1906 was a disastrous result for the Conservatives and Unionists. Dutton included this Amery quote in his reassessment of Unionist politics post-1906:

Never in the whole period between the Great Reform Bill and the Socialist victory of 1945 had the Unionists stood in greater need of dynamic leadership.

That is a good starting point to comprehend the magnitude of the election result, which really boiled down to the issue of tariff reform and a handful of other lingering issues. And among contemporaries, especially Unionist contemporaries, there was no uniform opinion on why this was a problem. The need, as some saw, for tariffs was three-fold:

• British industry would be strengthened by having a trade preference to the Empire by protecting industries better from growing competition

• American and German economic power was rising, as was their military and political power, and to impose tariffs would strenghten the British Empire

• With less appetite for laissez-faire policies, tariffs provided a revenue base outwith popular taxation to finance social programmes

Balfour had gone into the election arguing in favour of retaliatory tariffs, which were popular with supporters of the Unionists and were a midpoint between reformers and free traders in his own government, but this turned out to be to the detriment of his party, as they were interpreted as rising food prices hence the Big Loaf, Little Loaf election poster of the Liberal Party. In the aftermath, Chamberlain thought that a more considered, more pronounced reformist policy would have possibly not avoided a defeat, but would have avoided a defeat on that scale.

Beyond that there were other burning issues, and all the cards seemed to fall against the Conservatives on those issues:

• Boer War - Lord Salisbury had managed to win the 1900 election and win when support for the war was widespread. However, by 1906, the public was outraged at some of the stories being reported from South Africa, notoriously the poisoning of wells, the clearance of women and children and the use and conditions of concentration camps there. And on the domestic front, the Boer War unearthed some serious problems at a time where concerns of social justice were reaching the national limelight

• Social welfare and poverty - The British Army had recruitment problems in the Boer War because of the poor health conditions of working class recruits. Incidences of poverty-related disease were high enough to deem 40% of potential servicement unfit for service. This came at a time where Booth and Rowntree's respective studies of poverty in London and York revealed scandalous amounts of poverty in the cities, 30 percent of the population below a 7 shilling poverty and far more than what people previously had cared to acknowledge. The issue of social justice became a pressing one and the previous Conservative and Unionist governments had appeared to have abdicated their responsibilities to the electorate on this.

• Religious tensions - The Tories passed the 1902 Education Act which integrated denominational schools into the state. In practice this meant that Protestant non-conformists would have had the local school boards they controlled abolished and the schools would then be run by Anglican local governments, and the Anglican schools would be funded by local taxation, which meant many dissenters turned out for the Liberals. On the other hand, the Liberals were able to placate Catholic support by making some very lukewarm remarks about Irish Home Rule.

• The Labour Party - 1906 was the first election that the Labour Representation Committee would contest effectively and the LRC would go on to win a commendable 29 seats, largely because of a mutual assistance pact struck between Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone. As well as the Conservatives shedding large numbers of votes to the Liberals, the LRC were to receive support in even greater numbers from ex-Conservatives than the Liberal candidates could with notable scalps including Bonar Law in Glasgow Blackfriars.

The Conservatives fortunes can be summed up here with a British analogy along the lines of 'You wait ages for a bus and three turn up at once'. This can in a sense be applied to 1906. The Conservatives were essentially waiting for a major problem to test their resiliency in an election, but when the 1906 election came, they were exposed to multiple threats. What Chamberlain said could be avoided simply could not with the abundance of issues which they faced, and in that perfect storm, the Conservatives were faced with no prospects of anything other than a rout.

Sources:

• Dutton, David. "Unionist Politics and the Aftermath of the General Election of 1906: A Reassessment". The Historical Journal, Vol 22 (1979) pp 861-876

• Russell, A.K. Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1973