisive understanding of why the anti-Coalition Liberals did so badly that propelled him close to the leadership.

McKenna’s thesis was twofold: ignoring three-cornered contests where a Liberal had to fight uphill, there were two strong reasons for the defeat being on such a catastrophic level. The party machine had rusted through the War (while the Unionists and Labour had aggressively built up a solid base) so traditional Liberal voters drifted away from a Party they perceived as stagnant and unrepresentative of their interests.

But (and connected to the first reason) the Liberals were “not thought of as sufficiently venomous”. With slogans like “hang the Kaiser” bandied about in the election and posters in Asquith’s constituency pointedly asking “are you going to let him spoil the Peace?”, the Liberals came across as weak and timid. They lacked courage and resolve and needed fire in their belly.

McKenna went further: the relatively few Independent Liberals elected shouldn’t obscure the fact that as a political force, Liberalism was still strong in the country. After all, they had just voted in a Liberal Prime Minister. He might be just so happen to be a prisoner of the Tories, but still.

What was needed was a new plan to rebuild the neglected and moribund constituency parties, to inspire new members to canvass for a Liberal vote, and to capture all the hopeful energy that had collected around Lloyd George and would eventually find him lacking. The Liberals had to be there to pick up the pieces.

As if this wasn’t enough for some, McKenna continued in this provocative line of thinking. The only way back to power was, he argued, by seeking common cause with the Labour Party. Their immediate program of social reform was essentially the same. The 1918 election had seen many millions of working-class men and women cast their vote for the first time, and for the middle-class reformers on the centre-left, any anti-Tory force had to constructively engage with socialists, however much it damaged their pride and sense of independence. (2)

In the shock and the anger of the great defeat of 1918, this was too much thinking for some, but as the Independent Liberals digested his analysis, McKenna’s lucid and challenging logic held true. He had said what Asquith could not, and had been unable to address really since 1916, and by saying what they all knew to be true but hadn’t admitted, the words now clung to him, whether he wanted them to or not.

McKenna didn’t fancy the gruelling task of fighting in Opposition, but as his colleagues either stayed silent or let him do the talking, he began to assume the quiet confidence of those who know the facts are on their side. Some accommodation had to be made with Labour, eventually, and Asquith was no longer an effective leader. But had he said too much too soon?

The Liberals were still in a defensive and confused mood, and so as to not appear disloyal, a deputation of leading Liberals including McKenna, Acland, Walter Runciman, and the secretary of the National Liberal Federation, Sir Robert Hudson, visited Asquith on the morning of the 4th January.

The old man’s mind was in good form, but he was confined to a wheelchair to move about, and was attented to by his wife Margot and daughter Violet. The stroke had sharpened his mind in ways that a fatal situation often does. The assembled Liberals put it to their apparent leader that it was better to retire gracefully and allow a younger man to take the fight to Lloyd George, a man who could unburden him of the heavy duty of leadership. McKenna had once been a protege of Asquith's, in much the same way Lloyd George had been at first. Asquith had never quite grown to fully like the man now standing before him, but he trusted him.

Asquith knew what they wanted. He knew he wouldn't have much chance if tried to fight on. But it could also be someone else’s problem now. That other Liberals such as Runciman and Acland had come along with McKenna made it clear they at least agreed in principle to him taking over.

It also meant that McKenna could not be accused of hounding his leader to go, Asquith told himself dryly.

He consented, agreeing to nominate McKenna for the leadership when the Executive of the National Liberal Federation met later that month.

Then the wider Party would have to accept him…



1 See Roy Jenkins’ Biography on Asquith, page 480.

2 Adapted from Asquith by Stephen Koss, 239-40. McKenna’s advice is all from OTL from December 29th.

 

[Lyndhurst]

Fascinating. A genuine “path not taken”. They are the best PoDs IMHO, especially as follow ons to an earlier PoD.

This is shaping up to be a really interesting TL.

Thanks! And indeed, there's a lot of potential in McKenna's analysis that wasn't followed OTL. I took it from Asquith by Stephen Koss, page 239-40. I'll reproduce the relevant section here since I didn't get to a scanner today.

"Reginald McKenna...ventured a "personal opinion" on the situation. There were, he told A.G. Gardiner on the 29th, "two outstanding reasons" for the debacle, "apart from the losses caused by three-cornered fights" in which independent Liberal candidates were simply overwhelmed: on the one hand, as indicated by the "small poll all over the country", the Liberal machine had been allowed to rust during the "long years of political truce", with the result that traditionally "Liberal voters were apathetic and even resentful"; on the other hand, "anti-Germanism and the desire for revenge were strong among large numbers of people who voted for the Government in the belief they would get all the indemnities Germany could pay and more". McKenna's second point, that "the Liberals are not thought of as a party to be sufficiently venemous", was illustrated at East Fife by placards that bluntly proclaimed: "Asquith nearly lost you the War, are you going to let him spoil the Peace?"

"Hoping that the weakness of Liberalism (as he defined it) in the new Parliament would not be permitted to obscure the fact that it remained "really strong in the country" (as he gauged it), McKenna preached the necessity "to make up for 4 years of neglect and get to spade work in constituencies". At least in his mind, there was no doubt this objective could best be achieved by "finding a name, a formula, and a man to unite Liberal and Labour. There is no difference in our immediate political programme".

I remember reading this and thought...if the Liberals had taken all this on board they'd have saved themselves a lot of trouble!

 

[Lyndhurst]

Although anyone could theoretically be elected Liberal leader through a vote of MPs, if another faction controlled the National Liberal Federation, they could appoint another figure who had the backing of the best part of the Party machine (as constituencies remained fairly autonomous) as nominal leader. This was possible even if they did not technically command a majority in elected parliamentarians.

With McKenna emerging pre-eminent among the anti-Coalitioners to become official Party leader, it meant the establishment of two separate Liberal Parties almost inevitable. McKenna and his more strident colleagues considered such a split to merely formalise the distinctions made in the 1918 election, but others were more cautious. Lloyd George would spend most of 1919 basking in the glow of the Paris Peace Conference as an international statesman. He had not yet fallen to the depths that would claim his premiership and the fear was that if too many Independent Liberals were antagonised, they would all bolt to the Coalition.

The reasons why the Prime Minister did not immediately overtake the remaining Liberals have been variously debated. He still held some regard for Asquith, even having asked him to join the government in the last days of 1918, and memories of their many years in government increased after Asquith’s stroke. It is also correct that pushing to have himself elected leader of the entire Parliamentary Party would unnecessarily antagonise the Unionists and give the impression of creating an alternate power base not under their control.

The simple answer was that Lloyd George was much too busy. He spent nearly of all 1919 attending the Paris Peace Conferences, leaving domestic affairs to Bonar Law, who had effectively become Deputy Prime Minister. The two enjoyed a productive working relationship. McKenna was to him an irrelevant figurehead.

