ABSTRACT
Lloyd George, in a subtly argued assessment, hinted that Asquith's famously dismissive attitude reflected more directly on his own, rather than Bonar Law's, limitations. Bonar Law, backed by Carson, Balfour and other Unionist elders, supported the Lloyd George initiative, but at a party meeting held on 7 July 1916 he faced considerable diehard opposition, and found himself in what Robert Blake has assessed as a 'dangerously isolated position'. In ending the coalition, in freeing his party from the Lloyd George cavalcade, he also spared the Conservatives from dangerous ideological tensions and potential internal division. Even with the two issues which fired him tariff reform and Ulster he displayed more rhetorical truculence than conviction. It is easy to depict Bonar Law in stereotypical Calvinist or Scots terms. A more telling paean came from Austen Chamberlain, whose political career Bonar Law had done much to thwart: ‘he was indeed a most lovable man’.
