The 1900 general election, held from 26 September to 24 October 1900, returned the incumbent Conservative-Unionist government led by the Marquess of Salisbury as prime minister.

The election marked a second consecutive landslide for the Conservative-Unionist bloc.

Often referred to as the ‘Khaki Election’, the contest coincided with a surge in patriotic sentiment generated by the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

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The ‘Khaki Election’ description was derived from the new uniforms adopted by the British Army during the Boer War. (The term has since been applied to subsequent general elections, notably those of 1918, 1945 and 1983.)

In 1900, this framing worked to the clear advantage of Salisbury’s Conservatives – primarily because the opposition Liberal Party, led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was hopelessly divided over the war.

The Liberals had fractured into rival factions over the Boer War and broader questions of empire. One section believed the government should pursue a foreign policy that eschewed jingoism, true to the historic slogan: “Peace, Retrenchment and Reform”. This school, represented by ‘radical’ Liberals such as David Lloyd George and William Harcourt, was inherently sceptical of overseas expansion, military entanglements and imperial domination.

This ‘pro-Boer’ or ‘little Englander’ tendency saw the war as unjust.

An opposing bloc, the Liberal imperialists, believed the party should positively embrace empire. This group, represented by the Imperial Liberal Council (later the Liberal League), saw the war as necessary to protect and expand British interests in the region. Former and future prime ministers, the Earl of Rosebery and H.H. Asquith, were among the faction’s most prominent adherents.

Campbell-Bannerman, a pragmatic figure who did not identify strongly with either faction, presided over a party riven by these internal divisions.

At the turn of the 20th century, Liberalism had arguably still yet to recover from Gladstone’s retirement six years previously. CB, as he was known to contemporaries, was the party’s third leader since the 1895 election. He succeeded William Harcourt in 1899, who replaced Rosebery in 1896.

Both Harcourt and Rosebery, who resigned after leading the Liberals to a disastrous defeat in 1895, failed to unite the party.

Upon his resignation, Harcourt wrote: “A party rent by sectional disputes and personal interests is one which no man can consent to lead, either with credit to himself or advantage to the country.”

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In July 1900, some months before the general election, these divisions came to the fore over a commons motion introduced by radical Liberal MP Wilfrid Lawson. The motion called for the salary of Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary and leading Liberal Unionist, to be reduced by £100.

In his contribution, Lawson said Chamberlain was “responsible” more than any other actor “for the war and all the horrors which are going on in South Africa”.

He said of the war: “It has been a case of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against the oppressor, and of the freeman against the tyrant.”

Lloyd George dismissed Chamberlain’s “audacity” and said he could not support a government led by a man whose policy amounted to “a war of extermination”. The leading radical further accused Chamberlain of misrepresenting the nature of the conflict for political purposes.

He declared: “It was a speech intended purely for the hustings. It was an electioneering performance. I venture to say that there is no worse eye-glass than the ballot box; and it was through that glass that [Chamberlain] has been looking at all these facts.”

But Edward Grey, a leading Liberal imperialist, argued in favour of the government’s position, describing the war as morally “right”. The conflict had been “forced upon” the country, Grey declared.

Campbell-Bannerman was left to triangulate between the trenchant Liberal imperialist and pro-Boer positions. He maintained that he could not support the “extreme” stance advanced by Lawson, and instead resolved to abstain.

He told the House: “On the other hand, when I look to see what would be the position if I voted against [Lawson], I am bound to say I should then apparently be expressing a degree of confidence in [Chamberlain] which I am very far from possessing, and in the policy to which from the first I have taken exception in the strongest manner.”

The motion to censure the government by reducing Chamberlain’s salary was ultimately rejected by 208 votes to 52.

Radical Liberals like Lloyd George voted in favour of the motion; Liberal imperialists, including Grey and Richard Haldane, voted against.

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During the 1900 general election campaign, the Conservative and Unionist government sought to tar the Liberals as a whole with an unpatriotic brush. Chamberlain infamously argued that “a vote for the Liberal is a vote for the Boer”.

Campbell-Bannerman forcefully rejected this line of attack. Speaking in Alyth, Perthshire, he dismissed the tendency to brand as “pro-Boer” anyone who “did not agree to everything Mr. Chamberlain did”.