On of the other side of the fence, some Independent Liberals (named so by future historians for the sake of convenience and not because they would definitively embrace that label) argued against rushing to replace Asquith with another anti-Lloyd George figure. Politically speaking the Prime Minister was the far more powerful Liberal, and if they desired reunion they would have to keep on semi-favourable terms. They mostly came from the right wing of the Party and favoured the coalition with the Conservatives.

The 1918-22 Parliament has been described as a civil war between Liberals of various stripes. It was all a question of purity.

---

When the National Liberal Federation met in late January 1919 and nominated McKenna as the new leader, John Simon responded well. McKenna’s history as a former Liberal Imperial on the right wing of the Party (but not a libertarian in the modern sense), and a capable administrator with not too many radical instincts were advantages. However, he fiercely opposed McKenna’s proposal of working with Labour, arguing the Liberals had to be the vanguard against socialism.

Unfortunately for Simon, he was the kind of person who when he opposed something it made a lot of people think it was actually a good idea. Labour had not yet totally won the devotion of the working classes, and although they outranked the Liberals in terms of the number of MPs, the latter firmly carried the weight of experience.

Francis Acland and William Wedgwood Benn were more welcoming to McKenna. He represented a figure of authority under whom they could rebuild while the younger generation implemented a more radical course. McKenna would be 59 in 1922, the likely date of the next election, whereas Acland and Benn were both in their late 40s and would lead the next generation of radicals.

If McKenna wanted to be an effective leader however he needed a seat in Parliament or else he’d be stuck on the sidelines. It was a matter of selecting a by-election for a winnable Liberal seat, for a defeat of their leader would bring a great humiliation they might not recover from. By replacing Asquith, the fact had been acknowledged that the future was up for grabs, and it was only a matter of time.

For now, McKenna designated Francis Acland as Parliamentary Chairman, with Benn as his Chief Whip, pending the meeting of the new Parliament where a formal group might organise.

By setting up an “alternate” Liberal Party, open war had been declared on Lloyd George, requiring Liberals to choose between the two factions. McKenna hoped he could make a difference against this mountain of a government by identifying the Prime Minister as a prisoner of the Unionists. If people really wanted a radical government, they’d know who to vote for. And if they could break the Coalition, the dissident Liberals would return to the fold, so went the argument.

On the 3rd of February a rancorous meeting of 20 Independent Liberals met in the Commons, united only by their anti-Coalition stance. They were mostly glad to see Asquith gone, and some opposed the “stitch-up” of McKenna taking his place. Although he was acknowledged as more effective, such a provocative action might further split the Party. At this time the government whip had been indiscriminately applied to all Liberals, couponed or not, after the election. (1)

Francis Acland spoke in favour of setting up an independent Liberal faction, arguing that voters would soon find Lloyd George lacking and they had to be ready to carry on their Liberal traditions. At this, the pro-Coalitionist George Lambert silently left the meeting, bringing several MPs with him.

The remaining MPs were also sceptical of accepting McKenna without a definite sign he could soon return to Parliament and not be a figurehead. Acland conceded this and insisted he would bring the fight to the government.

After further arguing the group passed a broad anti-Coalition motion and voted in Francis Acland as their Chairman. Although Benn was nominated as a whip, the group also insisted on former parliamentary official Donald Maclean serving with him, signalling to Acland (and thus McKenna) that just as they accepted them as leaders, they still took matters into their own hands. Maclean had much greater experience than Benn, and would help anchor the gaggle of independents they now commanded.

Several days later every Liberal MP was invited to a much larger meeting to discuss reunion, if not some kind of working relationship as a first step on the way. Acland, Maclean, and Benn were all noticeably absent. With McKenna against it and Lloyd George leading aloof, it was not surprising that one month later, the prospect was abandoned. The split had been formalised (or confirmed, depending on your view).

Now the battle for the soul of Liberalism really began.



1 – This happened OTL after the 1918 election. I think it was a unity gesture by Lloyd George who still had some regard for Asquith.

 

[Lyndhurst]

After the excitement surrounding Reginald McKenna becoming Liberal leader and the creation of a separate Party to challenge Lloyd George, things quietened down for a time.

Much of the attention was still on the Prime Minister gracing the world stage at the Paris Peace Conference. Asquith remained extremely unpopular for his poor leadership in the War, and his stroke had given him plenty of time to withdraw from public life, leaving McKenna and Acland to play second fiddle.

This suddenly changed with the Leyton West by-election on 1st March. The previous Conservative MP had suddenly died of an illness, and after a campaigning on them having won the War, they lost the seat to the Independent Liberals on a swing of 24.7%. Although this could be attributed to a much lower turnout than at the election, even explained away as a freak result, the swing gave the Liberals great confidence, and a sense of wild disbelief. Even after their slow march back to relevancy, Leyton West was a reminder that all was not lost.

Oxford University remained in Tory hands later on that month, but that was to be expected. The second great boost came at Kingston upon Hull Central on the 29th, where Joseph Kenworthy stormed home with 52.8% of the vote. The two victories have been ascribed to the Liberals opposing peacetime conscription now the War was over, while Kenworthy had especially fought against saddling Germany with unpayable reparations. The Conservative campaign in both contests was lacklustre, and it soon became apparent that they couldn't rely on the star power of the Prime Minister. Even today, the twin victories at Leyton West and Kingston upon Hull Central stand out as the most remarkable (and unexpected) by-election victories of the time.

Then again, the electorate was reacting to the wild optimism and spite of the 1918 election campaign, and regretting the viciousness it had responded to. Now, politics was beginning to normalise.

Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire Central on the 16th April proved a worrying omen. Traditionally a Liberal safe seat, the previous Liberal MP, John Henderson, had lost his seat by a narrow margin in the last election. He had been the member for West Aberdeenshire for 13 years, and it looked like he would stand as an Independent Liberal, i.e., an anti-Lloyd George candidate. This posed some difficulty for the Prime Minister, since he would in effect have to endorse a Conservative candidate against a Liberal.

McKenna was keen to court Henderson and force Lloyd George to back the Conservative candidate by default. However, Henderson proved unwilling to take sides in the conflict, announcing his willingness to join the Coalition. Not all Liberals had gone over to the anti-Lloyd George camp, and some resented the attacks against a still popular Prime Minister. The matter remained unresolved until the local Conservative constituency, never entirely happy with having to back a Liberal, announced they would put up their own candidate. Depressed, Henderson withdrew, and the visible split in the Liberal camps was enough to hand the seat to the Tories by 500 votes.

The by-election highlighted the great risk to McKenna of openly attacking the Prime Minister so soon - many traditional Liberals were still allied to him as an anti-Socialist bulwark, and if they pressed the issue too much they could cause a permanent rupture. The fact that the anti-Coalition vote was over 50% did encourage the Independent Liberals. For now, they had to be careful. The Times described the result as proving that popular opinion was moving against the government, but that the Liberals were dimly, if persistently, ahead of Labour.

