National Party (UK, 1917)

The National Party was a short-lived British political party created in August 1917 as a right-wing split from the Conservative Party.

The party was formed at the height of the First World War, by the Liberal Unionist peer Lord Ampthill, Sir Richard Cooper and Sir Henry Page Croft. Its members took a particularly xenophobic line on the war and were also strongly opposed to the sale of honours. This was reflected in their aims, as outlined in the party's manifesto:

Several Conservative MPs joined the party, including Col Richard Hamilton Rawson, Alan Burgoyne, Douglas George Carnegie, Cooper, Croft, Viscount Duncannon and Rowland Hunt. At its peak, the party boasted seven MPs and eleven peers.

The newly formed party sought to widen its membership to include "men and women from all parties, not only in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but throughout the British Empire".Liberal Unionist Party MP Edward Fitzroy and former Liberal MP's Edmund Barnard and Thomas Kincaid-Smith also joined, as did John Jenkins, the former premier of South Australia.

The party was supported by the trade unionist Joseph Havelock Wilson of the National Democratic and Labour Party, though he was never formally a member, as well as the economists William Cunningham and Herbert Foxwell.

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