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‘How strange is fate’: The Leadership, March – December 1921
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2009
Extract
On 17 March 1921 Bonar Law unexpectedly announced his resignation on grounds of ill-health. Having abandoned all expectation of obtaining the leadership for himself a decade earlier, Chamberlain now found the prize equally suddenly and unexpectedly within his grasp. His conduct during this period illustrates much about Chamberlain's character. In particular, it revealed again that lack of steely ambition and ‘pushfulness’ so evident in his father: a weakness he cloaked beneath an acute sensitivity to the outward appearance of political propriety and personal delicacy. As he wrote to J. C. C. Davidson after his succession, with regard to such matters he had ‘a great honor of anything that savours of intrigue or pushfulness on the part of a possible candidate, and felt then as I felt ten years ago … that the only right thing to do was to keep quiet and have members to make up their own minds without either courting their favour or shunning responsibility if their choice fell upon me’. Having thus ‘emerged’ by acclamation as undisputed leader, another feature of Chamberlain's character swiftly manifested itself in his initial sense of weary trepidation at entering upon an apparently unpalatable task with grave reluctance. Like every other office, therefore, he confessed to his family that he accepted the leadership as ‘an obvious duty but without pleasure or any great expectation except of trouble and hard labour’.
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References
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53 Hilton Young unsuccessfully contested East Worcestershire against Chamberlain in January 1910.
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55 Eamon de Valera (1882–1975). Sinn Fein MP for Clare East, 1917–21; member of Dáil for Co. Clare 1921–59; President of Dáil 1919–22; President Sinn Fein 1917–26; President Fianna Fail 1926–59; Minister for External Affairs, 1932–48; Taoiseoch 1937–48, 1951–54, 1957–59; President of the Republic 1959–73.
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