For McKenna, the priority was in finding a parliamentary seat. Any defeat, however, would mean the end of his career, so it wasn't a case of standing in the next by-election. It had to be a winnable seat. He had half toyed with standing at Aberdeenshire and Kincardine Central if John Henderson had withdrawn, but the bitter Liberal split had made him draw back.

The other half of the McKenna strategy had been to co-operate with Labour in those seats either Party could win, and a lack of Labour candidates had helped the Liberals in their previous contests. In Wales, however, Labour support was growing among the working classes, but the Liberals could still claim to be the main anti-Conservative force. Thus when the seat of Swansea East fell vacant and a by-election was called for July, McKenna made the decision to stand. He had previously represented North Monmouthshire but been defeated at the new seat of Pontypool in 1918, and a return to Wales proved more appealing than Scotland.

The thing was, the other Liberal leader was as Welsh as they came. Determined not to be defeated on his home turf, Lloyd George selected as the Coalition candidate a local, David Matthews, a Welsh nationalist who was active in the community. Labour let it known that they would fight the seat hard, and the prospect of facing off against another Liberal and a Labour candidate proved troubling. McKenna didn't have the same credentials as Lloyd George or Matthews, and in a firmly parochial contest, the rank outsider would have a tough time.

For now, much as it pained him, he withdrew. Another seat would come. He had to be patient. Matthews duly won, so it was technically a Liberal victory, but not for the right team. McKenna didn't blame Labour for their determination to fight the seat - they had, after all, had a good showing in 1918. There were more opportunities to be had outside of Wales, he conceded.

A strong Labour victory over the Coalition Liberal candidate at Bothwell later in July showed that the two needed to work together better. It might be good for Coalition Liberals to lose their seats, but as the Aberdeenshire debacle had proved, Liberal opinion was still mostly unclaimed by either the Coalition or the Independent Liberals but seemed to move towards either side, depending on the contest, and on the constituency. It might push the militant anti-socialists towards the Coalition if McKenna was seen to work with Labour, but the two Parties had little choice.

An example of this productive engagement came at Widnes in August when the Liberals stood down, allowing the Labour grandee Arthur Henderson to return to Parliament. Henderson had been one of several key figures defeated in 1918, but more importantly as a former Labour leader he had argued for closer relations with the Liberals. A moderate, transitional figure whose politics lay in compromise, he was exactly the kind of man McKenna could (and had, in the Asquith coalition of 1915-16) work with.

By keeping moderate Labour opinion on their side, McKenna had tacitly admitted that the next government would have to involve them in some way - either a coalition or a confidence and supply agreement, but he gambled that the Liberals gained more than they lost. It was a tricky balancing act, but it had to be done, he preached, for the necessity of staying afloat. At any moment, a Labour leader could break off the working arrangements and claim the Opposition mantle.

This did not always convince other Liberals - at Pontefract, in October, a Coalition-backed Liberal, Walter Forrest, defeated a Labour candidate by canvassing for Tory support. The fact that a coalition minister, Thomas MacNamara, had come to the constituency to speak for the Liberal cause and stressed the unity of the Liberal-Tory arrangement, had annoyed the Independent Liberals. Forrest had also addressed Conservative associations in the campaign, taking up the Liberal theme of ending conscription, an opposition which had helped bring the great victories at Leyton West and Kingston upon Hull Central for the Independent Liberals in the spring.

If the government Liberals were stealing their own voters, what would this leave for them? On the other side of the fence, Labour were increasingly agitating for an independent path. Some leading figures like Henderson had welcomed the McKenna strategy, but others did not take to the Liberals, outnumbered as they were by Labour in the Commons, insisting on taking the lead. At Pontefract a local concern was the future of the mining industry, and both McKenna and Forrest opposed nationalisation, which many Labour voters supported. The Independent Liberals had proposed a scheme of sharing profits and improving worker conditions, but this didn't quite cut it.

Something would have to give.

 

[Lyndhurst]

If 1919 started with two spectacular by-elections for the Liberals, surprising victories at Leyton West and Kingston upon Hull Central, then the year closed out with two more historic contests at Manchester Rusholme and the Spen Valley.

The fact one was a clear defeat and the other a narrow Liberal victory didn’t sound promising, but history would be made in these small struggles.

Reginald McKenna had pushed for Lib-Lab co-operation ever since he assumed the leadership, citing a great policy overlap in social reform, housing, infrastructure, foreign relations, and free trade. The Liberals generally opposed nationalisations but apart from this the two Parties tended to agree on many matters.

Throughout 1919, however, strikes and labour disputes had gripped the country. Britain remained in a quagmire in Ireland, unable to keep the peace. The Liberals had endeavoured to portray themselves as the mediator between capital and organised labour, but as the trade unions grew in power and influence in the working classes, the nascent Labour Party began to chafe at what it considered an obstructive influence.

True, the so-called Progressive Alliance had worked well so far. McKenna, although prickly on occasion, presented himself as a man Labour could do business with. Especially since a Liberal far to his left was only Prime Minister because the Conservatives let him.

Another interpretation is that whatever the leaders decided, constituency organisations remained largely autonomous. A point very aptly proved in October 1919 when the local Labour organisation elected to stand their own candidate in the Manchester Rusholme by-election as a deliberate sign of their independence. Repeat negotiations between the two parties failed to resolve the impasse.

In Manchester, Labour had come third place in the last election, but at this time in Britain a nationwide railway strike was underway. Related to this was the ongoing debate about working conditions of the mining industry, sure to give Labour a boost. They hadn’t usually stood in Liberal/Unionist marginals before and a success here might encourage further Labour candidates appearing in by-elections, sapping Liberal strength as they did.

The Labour candidate, Robert Dunstan (who had been a Liberal until 1917), campaigned on a centrist policy of abolishing wartime restrictions, and advocated for nationalisation of the mines and railways. William Pringle, standing for the Liberals, would later take up both policies, attacking Labour for putting up a former Liberal man, but spent more time attacking the Conservative candidate.

McKenna and Acland had met with Arthur Henderson on the eve of the poll, stressing for the most part their great agreement with Dunstan’s policies, but that a split in the anti-Coalition vote might hand the seat to the Conservatives. That the Tories won, and the Liberals came a narrow second, seemed to confirm their point and strengthened Henderson’s hand in Labour circles for closer Lib-Lab co-operation.

It didn’t seem it at the time, but Manchester Rusholme could conceivably be called the most important by-election of the century, for it allowed the Liberals to hold their ground and pull ahead of Labour, if by a margin of 500 votes. Naturally such a narrow margin meant that certain inveterate anti-socialists like John Simon could argue, and not unconvincingly, that the Liberals should have sought more Conservative votes. A narrow win in Croydon South in November in a straight fight with a Unionist lent this idea some credence; after all, most Liberal voters were middle class, and the working classes had never reached more than 50% of the population.

Two weeks later, a decent second place for Labour in Plymouth Sutton on 29.3% and the Liberal candidate on 24.8% in a traditional Liberal/Unionist marginal challenged this view, even if the Liberals had come third in the election the year before. The Liberals seemed to be holding their head above water at least, but two Labour victories at the St Albans and Bromley contests in December put them in an optimistic mood.

