The End of the Hegemony 1902–6

On 12 July 1902 Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. For a decade at least Balfour had been the heir apparent. But what value the inheritance? A fortnight later the new Ministry- suffered a severe and unexpected by-election reversal at North Leeds. The Unionist majority of 2517 at the general election of 1900 was turned into a deficit of 758, a swing of 13 per cent. ‘One swallow does not make a summer’, cautioned the Liberal Review of Reviews.1 But North Leeds was to prove the harbinger of the Liberals’ Indian summer. For July 1902 marks the beginning of the end of the Unionist hegemony and with it that resurgence of Liberalism that was to characterise the Edwardian age. It is perhaps not inappropriate that Balfour, whom his cousin Lord Hugh Cecil was one day to describe as ‘the most unskilful leader (out of Parlt.) since Wellington’,2 should inherit the Prime Ministership in the very month that the great majority bequeathed him by his uncle began to disintegrate.