Tilting left

I finished my copy of Clement Davies: Liberal Leader by Alun Wyburn-Powell this weekend (Politicos, 2003). It was an enjoyable read and the author didn't do too badly, especially given it was his first book. Alright, there were a few stylistic issues I had here and there, but not enough to detract from the content of the book. And I liked how he brought it to an end by going full circle and ending where he started.

The man who emerge in this biography was more engaging than I thought he would be: a successful barrister with a varied social life and a happy marriage and children - until three of the four were cruelly robbed from him and his wife, Jano, all at the same age of 24. I suppose I imagined Clem Davies to be a dour man, not least by the photos which exist of him and those in the book.

Clem entered Parliament late, in 1929 aged 45, after a successful career at the bar. He managed to combine his Parliamentary work with being on the board of Unilever during the mornings - one of the first aspects of life in a different Parliamentary age which I can't imagine being allowed today.

He sat on the backbenches, as a Liberal National for most of the period in the run-up to war in 1939. Wyburn-Powell does a good job trying to explain the different factions and cleavages within the Liberal Party during this time, of which there were a bewildering amount, with each MP or faction calling themselves something different and allying with either the Tories or Labour. Some were Liberal Nationals, others National Liberals, and other Independent Liberals. If nothing else united them, only their individuality did, making them, like cats, notoriously difficult to control.

It was in 1939-40 which Clem shot to prominence, being one of the instigators and Parliamentary rebels who managed to kick Neville Chamberlain out of the premiership and replace him with Winston Churchill.

He probably never expected to become leader of the Liberals, which occurred in 1945. But with a party reduced to just 12 MPs and the leader, Archie Sinclair, out of Parliament, there were few alternatives and Clem had been one of the longest-serving by that point.

For the next 11 years Clem steered the Liberals through a difficult and tricky time. The party was not only tiny and inconsequential, it was also split evenly between left and right.

Although Clem was an interesting chap, at time I felt Wyburn-Powell was padding it out a bit. Perhaps there just wasn't enough to go on; Clem never kept a diary and although he had access to the family archives, much of the book's content deals with the history of the Liberal Party from the end of the First World War to the late 1950s. Nevertheless, for students of Liberals and liberalism during this period, it's an engaging study and personalising it in the figure of Clem makes it easy to follow.

One thing more though: having now read Clem's biography, I have a serious concern for the sense of history shown by both Mr Tony and the Lib Dems' former leader, Paddy Ashdown. Both men argued that the twentieth century belonged to the Conservatives, because of the split between Labour and the Liberals in 1900. Their ambition was to achieve a rapprochement of these two progressive forces and reverse that trend in the twenty-first century. So far, so simple.

But the reality wasn't as neat. Some Liberal MPs clearly belonged in the centre-left camp, like Megan Lloyd George, who eventually joined that party during Clem's tenure as party leader. But there were others who had more in common with the Conservatives, like Megan's brother Gwilym, who joined them, or who owed their seats to the Tories' decision to not stand against them, including Donald Wade in Huddersfield West. Indeed, even Clem didn't fight several elections in his Montgomeryshire constituency in Wales during the 1930s on account of the local Tory association's approval of him.

Indeed, an argument could be made that on some level, the Liberals had more in common with the Conservatives than they did with Labour. And it was Clem's misfortune that he had to lead the party when it was reduced from 30 seats to 12 and later six. Only when he handed over to Jo Grimond in 1956 did the shift towards the Labour-Liberal rapprochement once again begin in earnest. This is documented in Grimond's own biography, and subsequently resulted in coalition between the two parties in the late 1970s, alliance with the SDP in the 1980s, culminating in Paddy's and Mr Tony's mutual admiration society in the 1990s.