The final by-election of the year looked to be at Spen Valley, in a region of traditional Liberal strength. Here, Reginald McKenna could take the chance he had been waiting for to return to Parliament. Labour let it be known that they would fight the seat relatively hardly, but were not opposed to letting McKenna contest, knowing any victory would be an embarrassment for the government. It could mean an end to sitting on the sidelines and let him challenge the Prime Minister inside Parliament.

The stage was set.

 

[Lyndhurst]

Reginald McKenna had been leader of the Independent Liberals for just under one year and in that time, the Party had steadily rebuilt, with several by-election wins under their belt. The long-term work of rebuilding in the constituencies was also bearing fruit, as they recruited more members to spread their Liberal message, canvassing for further votes where they might be found. Although many constituencies tried to remain aloof from the deepening rift between the factions by pledging loyalty to the overall Liberal cause, this ambiguous stance had little effect on public opinion.

To them, the conflicts were Lloyd George or anti-Lloyd George, for or against his coalition. But to fight too hard against a Liberal Prime Minister would disillusion and disappoint traditional Liberal voters. This was the careful political calculus Lloyd George and McKenna had in the back of their minds.

The two factions knew the damage that might be done by entering into open battle against each other and so far, had avoided it, this fear leading to the McKenna Liberals backing down in the Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire Central by-election in April. Indeed, the so-called “split” was then of such little importance that the initial Liberal candidate had been ready to stand as an Independent and Coalition Liberal. By the time of the Spen Valley by-election in December, however, party divisions had long been festering.

If 1919 had been a relatively successful year for McKenna, for David Lloyd George it was even more impressive. His personal work on the Paris Peace Conference concluded in June 1919, then hailed as a triumph of diplomacy and high statesmanship. Now released from foreign affairs, he charged into domestic reform. Individual ministers such as H.A.L Fisher at the Board of Education or Christopher Addison at the Local Government Board (later renamed to Health, but including Housing, communal and welfare, under that brief) enacted successful reforms to living conditions. A land fit for heroes to live in was the rallying cry the Prime Minister gave in defence of his credentials.

The McKenna strategy of detaching the Prime Minister from his so-called Liberal following by revealing the Conservatives as the power behind the throne simply didn’t work when the Tories enabled and permitted many of these popular reforms. But it did put up a banner to which dissidents could rally; a breach would come and for now they had to be grateful for small mercies.

Spen Valley could be one such victory; it was an area of Liberal strength and had returned a Coalition Liberal candidate at the last election for a 2,156 majority over the Labour Party, who intended to fight the seat relatively hardly. The constituency seemed an ideal safe seat that once claimed, could be held against repeated electoral assaults. The Nonconformist and Irish populations could be courted by both Liberal factions, but McKenna had the advantage with his Irish ancestry and campaign for Home Rule before the War.

He saw this as a perfect opportunity to return to Parliament, to signal that he was back in the game and to rally the small band of anti-Coalitionists in the Commons. He gambled that Lloyd George wouldn’t risk splitting the Liberal vote by putting up a Coalition candidate. He guessed wrongly. Lloyd George had long held McKenna in low regard, a thin-skinned pedant and bureaucrat, choosing to ignore his talents. The man’s silly persistence in fighting on, when he had no chance of ever becoming Prime Minister. Any Liberal future had David Lloyd George at the centre, and that was now a political fact.

It is true that another Liberal, such as John Simon, or even Asquith himself, would become a target for the Prime Minister’s wrath. This was the first time a senior Opposition figure tried to get back into Parliament, and any potential rival threatened the future of the Coalition project. McKenna did arouse personal feelings of loathing and enmity in Lloyd George, but also a certain begrudging respect for how the man had fared in leading the Independent Liberals.

A popular cartoon at the time satirised Robin Hood McKenna and his merry band of Liberals, stealing from the poor because they themselves were poorer, but there was a point to be made. The rebellion had to be cut off at the root. The appearance of two Liberals fighting each other for the first time depressed many traditional voters initially, but the tune of the campaign began to shift from a civil war to a crusade.

Leading Independent Liberals such as Asquith (now Lord Walmer), Viscount Gladstone (son of William), Edward Grey, and Francis Acland spoke in favour of McKenna, framing it as a true fight for Liberal values, the old themes of uniting capital and labour, international peace, prosperity for all – Lloyd George could promise that, but for how long?

The Labour candidate fought hard, but directed the majority of his fire against the coalition, in an attempt to gather Liberal votes. Their constituency party had agreed to let McKenna have an easier time than most, since any embarrassment for Lloyd George was worth it, but they could hardly be expected to let either Liberal have a blank cheque.

The Coalition campaign itself became more desperate, portraying McKenna and his crew as stragglers, running off into the wilderness rather than joining responsibly with the Government. Lloyd George was active behind the scenes in trying to block McKenna’s victory, knowing that a defeat here meant an embarrassment for his own Liberal credentials.

The narrative of a Liberal Party riven and exhausted was slowly being replaced by a fight for purity, and it seemed to strike a chord with an electorate when the results were announced. McKenna came in first with 11,953, a majority of 900 votes over Labour, with the Coalition Liberal far behind on 6,931. A narrow victory yes, but in the poll the anti-Coalition Liberal candidate fell far behind Labour, even further behind the Independent Liberal. The result was seen as a great humiliation for the government, their candidate comfortably outvoted on either side.

One surprise backer of McKenna had been the Rothermere press barons. Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe arrogant but impressionable, had helped bring down Asquith in 1916 thanks to excoriating headlines. His brother, Harold, the Viscount Rothermere, might be called the brains behind the operation, but Alfred had a powerful personality, but not a powerful mind. He could be led in his thinking but not in deeper, more fundamental feelings, and as he called for a more conciliatory line in the Irish War for Independence, he found an unlikely champion in McKenna.

McKenna, hardworking and meticulous, and proudly principled, wouldn’t usually want the attention of a rogue opinion-maker like Northcliffe, who answered to no-one, but he couldn’t deny that he was useful. The popular presses were turning against the Lloyd George coalition, and now in McKenna they had an effective and decisive leader to rally to.

His victory at Spen Valley didn’t quite set the world on fire; but it allowed him to move out of Asquith’s shadow, and reject claims that he was a dogsbody for the former Premier.

The trouble was, the little band of independent MPs could hardly be called a Party. But it marked a turning point. Now, the fight would get harder.

