Austen Chamberlain succeeds Bonar Law as Tory leader
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London, 22 March 1921 - Austen Chamberlain has been unanimously elected as the new leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons.
The election, which took place yesterday in the Carlton Club in London, was precipitated by the surprise resignation of party leader Andrew Bonar Law owing to ill-health. His departure has left a vacancy in the coalition government in which he was a senior figure.
News of Bonar Law’s retirement was delivered to the House of Commons on 17 March by the Prime Minister David Lloyd George. In his resignation letter, Mr Bonar Law referred to the strain of the last few years and the difficulty he has had in doing his work. He admitted that he was ‘quite worn out’ and that the advice from his medical team was that unless he took an immediate and long rest, ‘an early and complete breakdown’ would be ‘inevitable’.
Angry unionism is nothing new. It was born in anger in the 1880s – when it recognised the threat posed to it by the Home Rule crisis – and it has remained angry ever since. Angry in 1972, when the Stormont parliament was closed. Angry in 1974, when power-sharing arrived. Angry in 1985, when the Anglo-Irish Agreement was foisted upon it. Angry in 1993, when the Downing Street Declaration stated the British government had no “selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. Angry right now, because the Northern Ireland Protocol, by leaving NI in the EU, has pushed it into the constitutional equivalent of a granny flat.
Keir Starmer needs one big, defining idea if he’s to avoid being another doomed Labour leader Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson show the way for a struggling opposition leader: offer a serious argument, not a set of policies. Labour often gives the impression it would rather do without a leader. In 1918 the fledgling Labour Party won the right, for the first time, to be regarded as the official opposition. With 57 seats, Labour was the largest single party in opposition to the triumphant coalition of Lloyd George and Bonar Law. However, the party did not have a leader as such. It had an annually elected chairman, but refused to upgrade William Adamson to leader. The forgotten Liberal Donald Maclean became the leader of the opposition instead.
Kedleston Hall is a Georgian jewel a few miles north of Derby built to rival Chatsworth. Its 18th-century Palladian facade and neoclassical architecture and parkland are just as impressive and it is one of the National Trust’s most popular visitor sites.
It was always the wish of its former owner Lord Curzon, a Viceroy of India and a nearly Prime Minister, that his childhood home, more a palace to showcase his exquisite collection of paintings, artefacts and furniture, should be opened up to the public.
And it was duly handed over by his heirs in 1987, 62 years after his death in 1925. By some distance he has been the most generous of benefactors to the National Trust two of his other historic properties, Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and Bodiam, in East Sussex, were bequeathed to the nation, along with provision for their maintenance. He also restored the Elizabethan mansion Montacute in Somerset, which the Trust also took over.
Road to Partition: how the border was drawn up
A very different border could have been chosen, but by the time the Better Government of Ireland act passed on 23 December 1920, the line between what would become Northern Ireland and the rest of the island had been drawn.
• 21 Dec 2020
In early 1919 Lloyd George s coalition government was engaged in the realignment of European borders at the Paris Peace Conference but, by the Autumn of that year, attention was focused again on the Irish question.
Conscious that the outdated 1914 Home Rule Act was on the Statute Book and would operate automatically after the European treaties were finalised, the Prime Minister set up a special cabinet committee under the chairmanship of Unionist Walter Long to advise on new Home Rule legislation.