general one. Lloyd George agreed to contribute £100,000 (in the event he claimed to have contributed £160,000 including help given to individual candidates; Liberal HQ put the figure at £90,000). In 1924, Lloyd George, realising that Liberal defeat was inevitable and keen to take control of the party himself, spent only £60,000. At the 1924 general election, Baldwin won a clear victory. Despite having a large majority, he appointed the leading coalitionists such as Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead (and former Liberal Winston Churchill) to senior cabinet places, to discourage any restoration of the 1916–1922 coalition. Liberal leader The disastrous election result in 1924 left the Liberals as a weak third party in British politics behind the ascendant Labour Party, with just over 40 MPs. Although Asquith, who had again lost his seat and was created an Earl, remained Liberal leader, Lloyd George was elected chairman of the Liberal MPs by 26 votes to 7. Sir John Simon and his followers were still loyal to Asquith (after 1931 Simon would lead a breakaway National Liberal Party, which eventually merged with the Conservatives) whilst Walter Runciman led a separate radical group within the Parliamentary Party. Lloyd George was now mainly interested in the reform of land ownership, but had only been permitted to put a brief paragraph about it in the hastily drafted 1924 Liberal manifesto. In the autumn of 1925, despite the hostility of Charles Hobhouse, Runciman and Alfred Mond, he began an independent campaign, soon to become "The Land and the Nation" (the Green Book, first of a series of policy papers produced by Lloyd George in the late 1920s). Asquith rebuked him, but was ignored, and they reached an agreement in principle on 2 December, then together they presented Lloyd George's plans to the National Liberal Federation on 26 February 1926. The Liberal Shadow Cabinet, including Lloyd George, unequivocally backed Baldwin's handling of the General Strike on 3 May 1926, but Lloyd George then wrote an article for the American press more sympathetic to the strikers, and did not attend the Shadow Cabinet on 10 May, sending his apologies on "policy grounds". Asquith sent him a public letter (20 May) rebuking him for not attending the meeting to discuss his opinions with colleagues in private. Lloyd George's letter of 10 May had not been published, making it appear that Asquith had fired the first shot, and Lloyd George