He argued that the Boers were “fighting gallantly for the independence of their own country”.

The Liberal leader added: “For goodness sake do not attribute every sort of evil to them while you are fighting them; when you have got them down, treat them with the respect and honour that such a people ought to receive – a people who, though they may be mistaken and entirely wrong, are conscientiously fighting for the independence of their own land.”

Campbell-Bannerman characterised his being called a “pro-Boer” for holding this view as a “gross slander and falsehood”. He argued that for “newspapers and politicians” to “stoop to a mean artifice of that kind” was a “scandal and a disgrace to the political life of today.”

But the election result, a landslide victory for the Conservative and Liberal Unionists, was a demonstration of imperialism’s electoral potency.

The Conservative/Unionist coalition won 402 seats and a large majority of 134. The outcome helped consolidate the alliance between the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists – paving the way for their formal merger in 1912.

The Liberals won just 183 seats, barely improving on their rotten performance at the 1895 general election. The party even failed to stand a candidate in 139 English constituencies – a sign of its ill-health,

The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by John Redmond, won 76 seats.

The general election, held just months before Queen Victoria’s death, was also the final occasion on which an incumbent prime minister (Salisbury) ran from the House of Lords.

The contest arguably holds longer-term significance for ushering a 25-year-old Winston Churchill into parliament. Churchill won the constituency of Oldham as a Conservative. Meanwhile, the newly formed Labour Representation Committee (LRC), the forerunner to the modern Labour Party, also secured a parliamentary foothold for the first time.

The LRC supported 15 candidates at the 1900 general election, winning a collective 62,698 votes and two seats – including one for its leader, Keir Hardie.

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The Liberal Party’s internal divisions deepened in the months that followed the 1900 election.

The campaign had been fought on the assumption that the Boer War was effectively at an end, but it dragged on for a further two years – apparently prolonging Campbell-Bannerman’s political difficulties.

In a famous speech in June 1901, Campbell-Bannerman condemned the government’s perceived policy of seeking to punish the Boers “as severely as possible”.

The Liberal leader said the war effort was now guilty of attempting to “devastate their country, burn their homes, [and] break up their very instruments of agriculture”.

He added: “A phrase often used is that ‘war is war’, but when one comes to ask about it one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

The Liberal imperialists interpreted the speech as Campbell-Bannerman throwing his weight behind the ‘pro-Boer’ position.

Campbell-Bannerman’s methods of barbarism intervention thus invited further division and denunciation. He felt compelled to clarify his position.

In a commons debate on 17 June 1901, the Liberal leader maintained he had “never said a word that would imply cruelty or even indifference on the part of officers or men in the British Army.”

He stated: “It is the whole system which they have to carry out that I consider, to use a word which I have already applied to it, barbarous. There are no people in the world who feel that barbarity more than the unfortunate men whose duty it is to enforce that system.”

This June 1901 debate was triggered by Lloyd-George, who sought to draw attention to “the condition of the camps of detention in South Africa, and the alarming rate of mortality amongst the women and children detained there”.

The future prime minister accused the government of pursuing a “policy of extermination against children in South Africa.”

He added: “The worst of this method of proceeding is that the burden of it is falling not upon the men on the field, but upon the weak and innocent who are outside. Why should the children be punished?”

Haldane, the leading Liberal imperialist, argued that using terms like “barbarous” would only “have the effect of strengthening the attitude of resistance of those opposed to us”.

Lloyd George’s motion was defeated by 253 votes to 134. But Campbell-Bannerman took the symbolic step of voting in favour.

On 9 July 1901, with his leadership coming under concerted pressure, Campbell-Bannerman sought to outmanoeuvre his opponents. He invited Liberal MPs to record their confidence in his leadership. A full 163 of Campbell-Bannerman’s colleagues did so, including those considered to be his foremost critics.

On 17 July, Rosebery, the former prime minister, intervened. Rosebery declared that “one school or the other must prevail if the Liberal party is once more to become a force.”

