100 years ago today the Liberal Party flipped into irrelevance. A General Election was held on 15th November 1922 to decide who would follow PM David Lloyd George into Number 10, and as it turned out there'd never be a Liberal Prime Minister again.
Lloyd George had been leader of a Liberal/Conservative coalition since 1916, but in October 1922 this finally fell apart and in the subsequent election his party were routed. It didn't help that the party had split into Liberals and National Liberals, and it definitely didn't help that the Labour Party were becoming an electoral force. So when the results came in the Conservatives (led by Bonar Law) had a clear majority of seats and the Liberals have been out of Downing Street ever since.
For the previous century power had flipped between Whigs and Tories, then between Liberals and Conservatives which was practically the same thing. The Whigs evolved into the Liberals during the 1850s.
100 years of Prime Ministers (1822-1922)
1822
1835
1846
1852
1859
1868
1874
1886
1895
1905
But the last time Britain elected a majority Liberal government was in 1906, after which they only had the numbers to rule in coalition and after 1922 not even that. Sure they earned significance during the Lib Lab pact in the 1970s and yes, five years of coalition power in the early 2010s. But the politician in the hot seat has only ever been blue or red, mostly blue, over the last 100 years.
100 years of Prime Ministers (1922-2022)
1929
1935
1945
1951
1964
1979
1997
2010
In British politics the third party rarely does well, and what happened a century ago is that Labour leapfrogged the Liberals into second place. It didn't look fatal at the time but it's proved that way since and shows no sign of recovery. Changes to the political battlefield can be glacial but with hindsight there's often a hinge, and for Liberallessness that was 100 years ago today.
