ABSTRACT
The 1924 election vindicated the skill with which Baldwin had handled the Conservative Party's affairs since taking over from Bonar Law. The biggest fish Baldwin landed, however, was Churchill, who at last realized that, now it had had to drop Protection, the Conservative Party offered him the only chance of continued political usefulness. He contested Epping as a Conservative and returned to the House for the first time since 1922. Moreover, the mere signature of the Locarno agreements implied that the League Covenant, to which Germany was about to become a full party, was null and void. Perhaps no member of Baldwin's Cabinet was more relieved by the settlement of the political scene in 1924 than the Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain's legislative chef d'oeuvre, however, was the complicated Local Government Act of 1929, one of the century's major administrative statutes before 1945.