He stated: “Take, for example, Sir Wilfrid Lawson and Sir Edward Grey, both honoured names in Liberalism. Both hold with intense conviction opinions on foreign and imperial policy which cannot by any conceivable compromise be reconciled.”

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Later that year, Rosebery set out to define the Liberal imperialist position in a sweeping address to the Chesterfield Liberal Association.

Rosebery outlined his support for the “stern, efficient, vigorous prosecution of the war to its natural end”. He also urged his colleagues not to dissociate themselves from “the new sentiment of the empire which occupies the nation.”

He declared: “When I hear the army spoken of as mercenaries and held up to execration for their barbarous methods I feel very strongly. I equally acquit the government or any one of British birth of barbarity in this matter.”

But he called for a peace settlement that involved “full civil rights” for Boers who took a “drastic oath of allegiance”. Rosebery reserved his starkest criticisms for the government, proclaiming: “I do not think they are as anxious to make peace as I am.”

The speech represented an attempt to forge a united Liberal position on the Boer War.

At the same time, however, Rosebery escalated his criticisms of the Liberal leadership’s domestic policy. He advised the Liberal Party that “its slate must be cleaned” – an apparent repudiation of the radical 1892 Newcastle Programme.

Rosebery stated that “my watchword if I were in office at this moment would be summed up in one single word… ‘efficiency.’”

Summarising his proposed policy, Rosebery stated: “It is at home to restore efficiency to our parliament, our administration, and our people; it is abroad, as a foreign policy, to dispel the atmosphere of suspicion and hatred which has grown up around us under this present government, and to restore things to the footing on which they were when we left office in 1895.”

He added: “I am quite aware that my policy does not run on party lines, but it is not to party that I appeal. Party in this matter can avail little or nothing.”

Rosebery referred dismissively to “parliament with its half-hearted but overwhelming government supporters and a distracted and disunited opposition.” He appealed, instead, to the “silent but supreme tribunal which shapes and controls, in the long run, the destinies of our people, I mean the tribunal of public opinion, that of common sense”.

The former prime minister concluded: “In this country I understand, you like a man who speaks his mind. Well, I have spoken mine.”

The speech was reported as Rosebery mounting an attempt to reclaim the Liberal leadership. But in the immediate term, his musings raised the prospect of a formal split in the party – with Rosebery leading the imperialist faction apart from the ‘pro-Boer’ Liberals.

On 18 December, Lloyd George delivered a sweeping address of his own. However, his rebuttal was not well-received.

Speaking in Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain’s political heartland, he met with a mob of protesters. The crowd was reportedly enraged by Lloyd George’s “pro-Boer and anti-Chamberlain utterances”.

The protesters, estimated to number between 10,000 and 50,000, chanted favourably for “Joey” and denounced Lloyd George as a “Traitor!”. The future prime minister was smuggled out of the Town Hall disguised as a police officer.

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In the wake of Rosebery’s speech, the Liberal opposition tabled a motion of censure against the government over its conduct of the Boer War. The motion, proposed by Frederick Cawley on behalf of the Liberal frontbench, was heavily influenced by Rosebery’s compromise and his so-called “Chesterfield policy”.

However, this attempt to smooth over Liberalism’s divisions only brought them into sharper relief.

The motion pulled in two directions. It expressed support for “all proper measures for the effective prosecution of the war”, but denounced the government’s policy for failing to secure “the early termination of the war and the establishment of a durable peace”.

Cawley argued that the first point was necessary because Conservative and Unionist enforcers had sought to convince the Boers that “a large section of the English people are anxious for the British arms to fail”. He went on to condemn reports of “indiscriminate farm burning” and “contemptibly mean policy of putting on half rations the women and children”.

Chamberlain attacked the motion as “dishonest” and “double-barrelled”. Referring to Rosebery’s recent address, Chamberlain claimed there was “no substantial difference” between the government’s policy and the Liberal imperialist position.

The colonial secretary appealed directly to Liberal MPs who supported “what has been called the Chesterfield policy”. He said those parliamentarians would “be doing some disservice to themselves and the country, if they do not take account of the company they will keep if they go into the lobby for this amendment.”

Lloyd George, having escaped Birmingham unharmed, condemned his party’s amendment as a “contradictory proposition”.

