The 1931 general election gave the Conservatives a huge in the House of Commons, them to their tariff with little hindrance. The announcement of the election itself drew together the various in the Conservative party, and Baldwin's decision to enter the National Government. From 1931, threats to his leadership disappeared, Moreover, because the Conservatives took with them into the National coalition of the and parties, the party competition of the 1930s became seriously unbalanced, the left being too shattered and divided to offer effective opposition.
The effect of this election on the other parties was disastrous. While it served to reconcile warring in the Conservative party, in the other parties it prevented any such reconciliation. In particular it widened the gap between and National , and made it quite impossible for any reunion to take place. For the , the election meant a breach between the party and its leader, Lloyd George, Indeed, it meant the end of Lloyd George's connection with the party. He refused to allow the party to his , and partly for this reason the were forced to accept a drastic reduction in the number of candidatures, from 513 in 1929 to 112 in 1931, The condition of the was far more serious than that of , for the party was beginning to lose its sense of and purpose (and has still not fully it). Once the party had shown itself, in the 1929-31 Parliament, unwilling to support Lloyd George's programme of national reconciliation, it had no answer to the question: What did the party stand for? Its only rallying cry remained free trade; and yet it was clear that the 1931 election would result in a protectionist . The seeming gains made by the in the negotiations before the Cabinet agreed to an election - that there should be no joint manifesto, and no pledge to introduce tariffs, merely an impartial inquiry - turned out (as might have been expected) to be worthless. The squabbling in Cabinet over the on which the National Government was to fight the election was, in reality, a form of shadow-boxing: for, whatever the , it would be by those who had the power to it, that is, the Conservative and protectionist . Lloyd George, himself perfectly willing to countenance departures from free trade in his 1918-22 Coalition, now argued that free trade was best defended through a vote for the Party. The 1931 general election was the last election until that of February 1974 at which the electoral performance of the was of to the two parties. In agreeing to fight the election as part of the National Government, the party abdicated from its as a in the political system.

Because they were losing their sense of , the were split three ways by the 1931 election - into Simonites, Samuelites, and the Lloyd George family group, The first group , culminating in a merger, with the Conservatives; the second to preserve an independent party; the third with Labour. So also the French in the Fourth Republic were to splinter in all directions, in governments of both left and right. The party could no more than the answer the question of whether, with political and universal suffrage , there remained a of liberalism which could the from other political parties.

Between 1929 and the formation of the second National Government after the general election, the party had been a genuine in the political system and the other parties had to consider carefully what its might be. During the course of the 1929-31 government, MacDonald gradually that the hopes which he had entertained during the 1920s of the and winning over the whole of the progressive vote for the party could not be . It was for this reason that he felt compelled to offer the the vote, an electoral system which would have the effect of entrenching the third party as part of the political system. The events between the formation of the first National Government and the general election, however, turned what had been an incipient three-party system into an unbalanced two-party system in which the Conservatives, by defectors from the and parties, the Liberal Nationals, and National Labour party, were the .

It was the general election, then, and not the formation of the first National Government, that was the event in the politics of the 1930s. The King was in the decisions precipitating both events. In recent years there has been discussion of the of the Sovereign in the of a hung Parliament, such as that of 1929-31, and the general has been that her is essentially a one. Yet both in the formation of the National Government and in the decision that it would fight the election as a government the King played an important, perhaps a . That was in fact the private view of Harold Nicolson, although he did not allow it to be expressed in his official biography of George V. In an of his diaries, he writes of his interview with Queen Mary on 21 March 1949, "I talked to her about the 1931 crisis and said that I was the King had been a determinant influence on that occasion. 'Yes certainly; he certainly was.' "

It is perhaps futile to ask the question, were the King's actions ? In a country without a codified , it is hardly possible to give a answer. If one asks the further question, were the King's actions wise? one's answer is likely to be all too heavily conditioned by hindsight, by the views one takes of the later politics of the 1930s, of the of a two-party system, and of the of the Party. The historian, perhaps, can do little more than echo Disraeli's pregnant remark in Sybil, Book IV, I: "when parties are in the present state of equality, the Sovereign is no longer a mere pageant."

(20th Century British History by Vernon Bogdanor)