[‘A deliberate attempt was made to overthrow the Government’: Lloyd George’s Chief Whip lays into a Liberal on the eve of the ‘Coupon Election’ following the end of the Great War.] Long Typed Letter Signed from Frederick Guest to W. H. Dickinson.

An extraordinary letter, rubbing the nose of a pro-Asquith Liberal in the muck on the eve of his leader Lloyd George’s landslide Coalition victory in the 1918 ‘Coupon Election’. Guest, who was Winston Churchill’s cousin, is described in his entry in the Oxford DNB as a ‘highly controversial’ figure who ‘knew where all the bodies were buried’, a useful attribute for someone who served as the Coalition Chief Whip from 1917 to 1921. The recipient Willoughby Hyett Dickinson (1859-1943), later an influential proponent of the League of Nations, began his career a Liberal MP. He was knighted in 1918, and elevated to the peerage as Baron Dickinson of Painswick in 1930, the same year in which he joined the Labour Party. 3pp, 8vo. In fair condition, lightly aged, with slight damage to corners from removal of stud which held the leaves together. Folded twice. Guest begins by stating that he has submitted Dickinson’s letter of the previous day (‘the 25th instant’) - presumably a request for a ‘Coalition Coupon’ - ‘to the Prime Minister’. Whilst appreciating that Dickinson voted for the government on 5 November, he feels he should deal with ‘the situation as it affects Liberal Members of the late Parliament, who are presenting themselves before the constituencies at this Election and who are in a similar position to that in which you find yourself’. Twisting the knife, he explains that the prime minister ‘can accept no responsibility’ for ‘the fact that the circumstances under which the present General Election is being fought inevitably involve a certain division in the Liberal ranks’: ‘Mr. Asquith and his friends declined to associate themselves with the Government when it was originally formed. They remained, supported by a powerful party in the House of Commons, in an attitude of scarcely-veiled hostility to the Government.’ He accuses this group - at ‘the darkest moment in the war’ - of having ‘deliberately challenged the existence of the Government on the Maurice debate and division’, at a time ‘when the establishment of unity of command was vital to our success’. He reproaches Dickinson for siding with the Liberals against the government in this debate, which was ‘the culminating point in a series of incidents [...] where a deliberate attempt was made to overthrow the Government’. He continues with an assertion that the prime minister has ‘found it impossible to induce the electorate to refrain from opposition in the case of Members who, up till at any rate the very last moment have shown that they could not be relied on to support the Coalition’, choosing instead to give ‘genuine support to the Progressive programme enunciated by the Government’. In a thinly-veiled attack on Dickinson, he states that those who have ‘maintained an attitude of reserve and suspicion, and who on critical and decisive occasions have cast their vote against his administration, have only themselves to thank if they now find themselves compelled to present themselves before their constituents under circumstances of some disadvantage’. The letter ends with an attack on ‘Mr. Asquith and his friends’ for declining ‘to associate with the Government and bear their share of the grievous burdens and wearing anxiety of the last eighteen months of the war’.