 

[Lyndhurst]

I appreciate this is a bit late in the TL but if you follow all the by-elections down the list some of the names and places might make more sense. This list goes all the way from the 1918 election to the 1922 election,

List of United Kingdom by-elections (1918–1931) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Lyndhurst]

The Spen Valley contest of 1919 received plenty of attention thanks to the historian Maurice Cowling, who in The Impact of Labour 1920-4 argued it was Simon's narrow defeat that meant Labour began to be taken seriously by the older parties. This...doesn't ring true to me. Yes, it's true that if the Coalition Liberal candidate withdrew, Simon would have won. But he only came second by 1,718 votes, he won the seat in 1922, and held it at every subsequent election (admittedly with Conservative abstention, and the seat became marginal in 1935). But for 6 elections after, a strong Liberal tradition remained in the constituency. The by-election in OTL I chalk up to a freak win, and a tendency to view everything through the lens of the 1922 election, when Labour overtook the Liberals.

And even that was only by 27 seats and 1.9% of the vote. The Liberal decline was reversible, Spen Valley was not the turning point. I appreciate why historians like to chose particular moments as watersheds, it makes it easier to define eras and it saves time. Asquith's continued leadership prevented an anti-Lloyd George movement organising and masked long-term decline.

Labour had already been taken seriously; the Coalition was formed to create an anti-Socialist bulwark, and there were fears of Communism spreading through the working classes. It's not that Spen Valley in OTL marked the point the Liberals were doomed, (and it's arguable they ever "were" by 1919, I personally put the cutoff at 1921/22), but more that longer-term problems were fixable for them and it's harder to reduce an era of great change and fluidity to a few victories and defeats.

 

[Lyndhurst]

1920 began inconspicuously. After the scrapes and skirmishes of the previous year, a more gradual recovery set in for the Liberal cause, but not always to their direct benefit. In the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election on the 31st January 1920, they came third but siphoned enough votes to let Labour win by 300 votes. The slow recovery in the constituencies was bearing fruit, but it remained to be seen if enough Liberals came over to their side. At this time, very few local organisations called themselves "Lloyd George" or "Coalition" Liberal parties; the two factions really only clashed when two Liberal candidates stood against each other, and so far, as Spen Valley had proved, Liberals were reluctant to deepen the split too much.

McKenna's return to Parliament had been enthusiastically but not brilliantly welcomed. He didn't carry the status of a former Premier like Asquith had, or Gladstone did all the way back in the Midlothian Campaign, so there was much less talk of a defeated rival making a great comeback, ready to challenge the Prime Minister. He wasn't Lloyd George's equal. Instead, he served as a credible figurehead for the few anti-Coalition Liberals in the House. The trio of McKenna, Acland, and Benn formed a nucleus around which their cohort and the Labour Party often co-operated on opposing the government, not that they could move much against the vast majority.

The Wrekin by-election of February 1920 brought a challenge from an unexpected quarter. The deliciously-named Horatio Bottomley was a financier, journalist, and confidence trickster who had been expelled from Parliament in 1912, before returning in 1918. A charismatic and colourful character, he had reinvented himself after the war, founding the Peoples' League in 1919, a political group to form a great third force between capital and labour, right on the Liberals' traditional doorstep.

Bottomley complemented this with a new populist grouping, called the Independent Parliamentary Group, his political antennae sensing that with the Coalition growing unpopular, the Independent Liberals and Labour weren't fully filling the gap in the electoral market. A niche had opened, and some Liberals were put off by McKenna's policy of co-operation with the socialists. On the other side of the fence, many working class voters were not entirely persuaded by socialism themselves, and the Independent Group sought to appeal to those disenchanted groups.

Bottomley convinced fellow journalist Charles Palmer to stand with his backing as an Independent Conservative, and in a three-way fight with a coalition Liberal and a Labour candidate, he scraped through by 500 votes. Palmer succinctly identified the appeal of the new grouping: against the fumbling Liberals, "there was an immense body of sound opinion in the working classes which ranges itself on the side of King and Constitution". In an age where many newly-enfranchised voters were still timid and cautious about voting for themselves, patriotic values, careful and wise government appealed far more than vague theories of socialism or liberalism.

Perhaps responding to this new entry onto the political stage, or anticipating it for the same reasons, the Northcliffe press which had turned against the Coalition now backed the Independent Liberal candidate standing in Paisley on the 12th February. One of the few uncouponed Liberals to make it through in 1918, John McCallum, had died, leaving a safe seat to be won. Francis Acland remembered McCallum as a "dear old Scot", so they expected to fight the seat, even for sentimental reasons, with the embarrassing support of the populist and jingoistic press.

This time another former Cabinet member, Walter Runciman, took the chance to return to Parliament. An unspectacular but loyal minister, he had been held various posts in the Trade, Agriculture, and Education departments, and was a good example of the kind of middle management the Liberals needed to recruit to their cause. McKenna, Acland, and John Simon spoke in his favour, on a platform of moderating German reparations, Dominion status for Ireland, and free trade, coming in first by 1,800 votes against the Labour candidate, while the Coalition-backed Conservative came in an embarrasing third and lost his deposit.

The Liberal platform was less a statement of deliberate policy but more of an indication to the working classes that they were not opposed to unionised Labour, and older, more overarching themes of free trade and Irish Home Rule. The latter appealed to McKenna personally, but also attracted the diaspora vote that might have gone to Labour. Certainly at the Horncastle by-election on 25th February, the Liberal candidate canvassed for votes among the many agricultural workers in the area. Themes in the contest included unwanted government influence through overregulation and bureaucracy, hence the Liberal victory was considered a victory against the idea of nationalisation, but as no Labour candidate stood, that was a moot point. Concerns over high food prices that could be pushed up further by tariffs appealed to the Liberals, since the breakdown in trade barriers remained a central part of their platform. The victory for the Liberals over the government-endorsed Conservative by 1500 votes proved that a rural recovery was underway.

Away from these smaller battles, as the Coalition passed its first anniversary and more, the idea of fusing the Liberal and Conservative contingents began to grow in the minds of Lloyd George and Bonar Law. For both of them, the move had great advantages. It gave the Prime Minister a firm political home, and it bound the Conservatives to him in a broad moderate alliance. The burial of the old two-Party system would be the final step in his outgrowing of the political system and truly allow the boast of the last election, that Lloyd George stood as the be-all and end-all between revolution and reaction, to be fulfilled.

And it would mean an end to Robin Hood McKenna and his merry band of no-hopers.

For Bonar Law, who from the first days of his leadership had been the warrior for Conservative principles, a fused Liberal-Tory party allowed him a new home, safe from the reactionary core that he had always viewed with distaste. This dour, modest Scotsman had pushed a hard line on Home Rule to give his divided Party new life and new energy; for him, the safety of Ulster was sacrosanct, all else paled in comparison. But he had feared that the controversial path he chose would split the Conservatives into moderate and hardline factions. In 1911 when Law took over, some had resented a Glaswegian merchant leading a party of the English gentry.

The Stockport by-election on 27th March allowed a perfect opportunity to show that the two parties had much to gain if they became one. A two-member seat, the rare double by-election began when the Coalition Liberal MP died. The local Conservative organisation thought it their turn to run a candidate, but not wanting to have a Tory and a Liberal fight each other, they had persuaded the other MP, a Coalition-backed Labour representative, to resign as well, allowing each Coalition party to run two candidates on a joint ticket of endorsement and unification. They faced only Labour opposition, a Bottomley-backed independent, and to round it off, the Irish republican William O'Brien.

