ABSTRACT
If we wish to understand the genesis and raison d’être of the Liberal Democrats, we had better begin where all good stories start, at the beginning. The diffi culty in this case is that there is no obvious beginning. Was it the establishment of the Liberal Democrat party in 1989? Was it the founding of the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1981? Was it the Orpington by-election of 1962 when the Liberals showed that the post-war two-party system might not, after all, represent the telos of British party politics? Or was it instead the founding of the Liberal Party a hundred years earlier? We can discern an unbroken if sometimes tenuous thread connecting the Whigs of Charles James Fox, Grey and Russell, to the Liberals under Gladstone and Lloyd George, to the recharged Liberals of the 1960s under Jo Grimond, to the Alliance party of the 1980s, to the Liberal Democrats of today, so it seems most appropriate to start with the Liberals in the nineteenth century.