He concluded: “In one breath they declared that the war was unjust and then turned to the government and said, ‘Unjust though it be, we will support you in prosecuting it.’”

Lloyd George even suggested that Campbell-Bannerman had been “captured” by the imperialists, “stripped of all his principles, and left on the veldt”.

It was left to Arthur Balfour, the leader of the commons and Salisbury’s nephew, to respond to Lloyd George’s speech.

Balfour said he would “do no more” than to observe that the amendment had been “stretched to its utmost limits in order to admit every kind of attack on His Majesty’s government which it might please any member of a somewhat, not merely divided, but perhaps I am not excessive when I say, sub-divided party, to hurl against any minister of the crown.”

In his contribution, Campbell-Bannerman differentiated between supporting the army and endorsing the government’s “political conduct of the war”. He called on ministers to “abandon their tone of discouragement to negotiation with view to a safe and generous settlement.”

Cawley’s amendment was defeated by 333 votes to 123. The result suggested a potentially significant number of Liberal abstentions; Lloyd George was among those MPs who did not back the opposition’s position.

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In February 1902, the Liberal League was established to promote Rosebery’s ‘Chesterfield policy’ with the former prime minister himself serving as president. The group counted Asquith and Grey among its vice-presidents.

But Campbell-Bannerman’s careful balancing act – his patient effort to maintain Liberal unity – was about to begin delivering results.

The end of the Boer War in May 1902 diminished the salience of Liberal imperialist-‘little Englander’ divide. At the same time, the trade and education policies of the Conservative-Unionist government from 1902 to 1905 – now led by Balfour as prime minister – helped unify the Liberal opposition.

Meanwhile, scrutiny of the government’s conduct of the Boer War helped spark a Liberal resurgence.

This did not fully dispel lingering tensions or doubts about Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership, however – particularly regarding his approach to foreign policy. Among Liberal imperialists, concerns also persisted about the health of the party’s leader and his ability to fulfil the responsibilities of high office.

In 1905, leading Liberal imperialists Asquith, Haldane and Grey agreed on a plan to undermine Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership. The terms of the so-called Relugas Compact, named after Grey’s Scottish lodge, stipulated that the conspirators would refuse cabinet office under Campbell-Bannerman unless he accepted a peerage, thereby forfeiting his seat in the House of Commons.

The scheme was designed to secure Asquith’s appointment as leader of the commons, enabling him to control both the presentation and direction of government policy from within the elected chamber.

Grey confronted Campbell-Bannerman with this plan. But it was to no avail.

Campbell-Bannerman resisted the pressure to step down and was soon invited to form a government as prime minister in December 1905. In a canny move, he offered Asquith the post of chancellor of the exchequer.

Asquith accepted, without seeking to enforce the terms of the Relugas Compact. Grey and Haldane were eventually persuaded to take up the posts of foreign secretary and war secretary respectively.

Lloyd George was appointed as president of the Board of Trade in the new ministry.

Balfour had sought to sow division by ceding government to the Liberals. But his gambit badly backfired.

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At the 1906 general election, a mostly united Liberal Party gained 214 seats. Balfour’s Conservative/Unionist alliance was reduced to 156 MPs – the party’s worst performance until the 2024 general election.

The Relugas Compact melted away. Rosebery, once the leading light of the Liberal imperialists, was reduced to a detached and aloof presence.

In 1907, Campbell-Bannerman became the father of the House by virtue of being the MP with the longest continuous service. He remains the only serving prime minister to have held this symbolic mantle.

But Campbell-Bannerman, suffering from ill-health, resigned as prime minister on 4 April 1908. He died weeks later on 22 April, aged 71.

Asquith was appointed as Campbell-Bannerman’s successor.

The Liberal League split over Rosebery’s condemnation of the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ – introduced to the commons by Lloyd George in his capacity as chancellor. Rosebery rejected the seminal budget as “pure socialism… and the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of property, of monarchy, of empire”.

The People’s Budget passed in 1910 – notwithstanding the opposition of Rosebery’s colleagues in the upper chamber.

From 1905 to 1915, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith jointly oversaw the longest period of continuous non-Conservative government in the 20th century.