Despite Labour's policy of Irish self-rule, many Irish people in Britain didn't see them doing much about it. O'Brien's candidature was intended to shame Labour into action, or at least to back McKenna's call for immediate Dominion status. Not that it made much difference; he came last, then the Bottomley independents, then the two Labour candidates, and finally the Coalition members in what seemed a resounding win for fusion. It only seemed a matter of time.

 

[Lyndhurst]

Although the proposed fusion of the Coalition parties was formally entertained for no longer than six months and was under serious discussion for only 3 months, the episode cast long shadows over the Parliament. In some ways, it foreshadowed the Coalition’s ultimate collapse some years later as change imposed from above became dispersed and created a corresponding reaction from below.

The problem was, the Coalition Liberals had no permanent home. They were in limbo, cut off from rejoining their Liberal brethren, it seemed, with little choice but to go the way of Joe Chamberlain and merge with the Tories. They worked exceptionally well with their Tory colleagues, perhaps the most harmonious cabinet of the century compared to its successors, and to most Unionists Lloyd George was irreplaceable. The perceived menace of socialism was a credible and tangible fear in their minds.

There had been loose talk of closer co-operation as part of the coalition negotiations in 1918, while Liberal and Labour by-election gains was interpreted as further need for fusion between the Coalition contingents. In the spring of 1919, a New Members Committee (NMC), largely controlled by the Unionists began putting out feelers through the middle and lower ranks of the Party, probably under the discreet orders of the leadership, although no direct link was ever maintained.

They certainly had the blessing of the grandees; on the Liberal side Churchill and Christopher Addison were in favour, while leading Unionists Balfour, F.E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), and Austen Chamberlain could be counted as supporters. Even the Prime Minister and Bonar Law seemed to be inclined; the Conservative leader thought a fusion of moderate opinion could reinvigorate Toryism for the 20th Century. In October of 1919, Law put the word out at a Party meeting that a “fused party” might not be such a bad thing. Certainly, in the Commons and in Cabinet, they all lived happily.

In the constituencies, much less so.

Unionist members questioned the need for a broad anti-Socialist pact when many working-class voters were reluctant to embrace the faddish, new-fangled Labour Party. The Liberal resurgence proved that the public still held to their ideals, more so than any other vague threat that mass democracy had seemed to present. Perhaps things hadn’t really changed as much as the political class thought they had.

The arguments for a fused Party – the Centre Party was the name NMC members bandied about the most, or the more grandiose United Reform, as the PM ventured – came mostly from the Party establishment, with much less enthusiasm from ordinary members. A round of speeches and public events to drag the Party machine in the leadership’s direction helped somewhat, but it really remained in what would now be called the Westminster bubble.

In March 1920 nearly 100 MPs signed a pro-fusion statement with the help of the NMC, but the leadership remained hesitant, fearful of the reaction they might inspire. They needed to be delicate. Finally, on the 18th, the great bombshell was ready to be dropped, first by Lloyd George, followed by Bonar Law. The PM met with his Liberal colleagues and the wider Party – and got a cold reception. The Liberals were wary of being absorbed into a Tory chimera; the idea had been dropped on them as a great reactionary move against organised labour, something McKenna’s efforts easily disproved.

Moving on breezily like nothing had happened, Lloyd George dropped the proposed fusion altogether, leaving Law to hint vaguely at future co-operation when he met with a disappointed and confused Unionist Party later on.

Apparently, the time was not yet right. The idea was shelved for now, and in this atmosphere of frustration one can read a certain vindictiveness in how the Stockport by-election on the 27th was so arranged that a Liberal and Conservative together won the seat. But the Dartford election on the same day saw a formerly Coalition Liberal seat fall into Labour hands, the Independent Liberals beating the government-backed Conservative into third place.

If Lloyd George and Bonar Law had hoped to prove a point, they had proven that if you cut off your nose to spite your face, you can’t smell when something stinks.

Four days later on the 31st, the Coalition minister, T.J. Macnamara, and an associate of Lloyd George stood in the ministerial by-election in Camberwell North West, then required by contemporary law for his appointment to the Cabinet. The Camberwell Liberal organisation had tentative feelings about the Coalition, but had remained loyal to Macnamara, until his interventions against anti-Coalition Liberals in by-elections had made the breach certain. Instead, they put up their own Independent Liberal, J.C. Carroll, a local builder. Labour had considered putting forward a candidate, but held back to allow Carroll a free run, as it did them good to let the Party fight itself, although McKenna hoped that they could bag a good prize in Macnamara’s defeat.

Setting Liberal against Liberal wouldn’t usually inspire their voters and looked bad for the Party, but the campaign became as a contest on the popularity of the Coalition. The Times pointed out that although government support was waning, they had defended their own seats well; Macnamara was a keen anti-socialist and anti-Communist, a seasoned campaigner able to artfully pivot between Conservative and working-class voters. His experience made it a tough fight, for despite McKenna and Acland speaking in Carroll’s favour, they won by 1000 votes.

Yet another defeat for Lloyd George’s alliance with the Tories, it seemed, but this was no Spen Valley. For all the excitement, turnout was down at 49%. In Basingstoke on the same day, E.T. Judd held the seat for the Unionists, proving they were still competitive in the rural constituencies the Liberals pinned their hopes on. At the Northampton by-election on the 1st April, the local Liberal organisation backed a Coalition Liberal-candidate in another ministerial by-election and won, refusing to back a McKenna candidate.

The two Liberal Parties in their own ways were slowly starting to push through the mire.

 

[Lyndhurst]

For the western powers, the Paris Peace Conference had largely settled the new world order where they could influence it – in the West on the doorstep of Britain and France, and for their colonial benefit overseas. Beyond this in Central and Eastern Europe the void left by the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire left many new transitional states whose borders were in flux.

Within Russia, the Soviets had overthrown Kerensky’s provisional government and soon found themselves fighting on all fronts. A revolutionary Communist, republican movement was loathed and feared by the conservative tendencies of Britain and France, especially Winston Churchill, who co-ordinated the sending of Allied troops to aid the anti-Communist forces, the “Whites” as they came to be known. Churchill had the support of Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary George Curzon, broadly motivated by the anti-socialist sentiment that had led to the Coalition forming in the first place.

Other opportunistic powers such as the Japanese occupied parts of Siberia, while newer states broke free, including Finland and the Baltic States. By the spring of 1920, however, the Red Army had reorganised under Leon Trotsky, driving the Whites behind the Urals and forcing the Allies to withdraw their forces.

In the West, the new state of Poland had been granted independence, but her borders largely undefined; the Kiev Offensive into former Russian territory brought the attention of the Red Army, who soon swept back through with alarming speed. In invading Poland, their ultimate objective was to establish a pro-Soviet puppet state, and provoke revolutionary sentiment in the new German Republic. Such a chain of dominos would, they hoped, make Communism unstoppable in its spread.

