the merits of Home Rule he declined an offer to stand as an Ulster Unionist for a Belfast seat in the November 1918 General Election, despite an interview with Carson whom he found more "broadminded" in private than the uncompromising speeches which he was delivering in public. Gough's name was proposed to the Cabinet early in 1921 by William O'Brien as a potential Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (in succession to French). Nothing came of this, but he stood unsuccessfully as an Asquith Liberal (i.e. opposed to Lloyd George's coalition government) in the 1922 Chertsey by-election. During the campaign he stressed his opposition to the policy of reprisals which had been employed in Ireland. Gough would later decline further attempts to persuade him to stand for Parliament in the 1922 General Election. After the May 1929 General Election he recorded his dislike of the "fierce old women who support, and in large part constitute, the Tory Party" and of the "arrogant audacity" with which they appropriated the Union Jack as a party symbol. However, in March 1931 he declined another offer to stand for Parliament as a Liberal, not least because of his dislike of Lloyd George, who was now Liberal leader. Later life Farming and business career Gough initially (August 1918) found that his recent "difficulties" in France would make it difficult for him to pick up company directorships. In October 1918 he attended an agriculture course at Cambridge University, most of the other students being wounded or invalided officers, and was there when the armistice was announced. In November 1918 he went on an expedition to Armenia, on behalf of a merchant banker, to investigate the affairs of a British company there. With four daughters to support, from the summer of 1920 (i.e. after his return from the Baltic) Gough attempted to earn his living as a pig and poultry farmer at Burrows Lea at Gomshall in Surrey. He also became a director of the Ashley Trading Company, initially selling US-manufactured wallpaper paste in Britain. In 1925–26 he bought land in Kenya with a view to moving out there, but thought better of it, in part because so much of his time was taken up with the affairs of Fifth Army veterans, and also because his farm in Surrey was not succeeding as he had hoped. He sold Burrows Lea in 1927. The reputation which Gough had won on