After the electoral disaster of 1880 a meeting had been held at Bridgewater House, under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, to examine the causes of defeat. A committee, formed chiefly of members of the Carlton Club, had been appointed to consider various methods of reforming, popularising, and improving the party organisation. This committee was never dissolved. It continued to exist, and under the title of the ‘Central Committee’ assumed the direction and management of all party affairs and controlled the large funds subscribed for party purposes. The National Union of Conservative Associations, upon the other hand, was a body formed on a basis of popular representation. Its branches had spread all over the country and its membership included many of the more active local leaders of the Conservative party in the great towns. It was, however, deprived of all share in party government by the Central Committee and jealously excluded from possessing any financial independence. Mr. Gorst was already its Vice-President and had long exercised an influence sustained by an unrivalled knowledge of party machinery. Sir Henry Wolff was one of its original members. But Lord Randolph Churchill’s election by co-optation to a seat upon that body in 1882 had led to an unprecedented division of opinion. His personal antagonists had banded themselves together and attacked him upon various ingenious pretexts. One gentleman undertook to prove from elaborately prepared and complicated statistics that the member for Woodstock was a Fenian. Another endeavoured to convince the Council that he was a devoted slave of Mr. Chamberlain--apparently on the curious ground that he had voted against a plan for making a Channel Tunnel. When the Council had divided, the numbers for and against him were exactly equal. The duty of giving a casting-vote fell upon the Chairman. Although consistently hostile to Tory Democracy in all its forms and representatives, Lord Percy refused to use his vote to exclude a distinguished opponent and Lord Randolph Churchill had thus been elected.