Weimar Germany was a fragile state, many suspicious of the democracy hurriedly imposed on them, with a strong presence of paramilitaries. The Freikorps initially began in the 18th century as irregular mercenary and volunteer organisations, their number bolstered by deserters from the standing army. By the end of the Great War, they became a home for the large numbers of enlisted soldiers returning from the front. Many organised themselves into autonomous units that said they fought in the name of the new Republic, but the authorities mostly kept their distance, apart from Defence Minister Gustav Noske, who employed them to supress Communist activity.

Despite numerous attempted coups however, ordinary German people seemed to have reconciled themselves to the new regime. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 had been put down when Berlin citizens and civil servants refused to co-operate with the plotters; people wanted stability and order, but if they were pushed too much, they would naturally want to defend their homeland. The Freikorps were gently treated by the law, and in August 1920 a general amnesty had been granted, except for the ringleaders.

By August 1920, the Polish forces had rallied around the capital of Warsaw, clearly planning a last-ditch effort. Although evenly matched in terms of troops deployed, the Soviets had the momentum and pushed them aside, breaking the back of Polish resistance and scattering their remaining forces. The reaction was immediate; the Freikorps, still mostly in the public sphere, rallied to the defence of the German people. At once, the spectre of Communism loomed on the Eastern border, and a great fear gripped the nation. The Reichswehr, the regular army, crossed the Polish border aided by the Freikorps and engaged the Soviets in battle.

In Britain and in France, opinion was apprehensive but broadly sympathetic to Germany; a powerful pacifism had taken root after the furious war, and any fear of their old enemy reasserting herself was swallowed by a greater anti-Communist anxiety. France was only prepared to give Germany the bare minimum of aid, but in Britain, some of the more extreme measures of Versailles could be rolled back in her favour. Not too many, since Lloyd George was intimately associated with the new peace, but enough to integrate an old enemy into a wider anti-Soviet circle.

The swift pivot from harsh peace to a belligerent anti-Communism, while respecting the hard work of the Paris Conference, was not as great a change as it might seem. Germany simply had a new role and slightly longer leash.

The Battle of Berlin in October 1920 marked the highwater mark for the Soviets. Their supply lines extended, their advance flagging, they were surrounded and slowly crushed. General Ludendorff, rapidly reinstated in the Reichswehr, fought a brilliant fighting retreat from Warsaw to Berlin, then masterminded the German victory. Throughout the autumn of 1920, German forces gradually pursued the Soviets out of Poland until their advance slowed and stopped at the Curzon Line, provisionally accepted as a boundary for a future border. Clashes remained common between the two sides, and despite Allied attempts at mediation, a peace agreement would have to wait until 1922.

In the meantime, a compliant rump Poland was created, its border with Germany fixed on the 1914 Russo-German border. In Germany itself, the rapid recovery and defeat of the Soviets did much to motivate a depressed nation, enabling the creation of a new national myth – “the miracle of Berlin”. This only confirmed in the worst possible way the other great myth – the “stab in the back” idea, she had lost the Great War because of traitorous elements within her borders. The defiant stand in Berlin entered the popular mind as a symbol of German supremacy and invincibility, and added with the anti-Slavic beliefs of the Freikorps, these poisonous thoughts would rot and infest deep, coming to their horrible conclusion in the 1940s.

The right-wing had been greatly energised by their success in the Anti-Soviet War. Ludendorff had toyed with taking power for himself, with the Army at his back, a new national hero, but a nervous breakdown in the autumn on 1920 forced his temporary retirement. In the meantime, other copycat movements engaged in communal violence, attacking workers and ghettos for suspected “Bolshevism”. With their figurehead convalescing, other members of the Freikorps entered politics, cultivating a personal following with their respective paramilitary. Defence Minister Gustav Noske would secure the backing of the Freikorps and their voting base as part of his rise to the Chancellorship in 1925.

The longer-term effect on British foreign policy would be to promote a wider anti-Communist strategy of encirclement, such as promoting a strong Turkey with an independent Armenian buffer, or forging greater connections to Japan. By the time of the Chanak Crisis of 1922, the idea of Armenian independence had been dropped, a largely pro-Turk Conservative Party was happy to let them take the Bosphorus unhindered. Britain’s gradual withdrawal from European affairs connected with a widespread feeling of disillusionment over the terrible slaughter of Great War, began to be called a second “splendid isolation” by contemporary commentators. As the name implied, it came to be mixed with Victorian-nostalgia and the re-interpretation of an expanding Empire into a progressive Commonwealth of the late 20s and early 30s. The Anti-Soviet War became a tidy end point for Britain’s involvement in the Continent.

The French meanwhile, with a reinvigorated Germany on side and a Britain who largely seemed aloof to continental affairs on the other, forged a series of alliances with the smaller states of Central Europe – Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, as part of an attempt to turn German ambitions eastward. This “New Entente” largely contained German expansions and grew to include Fascist Italy after 1923. The Locarno Treaties of 1925 confirmed the new arrangement – a definite settling of Germany’s western borders in exchange for recognition of her defensive role in central Europe, in particular a guarantee of Polish independence against foreign (i.e., Soviet) expansion.

---

Woodrow Wilson had been President of the United States since 1913, his tenure largely defined by his interventionist stances, including progressive economics at home and an internationalist approach overseas. Although rated highly by certain historians for his leading role in formulating the League of Nations, this concealed a more complicated legacy that included the enforcement of segregation at the federal level.

Curiously, he bore more than a few resemblances to Herbert Henry Asquith. They were both of a similar age, born in the 1850s, and they had taken their countries into the Great War despite leading nominally centre-left administrations. They had both governed in a more left-wing direction than their moderate, even Whiggish, political background might imply, compared to the new generation of radicals. And their political careers were both cut short by a debilitating stroke.

The stroke left Wilson paralysed but alive, bedridden but needing assistance to do more than just basic tasks, and denied the vision in one eye. Perhaps the kindest thing to have happened would have been for him to have died for it was unclear now if he could perform the day-to-day responsibilities of being President. This was before the process of filling a vacancy or transferring power to a suitable deputy had been formalised, and constitutionally speaking Wilson was in an ambiguous situation.

Vice President Thomas R. Marshall might, if he had the backing of the Cabinet, forcibly take over, but he was reluctant to step in, partly for lack of an official confirmation of the President’s incapacity, but mainly for the precedent it might set. Accusations of a power-grab from a President who may yet recover would mean the end of Marshall’s career and all who went with him, and would only strengthen the Presidency at the expense of future Vice Presidents.

There was furthermore the need to be sensitive to Wilson’s disability, even a temporary one.

Marshall himself was disliked for his rustic manner and irreverent humour, especially by Edith Wilson, the First Lady. Motivated by a personal dislike for Marshall and a protective love of her husband which extended to not publicly acknowledging his weakened state, she and a closed circle of the President’s advisors deliberately restricted access to him, choosing which documents passed his desk, which he signed, and whom he spoke to. Woodrow Wilson effectively became a figurehead for the remainder of his second term in office.

