Clement Davies

Clement Edward Davies KC, MP (19 February 1884 – 23 March 1962) was a Welsh politician and leader of the Liberal Party from 1945 to 1956.

Early life

Born in Llanfyllin, Wales, and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Davies was called to the Bar of England & Wales and was subsequently appointed a KC in 1923.

Political career

Davies was elected to the House of Commons in the 1929 General Election as a Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for Montgomeryshire. In 1931 the Liberals divided into three groups and he became one of the Liberal National MPs supporting the National Government. However in 1939 he resigned from both the party and supporting the National Government. During World War II he was chairman of the All Party Action Group that played a significant role in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Leader of the Liberal Party

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Davies in 1960

In 1942 he rejoined the Liberal Party. Despite the fact that he had been absent from it for a decade, and with lingering suspicions that his commitment to Liberalism was less than full, he then became leader of the party in 1945 after Archibald Sinclair surprisingly lost his seat in the electoral debacle of that year that reduced the Liberals to just 12 seats in the House of Commons.

Davies had not sought the position of leader, and was not enthusiastic about it. But with only 12 MPs, 6 of whom were only newly elected that year, the party's choice was somewhat limited. It was widely expected, and generally hoped (probably even by Davies himself), that he would be only a 'caretaker' leader until the more dynamic and popular Sinclair could get back into the House of Commons. But this never happened, and Davies was in fact to remain party leader for the next 11 years, taking the Liberals through three General Elections. Davies was President of the London Welsh Trust, which runs the London Welsh Centre, Gray's Inn Road, from 1946 until 1947.

His first General Election as party leader in 1950 reduced the party to 9 MPs with barely 9% of the vote, and in those of 1951 and 1955, the Liberals fell back even further, holding only 6 seats, with 2.5% and 2.7% of the vote (although these vote shares were largely attributed to the huge drop in the number of seats the party fought). He finally resigned as leader at the party conference in September, 1956, and was succeeded by the much younger and more vigorous Jo Grimond, following what was effectively a coup by the membership against the executive; both Davies and Grimond appeared to be unaware of the coup until it was over.

Davies therefore led the Liberal Party, which in the late 19th Century dominated British politics virtually without opposition, through its lowest period, when it was reduced to a minor party: the result of the electorate's polarisation between the Labour and the Conservatives. The cliche "A Liberal vote is a wasted vote" argument never held truer than in the 1950s. He was personally well liked, both in the party and beyond it. The general view of him was that of a personally decent man who did his best in a position to which neither taste nor temperament fitted him.

Davies was an alcoholic for decades, and this left him in a weakened state of health, particularly by the time he took on the burden of party leadership. For two of his three General Election campaigns as leader, for example, he was hospitalised. And, despite the general affection in which he was held, his leadership was widely regarded as lacklustre and ineffective, and thus contributing to the party's malaise at a time when it was most in need of direction.

In recent years, however, his role has been revised and treated more sympathetically. Historians now point out that with the Cold War tensions of the late 1940s and early 1950s in particular, leading the Liberal Party then would have been a challenge for anybody, and that in simply keeping the party together and in existence at all, Davies made a significant contribution. It has also emerged that he was offered cabinet office (Education Minister) in 1951 by Winston Churchill in exchange for supporting the new Conservative government, but refused on the grounds that it would have destroyed the Liberal Party.

Clement Davies died in 1962, aged 78. Though still an MP, he was by then largely detached from the affairs of the Liberal party and acted semi-independently. He was succeeded as Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire by Emlyn Hooson. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1947.

Personal life

Numerous personal tragedies darkened his life. He lost three of his four children within the space of a few years after the outbreak of the Second World War. His oldest son David died in 1939 as a result of natural causes related to epilepsy, his daughter Mary committed suicide in 1941 (though the family always refused to acknowledged that she had deliberately killed herself) and another son, Geraint, was killed on active service in 1942. Each of his children died at the age of 24, except for Davies's fourth son, Stanley, who survived until old age.

Further reading

• Violet Bonham Carter, ed. Mark Pottle, Daring to Hope: Diaries 1945-1969 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)
• Alun Wyburn-Powell, Clement Davies: Liberal Leader (Politico's, 2003) ISBN 1-902301-97-8

External links

• Clement Davies 1884–1962 biography from the Liberal Democrat History Group