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Unionist Politics and Theaftermath of the General Election of 1906: A Reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

David Dutton
David Dutton
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

The internal dissessions and upheavals in the Unionist party following the catastrophic defeat incurred at the general election of 1906 have been the subject of frequent examination by historians. Despite, or perhaps because of, the importance of the issues involved there has been general agreement that questions of policy were at the centre of this struggle. Balfour's official biographer has commented that any rumours of ‘disputed leadership’ were ‘ludicrous in the light of the correspondence that was passing in private’, while Chamberlain's biographer has asserted that he was staking ‘everything on policy’. Recently Dr Judd has suggested that Chamberlain ‘envisaged…a reunited Unionist party…very probably under his leadership not Balfour's’, but he took this analysis no further and Mr Fraser's judgement is typical that what took place was ‘a polite but ruthless struggle for the control of the Unionist party's machinery and policy’. The Birmingham leader is characteristically seen to have played through the whole episode with the straightest of bats, bound above all by personal loyalty to Balfour. Contemporaries, however, saw a different Chamberlain – one whose ruthless ambition bordered on fanaticism. Balfour noted that Chamberlain ‘cannot realize that because he is only thinking of one thing, it does not follow that every one else has the same limited intensity of vision’. Some were prepared to interpret Chamberlain's machinations in terms of a dual personality: ‘You know there are two Joes and that one honestly sees no harm in prosecuting such a manoeuvre’, but others were ready to place more sinister constructions upon them:

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 861 - 876
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 See particularly Fraser, P., ‘Unionism and tariff reform: the crisis of 1906’, Historical Journal, v, 2 (1962)Google Scholar; and Amery, J., Joseph Chamberlain and the tariff reform campaign (London, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mr Amery's study provides the historian with a wealth of material from the Chamberlain papers, but is narrative rather than analytical in nature.

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