202. Fall following the decline

The Chanak crisis of 1922 brought Britain to the brink of war with Turkey. Saner heads, in particular those of both the British general on the spot and the Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal, soon to be Turkish president as Kemal Atatürk, defused the crisis and averted war. But Lloyd George’s handling of the crisis, in which he took a distinctly hawkish stance, added further to the growing dissatisfaction with him as Prime Minister, and with his Coalition government, among rank and file Conservatives.

That came to a head in the Carlton Club meeting in October, which voted for the Conservative Party to contest the forthcoming general election as a separate organisation and not merely a component of a Coalition. Both anti- and pro-Coalition ministers felt they had to resign from the government. The pro-Coalition Austen Chamberlain even gave up the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Lloyd George, realising that his government was no longer viable, resigned.

In the subsequent election, the Tories won themselves a strong working majority. The outcome for the Liberals was disastrous: they were overtaken by Labour which became the official opposition. Never since have the Liberals formed another government of their own, at best being a minor partner in someone else’s.

Bonar Law, who had returned to the leadership of the Tories, became Prime Minister. That didn’t last long: cancer finished him within a few months, at which point he was succeeded by a Conservative who’d played a leading role in ending the Coalition, Stanley Baldwin.

He and Ramsay MacDonald who had, in the meantime, again won the leadership of Labour, would dominate British politics into the mid 1930s in their rivalry and, sometimes, their collaboration.

Illustration: Kemal Atatürk, who led the Turkish forces fighting for the independence of his country, inspecting troops in June 1922. Public Domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License