Austen Chamberlain succeeds Bonar Law as Tory leader

London, 22 March 1921 - Austen Chamberlain has been unanimously elected as the new leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons.

The election, which took place yesterday in the Carlton Club in London, was precipitated by the surprise resignation of party leader Andrew Bonar Law owing to ill-health. His departure has left a vacancy in the coalition government in which he was a senior figure.

News of Bonar Law’s retirement was delivered to the House of Commons on 17 March by the Prime Minister David Lloyd George. In his resignation letter, Mr Bonar Law referred to the strain of the last few years and the difficulty he has had in doing his work. He admitted that he was ‘quite worn out’ and that the advice from his medical team was that unless he took an immediate and long rest, ‘an early and complete breakdown’ would be ‘inevitable’.

Reacting to this development, the Irish Times has written that Mr Bonar Law was ‘neither a great statesman nor a great orator, but he was something which is, perhaps, rarer than both. He was a man of strong and unshaken loyalty.’

It is not expected that the change of leadership will impact on the working arrangement of the Liberal-Conservative coalition, on which the current British government depends.

[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]