‘I’m not going to pay good money’, Groucho Marx famously quipped, ‘to join a club that lets in people like me.’ In the case of the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, whose 175th anniversary last year was marked by this handsome history, requirements were quite explicit. Membership depended on opposition to the 1832 Reform Bill. Four years later, the Reform Club demanded the exact opposite. Thus, in their political heyday between the first two Reform Acts, these rival clubs became the effective headquarters of their respective parties, a role altered but not entirely diminished in the Carlton’s case by the foundation of Conservative Central Office in the early 1870s. ‘After 1870’, we read, ‘Central Office got the drudgery; the Carlton kept the glamour and excitement.’
The most celebrated moment in the Carlton Club’s history came on 19 October 1922, when the party met to debate future involvement with the discredited Lloyd George Coalition. The background to the meeeting and subsequent developments are grippingly described. On the way into the meeting, J. C. C. Davidson, Stanley Baldwin’s PPS, was asked by the Yorkshire Post what was going to happen. ‘Just a slice off the top’, replied Davidson enigmatically. His prophecy was fulfilled, as the party voted over two-to-one to end its association with Lloyd George, who on hearing the news exclaimed, ‘Damn, there goes Chequers’, and tendered his resignation to George V, never to hold office again. Lloyd George, unsurprisingly, categorised the meeting as ‘a backstairs conspiracy in a West End club’. In fact, the result was a powerful assertion of internal party democracy. By jettisoning both the incumbent prime minister and their own leader, Austen Chamberlain, the parliamentary party triggered an immediate general election, established Stanley Baldwin as the face of inter- war Conservatism, and consigned the fractured wings of the Liberals to permanent third-party status in the Commons, thus making the Labour Party the main opposition force in the Commons.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in