The League was a small group of current or former members of the Conservative Party led by Arthur K. Chesterton, a former leading figure in the British Union of Fascists, who had served under Sir Oswald Mosley.

[1] Chesterton established the group in 1954 on the far right of the Conservative Party, effectively as a reaction to the more liberal forms of Toryism in evidence at the time, as typified by the policies of R. A.

He concluded that Bolshevism and American-style capitalism were actually in an alliance as part of a Jewish-led conspiracy against the British Empire, a mindset that informed the LEL from the beginning.

At the 1958 party Conference in Blackpool, George Irvine Finlay (who became Director of Organisation for the Scottish Conservatives) was involved in forcibly removing members of the League of Empire Loyalists.

[9] In November 1961, Leonard Young, a Royal Air Force Wing Commander and author of the 1956 book Deadlier Than the H-Bomb,[10] gained further notoriety for the LEL when he threw a bag of sheep guts at the President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.

[6] It was to be its calls for the restoration of the empire and reassertion of the notion of Britons as the world's natural leaders that ultimately saw the group become estranged from the Conservatives, as the League was increasingly divorced from the one nation conservatism that came to dominate the party.

Chesterton's personal anti-Semitism and devotion to conspiracy theories about the Jews and international capitalism also became more prominent in LEL ideology towards the end of the group's life.

[18] In an attempt to reinvigorate the flagging group Chesterton was persuaded to put up three "Independent Loyalist" candidates in the 1964 General Election, but between them, they managed to secure only 1064 votes[19] According to Michael Billig, the League only contested these seats as a publicity stunt rather than due to having any pretensions to becoming a political party.

[19] Chesterton's mood was dampened somewhat by the 1966 general election in which the Labour Party won a convincing victory and anti-immigration candidates lost support, as well as by Rhodesia's exit from the Commonwealth following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

The conference also saw the establishment of a working party to thrash out details of the new group, consisting of Austen Brooks, Rosine de Bounevialle, Avril Walters and Nettie Bonner from the LEL and Philip Maxwell, Bernard Simmons and Gerald Kemp from the BNP.