Abstract
It quickly becomes tiresome for the reader to be presented continually with the statement that ‘of all leaders of the Conservative Party, Box-Bender was the most surprising’; one might almost come to the conclusion that all leaders of the Conservative party are surprising — which is certainly not the case. Bonar Law possessed many qualities, but an ability to surprise was hardly one of them. Still, a greater contrast to Balfour could not have been found. If Balfour almost fitted the description of the heir in Kipling’s The ‘Mary Gloster’ whose rooms at Cambridge were ‘beastly — more like whore’s than a man’s’, then Andrew Bonar Law, who was a friend of the poet’s, nearly matched that of Sir Antony Gloster himself: ‘I didn’t begin with askings. I took my job and I stuck: I took the chances they wouldn’t, an’ now they’re calling it luck.’ There was certainly a large element of that in Law’s rise to the leadership.
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Notes and References
Robert Blake, The Unkown Prime Minister (1956), p. 31.
Alan Clark (ed.), A Good Innings (1974), p. 118.
D. Gilmour, Curzon (1994), p. 436.
G. D. Boyce (ed.), The Crisis of British Unionism… 1885–1922 (1987), p. 128.
For this see G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics (1987).
R. Self (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters (1995), 147.
M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill IV. Companion vol. 3 (1977), letter to Churchill, 8 April 1921, 1434.
There are good accounts in the following: K. O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity (1979), Chapter 14; Cowling, Impact of Labour Chapter 11
and M. Kinnear, The Fall of Lloyd George (1973), Chapters 5–6.
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© 1998 John Charmley
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Charmley, J. (1998). Over the Top with Bonar Law. In: A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14691-8_3
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