Bonar Law Quotes (1858-1923)

“You Clyde boys were pretty hard on me today. But it's fine to hear your Glasgow accent. It's like a sniff of the air of Scotland in the musty atmosphere of this place.”

“Throughout his career, as it seems to me, there were two principles which were at the basis of his political action...a desire to improve the condition of the people, and an intense, and perhaps almost aggressive, national pride.”

“I really do not like what you say about Aitken. He is my most intimate friend. I know him as well as I know anyone and in my belief he is as honourable a man as I am and one of the ablest men I know.”

“There was a vast new electorate in this country; a new democracy had been called into being by the last Reform Bill. There were millions of voters unattached to any party, and up and down the country people were wondering exactly what they wanted and for whom they could vote. One morning they opened their newspapers and read that Mr. Lloyd George said that Mr. Bonar Law is honest to the verge of simplicity. The British people said, "By God, that is what we have been looking for."”

“I know that Bonar Law was the greatest figure on the political stage with which these books deal—that by action, by support, or by withdrawal, he made and unmade every Government from 1915 to 1922. And I can prove it—but there are some people whom I never expect to admit it or believe it.”

“We had never known a more selfless man, a more loyal man; selfless, but also in a peculiar way ambitious. Strangely enough, when everything had come to him he appeared to regard it as dead ashes. There was no joy in the achievement. I think something snapped when the news came that his son had fallen in the war. Then there were the warning beginnings of his illness.”

“By an overwhelming vote the Conservative Party determined to break with Lloyd George and end the National Coalition Government. The Prime Minister resigned that same afternoon. In the morning we had been friends and colleagues of all of these people. By nightfall they were our party foes, intent on driving us from public life. With the solitary and unexpected exception of Lord Curzon, all the prominent Conservatives who had fought the war with us, and the majority of all the Ministers, adhered to Lloyd George. These included Arthur Balfour, Austen Chamberlain, Robert Horne, and Lord Birkenhead, the four ablest figures in the Conservative Party. At the crucial moment I was prostrated by a severe operation for appendicitis, and in the morning when I recovered consciousness I learned that the Lloyd George government had resigned, and that I had lost not only my appendix but my office as Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies, in which I conceived myself to have had some Parliamentary and administrative success. Mr. Bonar Law, who had left us a year before for serious reasons of health, reluctantly became Prime Minister. He formed a Government of what one might call "the Second Eleven". Mr. Baldwin, the outstanding figure, was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Prime Minister asked the King for a Dissolution. The people wanted a change. Mr. Bonar Law, with Mr. Baldwin at his side, and Lord Beaverbrook as his principal stimulant and mentor, gained a majority of seventy-three, with all the expectation of a five-year tenure of power. Early in the year 1923 Mr. Bonar Law resigned the Premiership and retired to die of his fell affliction. Mr. Baldwin succeeded him as Prime Minister, and Lord Curzon reconciled himself to the office of Foreign Secretary in the new administration.”

“The present leader of the Unionist Party in that House, Mr. Bonar Law, would not have been chosen to succeed Mr. Balfour but for his powers of speech, which had given him a high reputation, though not as yet Cabinet office. The exercise of these powers in a field of authority, added to fearless courage, transparent sincerity, and an uncommon faculty for going straight to the heart of things, has justified that choice. What Mr. Bonar Law's future as a statesman may be, the gods hold in their lap. As a Parliamentary and public speaker, he possesses a gift unseen since the late Lord Salisbury—that of delivering a sustained and closely reasoned argument or attack for an hour without a single note. In part the result of an astonishing memory, in part of great intellectual quickness, this faculty as it is developed by practice, cannot fail to place him in the front rank of British Parliamentary successes.”

“His delivery was extraordinarily good and, though he spoke for an hour and a half I should think, his voice never failed him and every word was clear – and bold. It wasn't brilliant oratory, no flowers of rhetoric à la Curzon, or subtle 'nuances' à la Balfour, but it was good hard sound commonsense. ... He held his audience all through his speech, you felt he was in touch and in sympathy with them and they with him. He was so extraordinarily quiet and self-possessed, it was almost as if he were chatting to us confidentially about it all instead of making an elaborate speech.”