At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Liberal Party was the principal opposition with a 44.6 percent share of the vote. Thanks to the divisions in the Conservative and Unionist ranks over protectionism, the Liberals and their Labour and Irish Nationalist allies won the 1906 general election by a majority of 356 seats. Under the leadership of Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill, the Liberal government created the beginnings of the welfare state and reformed the House of Lords. Yet by the 1922 election, the Liberals had been pushed into third place, behind the Labour Party, and, by 1951, the Liberal vote was down to 2.6 percent, electing a mere six MPs. This poses two questions. Why did this decline take place, and why, despite all the disadvantages to a small party of a “first past the post” electoral system, did the Liberal Party survive? By the time David Dutton finishes his tale with the 2001 general election, the Liberal Democrats, who have inherited the mantle of the Liberal Party, had recovered to an 18 percent share of the vote and 52 MPs.

As Dutton acknowledges, the first of these questions has attracted much attention from historians. Explanations, from the inevitable rise of the class-based Labour Party replacing its competitor on the left to the unfortunate collision of a party of individual liberty with the First World War that required government to mobilize all the nation's resources, are examined lucidly and impartially. Dutton discards the deterministic view that failure was inevitable, concluding that there is too much evidence of prewar Liberal strength as well as inherent weaknesses. But he does not spare the squabbling party leadership or the flaws in an organization that promoted self-help by the working classes but could find little room for the leaders of labor in the ranks of its candidates.

The strife between Lloyd George and Asquith, begun during the First World War, carried over into the peace, and despite a superficial papering over of the cracks in the early 1920s and the death of Asquith, Dutton paints what was for Liberals a deeply depressing picture of continued distrust of Lloyd George and inept leadership by his competitors and successors. The turmoil did not prevent the party continuing to generate effective ideas and policies that merit the continued attention of historians. It would be hard to think of figures more influential on twentieth-century British politics than Keynes and Beveridge. But frustration with the leadership of the Liberal Party made for continuing splits and a steady drip of defectors to the Labour and Conservative Parties. Dutton's decision to harvest his material into a chapter covering 1916–35 reflects this focus on the significance of leadership.

His next chapter, headed “So Few and So Futile,” accurately reflects the position of the party between the election of 1935 and the advent of Jo Grimond to the leadership of the party. No realistic Liberal could have passed through this period expecting that recovery was just around the corner, although some optimists managed to convince themselves that it was a possibility. In these twenty years the party should have died, and it is of little tribute to its leaders, Archibald Sinclair and Clement Davies, that it did not. Dutton's arguments that the survival of the party owes as much to the inadvertence of Labour and the Conservatives as to its own efforts has merit but is not sufficient. Labour attracted progressives too impatient for action, but Dutton does not provide much evidence of positive efforts to make the passage to the people's party easier. He is much stronger on the Conservatives who both argued the case to the electorate that Conservatism had absorbed the best Liberal values and tried to smother leading Liberals with kindness in an effort to win them to an antisocialist alliance. Indeed, since most of the handful of Liberal MPs owed their presence in the Commons to a failure of Conservatives to oppose them, Davies’ major achievement may have been not to accept the offer of a government post from Churchill in the early 1950s.

But it is here that Dutton's focus on leadership shows its weakness. A political party depends on leaders, of course; it depends on support from the electorate; but it also depends crucially on its membership, the foot soldiers who deliver, canvas, and supply the candidates at municipal elections. The small numbers, who, through sheer bloody-minded individualism refused to admit the rational conclusion that the party had died when its vote share was less than 3 percent and when its parliamentary representation could be conveyed in a single taxi, kept the Liberal Party alive are an important part of the story and require more attention than they have been given here. We are given no very clear idea of the scale and style of organization of what must have been more like a series of guerrilla groups than the well-marshaled armies of Conservative and Labour members.

It is hard to convey the charisma of Grimond, whose leadership provided the inspiration for a new generation of activists who fought the by-elections that breathed new electoral life into Liberalism, and who provided the current successor party with the techniques that have enabled it to make some headway against the unfairness of Britain's electoral system to a third party. Dutton recognizes Grimond's significance and conveys his search for a realignment of the left, which successively provided Steel and Ashdown with a goal. It has proved to be a chimera, always just out of reach, but the interchange it promoted with Labour politicians created the opportunity for an alliance with Labour's disaffected pro-European social democrats. While the alliance dented rather than cracked the mold and proved ultimately to be another lost opportunity, it left the Liberal Democrats still in the battle. At times, Dutton is reduced to a trudge through the mud of postwar elections and opinion polls in an effort to explain a revival that took place despite the lack of congruence between the attitudes of Liberal voters and the policies advocated by the party, but he succeeds in a fair and balanced verdict. Similarly, he bravely tackles the controversies of the changing fortunes of the alliance and the Liberal Democrats up to 2001 treading nimbly through the partial supply of accounts by the leading participants.

As an economic liberal, I believe that competition is a good thing. For many years, Chris Cook's book has dominated the market for the history of the British Liberal Party. Dutton's volume is a welcome new entrant. Dutton does not presume heavily on the prior knowledge of his readers, and his keen eye for a telling quotation does not interfere with the detached judgment he applies to the conflicting theories of the party's decline and revival. Unwilling to accept a single explanation of the past, he is cautious about the outlook for the Liberal Democrats and wisely offers no prophesies.