For the next few decades, the once-dominant Scottish Liberals experienced a long decline which mirrored what George Dangerfield called the ‘strange death’ of the party in England. At the 1918 election the party had managed to elect 25 Coalition Liberals and 8 Independent Liberals; in 1922, 12 ‘National’ Liberals and 15 regular Liberals; in 1923, 22 ‘Reunited’ Liberals; and in 1924, just 8 Liberals.

The ideological bent of this dwindling band of Scottish Liberal MPs moved increasingly rightward. In 1923, the eight Scottish burgh Liberals were led by H. H. Asquith, now the MP for Paisley, and they had a strong publishing/media background. The 14 county Liberals were more conservative, and included a few London lawyers. Only two landowners remained, Archibald Sinclair in Caithness and Sutherland and Cecil Dudgeon in Galloway. Asquith proved ineffective in opposing Lloyd George between 1920 and 1922, and little better against Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin thereafter. The Asquithian court resembled ‘an extra-parliamentary conclave of the elder venerated, meeting in spacious drawing-rooms to await the second coming.’

Asquith's decision to prop up a minority Labour administration in 1924, meanwhile, ‘evoked a wave of shocked hostility in Scotland’. In Paisley, Unionist and Liberal businessmen implored Asquith not to support Labour. The hitherto Liberal-supporting Daily Record switched to the Unionists while Liberals flocked to the Unionists in order to keep Labour out of office. ‘It was appropriate’, judged I. G. C. Hutchison, ‘that the most spectacular casualty of the Liberal rout in that year's general election was Asquith himself.’ He was defeated by an unknown young Labour solicitor called Rosslyn Mitchell (who later led a Commons rebellion against the revised Anglican prayer book). ‘Keep your eye on Paisley’, Asquith had once declared. ‘The country did just that,’ observed the writer James McMillan, ‘And witnessed the end both of Asquith and the Liberal Party.’

Asquith's message to a Scottish Liberal Federation council meeting in October 1924 was to ‘Let Scottish Liberalism stand firm’. But the 1924 election was no 1900; there would be no 1906-style bounce back, in Scotland or anywhere else. ‘People and politicians alike found Liberal ethics impossible of application to the immense social and economic problems of the post-war period,’ judged T. C. Smout. ‘Reduced to a tiny faction at Westminster, the Liberals could offer no hope of fulfilling any-one's moral imperatives or political aspirations.’