Bonar Law

Andrew Bonar Law (16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1922 to 1923. He was the first prime minister born outside of Britain or Ireland, and the shortest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century.

Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick (now a Canadian province). He was of Scottish and Ulster Scots descent and moved to Scotland in 1870. He left school aged sixteen to work in the iron industry, becoming a wealthy man by the age of thirty. He entered the House of Commons at the 1900 general election at age 42, relatively late in life for a front-rank politician; he was made a junior minister, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, in 1902. Law joined the Shadow Cabinet in opposition after the 1906 general election. In 1911, he was appointed a Privy Councillor, before standing for the vacant party leadership. Despite never having served in the Cabinet and trailing third after Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain, Law became leader when the two front-runners withdrew rather than risk a draw splitting the party.

As Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition, Law focused his attentions in favour of tariff reform and against Irish Home Rule. His campaigning helped turn Liberal attempts to pass the Third Home Rule Bill into a three-year struggle eventually halted by the start of World War I, with much argument over the status of the six counties in Ulster which would later become Northern Ireland, four of which were predominantly Protestant.