The Coming of the First Election

Abstract

Until the autumn the Ministers had been sustained in private, as well as in public, by their belief in the constitutional enormity of rejection. Although Lloyd George for one was now working to provoke the Lords to rejection in the belief that if they did ‘then never has there been such a delivery of our enemies into our hands since the Syrian Army was stricken with blindness,’¹ most of the Ministers frankly recoiled from the tumult and turmoil of a constitutional revolution. Thus when on 8 September the Cabinet discussed the possibility of rejection for the first time it was not the deliverance up of their enemies that concerned them, but the great difficulties arising from rejection.²