Even the effort to join the League of Nations came to nothing, as sufficient guarantees for the preservation of American sovereignty, i.e., keeping her from getting caught up in foreign wars, could not be obtained by the President or his associates. That America did not join didn’t change the foreign policy of the great powers much throughout the 1920s, but it set back the internationalist movement that had cried out for such an arbiter and ended Wilson’s time in office on a downward note.

By the time of the Democratic National Convention in 1920, Wilson allowed his name to be put forward for a potential third term, despite being in no fit state to do so. This was largely a ploy to block William McAdoo, his son-in-law, who was looking more and more like the most senior candidate, but many others jostled for the nomination. McAdoo had a clear lead, but senior figures like Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and New York Governor Al Smith came not far behind. McAdoo would eventually win out on a platform not too dissimilar to his father-in-law’s, but promising further international co-operation that stopped short of joining the League of Nations, fair treatment of Germany in the Peace Treaties, firm anti-Communist action at home, and an “overall calming of the political waters” as he called it.

The War had articulated great passions in the American public: female emancipation was underway and this was the era of Prohibition and the Red Scare. To add weight and hereditary appeal to McAdoo’s return to normalcy, the DNC nominated Navy Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For an unstable time, it seemed appropriate when the Republicans nominated the liberal Republican Hiram Johnson, whose impulsive character and temper seemed to seal the election for McAdoo. Johnson made up for this with his generally progressive leanings. Indeed, although Franklin Roosevelt implied as much as he might that he was keeping up his relative’s legacy, Johnson could point to the fact he was Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912, under the Progressive label. In that same election, the Progressive ticket had squared off against McAdoo’s father-in-law, Woodrow Wilson.

Under pressure from party bosses, Johnson ran a largely conservative and tightly-controlled campaign, arguing along the same lines as McAdoo for a return to tranquillity, his isolationist rhetoric striking a chord after the sceptical treatment the League of Nations and Paris Treaties received. At the same time, he implicitly connected McAdoo with Wilson, saying that the radical undercurrents of the era needed to be faced down and brought to heel; the old guard couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be up for that. The American people wanted change by not voting for it, seemed to be the confused message that Johnson gave off. And yet it was enough to carry the day for the Republicans, who by a narrow margin had retaken the White House.

 

[Lyndhurst]

By the summer of 1920, the Independent Liberals were feeling frustrated. Steady progress had been made, and Reginald McKenna could claim he formed the principal Opposition to the Lloyd George coalition. But the government still commanded a supreme majority in the Commons, and the outbreak of the Anti-Soviet War allowed the Prime Minister to once more make the circuit of international conferences, performing as the statesman who had outgrown domestic politics. Rapid negotiations between London, Paris, and Berlin had brought the French round to the idea of the new German role as an anti-Communist bulwark, keeping tight controls on her military strengths but redirecting her eastward against the Soviet Union. The pivot away from the harsher terms imposed only a year before at the Paris Peace Conferences came relatively easily for Lloyd George, who could carry the Conservatives with him on a general anti-Communist slant. It was a common tactic of his to present himself as a great moderating force, between “reaction and revolution” as he had put it in the last election campaign. This stance was a traditional Liberal clarion call, but cut off from the centre-left, Lloyd George began to cling to the Conservative rocks in a wild electoral sea. The electorate themselves gave out mixed messages; the Coalition had endured, and neither McKenna or Labour seemed to have the advantage.

The Edinburgh North and South by-elections on the 9th April started off well for the Liberals; both seats were being defended by the Unionists, and both fell to the Liberal challengers, the contest in Edinburgh North allowing the Asquith-era cabinet minister McKinnon Wood to return to Parliament. Like Walter Runciman at Paisley in February, the medium-ranking Wood helped flesh out the McKenna liberals beyond the grandees.

The spring of 1920 proved slow progress – another ministerial by-election at Sunderland on the 24th on Hamar Greenwood being appointed Chief Secretary to Ireland allowed Labour and the Liberals to protest the increasingly brutal reprisals in Ireland, but neither could agree to withdraw in favour of the other, and Greenwood was victorious. In Louth, on 3rd June, Home Rule and agricultural issues were prominent, and the Liberals took the seat, but a fortnight later in Nelson and Colne, they came a clear third behind the Labour and Conservative candidates.

Labour continued to perform well; in the South Norfolk contest in July, they exploited the divided Liberal vote to win. In Woodbridge a day later, they won, and secured a good second place in Ilford in September.

The Hemel Hempstead by-election in November was uncontested, but permitted the civil servant John C.C. Davidson to enter Parliament. His time had not yet come but Davidson proved a key figure in Conservative circles, being close to Bonar Law, Austen Chamberlain, and Stanley Baldwin, two of them future party leaders.

By November of that year, the Anti-Soviet War was in full swing; German-Polish forces fought a furious battle in October, turning back the Red Army and rallying anti-Communist sentiment in the right wing of British politics. The Independent Parliamentary Group had taken an increasingly anti-Communist line, chasing the patriotic working-class vote. Backed by the bombastic Horatio Bottomley and all his oratorical skills, it began to eat away at Labour support. The Wrekin by-election on the 20th caused by the death of the former MP, an associate of Bottomley’s, was a strong showing for the organisation, but beyond this they began to fall back as the Conservatives pushed for harder measures against the Soviets.

Certainly, the anti-socialist mood prevalent in the country helped the Coalition Liberals hold the seat of Middleton and Prestwich on 22nd November, but a minor outbreak of smallpox did also hinder canvassing efforts. Moderate Labour argued for a distinction between Sovietism and British socialism, but in the heady atmosphere of the times, this difference didn’t seem to matter much.

That said, Labour candidates were successfully returned in the final two contests of 1920, in Rhondda West and Abertillery. It seemed Wales was slowly slipping under a red wave. The mainstream Liberals remained firmly wedded to the Coalition, and Ireland was only becoming ever bloodier and more chaotic.

If 1920 had yielded little gain, 1921 would be when it all came to a head.

 

[Lyndhurst]

Apologies for the lack of updates on this TL. My new job has taken up a lot of time for writing and researching, and I'm not satisfied with how this thread is currently written. I'm also unsure how to progress. Broadly speaking the next steps would be an eventual Liberal reunion and McKenna becoming the next Liberal Prime Minister, after the fall of Lloyd George and a brief Conservative interim and a hung parliament over the issue of tariffs. This felt too much like OTL and retreading much of the ground Pipisme's excellent TL has already covered.

I'd also like to cover foreign events in greater detail that would mean reworking other parts. There's a lot of scope for what had been intended to be a purely domestic British TL ending in 1929/30. I have to confess that while writing this TL really took on a life of its own and as a first time writer the structural problems need working out.

Rest assured I will return to this idea in the future, but thank you to everyone so far who has read and commented on it.