The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [22]
Baldwin saw Churchill again at Downing Street. “He evidently wants very much to secure my return & co-operation,” Churchill wrote to Clementine. But the local Conservative Association did not fall in with either Central Office or the party Leader: instead, it adopted the nephew of the previous member as its candidate. Churchill faced the prospect of splitting the Conservative vote. But he was determined to try to get back to Parliament and felt confident he could win the seat. His private appeal to Baldwin to persuade the official Conservative candidate to stand down, or at least to ensure the “non-interference” of Conservative Central Office, was in vain. But his campaign effort in each of the nine wards in the constituency was headed by an existing Conservative MP.
One letter of support came from a former Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, the object of so many of Churchill’s criticisms in earlier years. “Your absence from the House of Commons at such a time,” Balfour wrote, “is greatly to be deplored.”
Churchill conducted a vigorous campaign. One proposal he advocated in the social sphere was the provision of houses “with proper State assistance.” Novel methods and materials should be used, “in much the same way as the shell problem was solved during the war.”
The result was incredibly close, so close that Churchill was initially believed to be the winner, to the delight of his supporters. But, in fact, the official candidate had won with 8,187 votes. Churchill was forty-three behind, a tiny margin. With 6,156 votes, the Labour candidate had failed to take advantage of the split. “You deserved to win,” one Conservative MP wrote to Churchill when the result was known. “You are never more wanted in the House than now.” Within two months of his defeat, Churchill went to Liverpool, where he made his first speech to a Conservative meeting in twenty years. There was no longer any place in British politics for an “independent” Liberal Party, he said. Only the Conservatives could defeat Labour. “Liberals” like himself, he said, must be prepared to support the Conservatives.
On 9 May 1924 the Ashton-under-Lyne Conservative Association asked Churchill to stand as an “Anti-socialist” candidate. So too did the Conservatives at both Kettering and Royston. On May 10 Churchill informed Baldwin that he was helping to organize a group of Liberal MPs in the Commons to vote with the Conservatives on the next anti-Labour motion. At the end of the month he asked Baldwin to support his candidature at the second Westminster constituency, Westminster St. Georges. More than 1,500 of the electors there—though not the local Conservative Association—had urged him to stand, but Baldwin backed away. Finally, in July, the Conservative Central Office said that it would find Churchill a constituency and that he could stand, not as a Conservative—which he did not wish to do—but as a “Constitutionalist” candidate, with full Conservative support. Within a month he had been found a constituency, Epping, just outside London.
The General Election was held on 29 October 1924. Churchill faced both a Liberal and a Labour candidate. When the result was announced the following day he was once more a Member of Parliament, with 19,843 votes, compared with a combined total of 13,848 for his two opponents. Nationally, the Conservatives were returned to power with 419 seats, as against 151 for