FOR ARTHUR BALFOUR and George Pembroke, the excitements of their friends’ private lives played out against the political dramas that unfolded with the collapse of Gladstone's government in the spring of 1885. Three weeks after the wedding of Laura Tennant and Alfred Lyttelton, the ministry was defeated in the House of Commons when the Conservatives forced a surprise division with too few Liberals present to support their own side. Gladstone resigned on 12 June and Queen Victoria invited Lord Salisbury to form the first Tory government in decades without Disraeli among its leadership. With Conservatives still a minority in the Commons, a general election was needed, but this would be delayed for several months while voter lists could be prepared to reflect the franchise and redistricting reforms of the past year. No one knew the implications of the ‘new order of politics’ that readjusted urban and county constituencies and expanded the electorate by more than two million voters, a quarter of them Irish. Salisbury's cabinet of the summer 1885 through February 1886 ran a ‘caretaker’ ministry while awaiting the electoral verdict of the new democracy. The Conservatives still managed to annex upper Burma – a territory the size of France – and pass the Ashbourne land act that confirmed the party's commitment to helping Irish tenants buy out their landlords through government-assisted loans.

The manoeuvre to bring down Gladstone was devised at Arthur's London house at 4 Carlton Gardens, a quiet family residence more associated with experiments in psychical phenomena than political or social power-broking. The choice reflected the political role that Arthur had been assuming in the past few years. As Randolph Churchill grabbed the headlines with bravura parliamentary and platform challenges aimed at both the Liberals and the ‘old gang’ leadership of his own side, Arthur stayed behind the scenes in the kinds of advisory work at which he excelled. In 1881 he had become the youngest of the six-member Conservative Central Committee that allocated funds for the party. The position put him at the heart of struggles between Churchill, Salisbury and the Tory leader in the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote, to reorganise and re-message the party after the trouncing it received in 1880.