Asquith (18 page)

A more significant relationship for the politics of colonial affairs in the years leading up to the South African War, was that between Alfred Milner and many of the Liberals, and particularly Asquith. Milner was appointed by Chamberlain to succeed Sir Hercules Robinson as High Commissioner in South Africa in March, 1897. He quickly became the instigator and instrument of a tough policy towards the Boers, but he went out with the blessings of the Liberal Party—of which he was in general a supporter—as well as of the Government. Asquith, who had known him since Balliol, presided at a great dinner of farewell, at which Chamberlain, Balfour and Morley spoke, and to which Rosebery and Harcourt (united for once) sent warm messages. After his arrival at the Cape Milner used Asquith as his main channel of communication with the Liberal Party and wrote him long, frequent and confidential bulletins of information and argument. That there was little of an “ imperialist ” intrigue about this correspondence is shown by Morley’s desire to use it as a vehicle for his own good wishes. But as time went on Milner became more inclined to suggest that what he wrote should be shown “ to Grey and Haldane and no one else.” There is little doubt that Asquith’s views on the approach of the Boer War were influenced by Milner’s letters, Ger-manically voluminous though they were for his taste.

Before the war became imminent the Liberal Party suffered another upheaval. On December 8th, 1898, Harcourt wrote a long letter to Morley, rehearsing his grievances since the retirement of Gladstone, and announcing that he was not prepared to continue as leader. Morley replied on December 10th with equal publicity, telling Harcourt that all his complaints were more than justified, and that the surprise was that he had continued to put up with the situation for so long. On December 14th the correspondence was published in the newspapers.

Asquith was ignorant of these transactions until he received the
news in a letter from Harcourt on the morning of the 13 th. The body of this letter was cool and calm, but attached to it was a less calm and longer postscript which pin-pointed Rosebery's letter to Spencer of August, 1895, as “ the key to the whole situation,” but refused to mention its author by name, referring to him darkly throughout only as “ he ” or “ him.” Asquith at once treated the situation created by Harcourt’s decision as one of major crisis for the Liberal Party. He put off his appointments in the Law Courts and set out to find Ellis, the Chief Whip, whom he had “ not seen for months.”
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He located him with some difficulty at his house in Cowley Street, Westminster, and showed him Harcourt’s letter. Then he went across to the House of Lords where Haldane was arguing a case and took him out into a corridor in order to read the letter to him.
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With both Ellis and Haldane, Asquith was more concerned to discuss the future rather than any question of putting back the past. They were “ each of them strong that. .. (Asquith) was the proper successor.”

While he was talking to Haldane, Asquith accidentally encountered Morley who was on his way to some committee. He remonstrated with him about Harcourt’s action—not then knowing how deeply implicated Morley was in the whole business—and discovered both how useless this was and what were the exact plans for publication. “We had an unsatisfactory and not very agreeable interview, though we parted on perfectly friendly terms,” Asquith recorded. His next task was to reply to Harcourt’s letter. He expressed his disapproval of the decision and of the way in which it had been taken. But he did so sufficiently agreeably for Harcourt to reply on the following day in a distinctly more friendly tone than he had struck in his first letter. This second Harcourt letter to Asquith contained the following notable passage:

One of my strongest feelings is a regard for the character and dignity of the House of Commons. It depends mainly on maintaining the authority and position of the leaders on both sides.

A leader of opposition who finds his whips speaking and voting against him
³
cannot maintain that respect which is due to his position, still less when he finds the organisation of the party working against him in the country.
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One of these days—and that an
early
day—you will have cause to be grateful to me for having vindicated the authority of the leader.
^k

That night Asquith went to Leicestershire to see his wife, and returned to London on the following morning—Wednesday, December 14th. He had two problems on his mind at this stage. The more immediate but lesser one was what he was to say in Birmingham on the Friday evening, when he was due to address a public rally at the close of a meeting of the National Liberal Federation.
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The greater problem was whether, if the pressure were sufficiently strong, he should allow himself to be pushed into the vacant leadership. He had sedulously spread around the view that he could not afford it. Spencer, for instance, wrote to him on Christmas Eve: “As to yourself I heartily wish that you could lead the opposition; I consider that you are the right man for the post, at the same time I feel that the party cannot ask you to sacrifice your family and private interests..."
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And Asquith himself, after noting the strong opinions of Ellis and Haldane in his favour, recorded:

From the first this was not my own view. On personal grounds it is impossible for me without a great and unjustifiable sacrifice of the interests of my family to take a position which—if it is to be properly filled—would cut me off from my profession and leave me poor and pecuniarily dependent. On public and party grounds, I doubt whether at this moment and under existing political conditions, I would not render as good service as second in command as in the position of leader. From every point of view I thought that the best choice our party could make was Campbell-Bannerman.
^{1 m}

¹
_{If Asquith were to exclude himself, Bannerman became almost inevitable. Harcourt and Morley apart, there were only two other ex-Cabinet ministers—Fowler and Bryce—left in the Commons. Neither was
papabile.}

Yet his contemporary writings
²
give the impression that at this stage he was wavering. He was unusually worried about his speech at Birmingham—which, despite the disarray of the Liberal Party, was delivered to a packed Town Hall and then to an overflow meeting— and took the precaution both of writing it out, and of choosing “ matter (which was) not very inspiring.” No doubt the circumstances would have made it necessary for any prominent figure in the party to speak circumspectly, but Asquith seemed additionally anxious to say nothing which would commit him either to accepting or refusing the leadership. He got back to London on the Saturday morning and Ellis and Haldane lunched with him in Cavendish Square. “ There was much discussion between us as to the possibility of my leaving the Bar and leading the party, but we all agreed that in the first instance the leadership ought to be offered to Campbell-Bannerman, whom I and all would loyally support.”

²
_{The main source is an 1,800 word memorandum of events—unusually long for Asquith—which he wrote immediately before Christmas.
(Asquith Papers,
ix, ff 109-28).}

That luncheon probably decided Asquith against taking the leadership. If Ellis and Haldane had put a pistol to his head by taking the view that Bamierman was impossible, Asquith might have been prepared to say yes. But they did not. And when a letter from Fowler in much the same sense arrived on the Monday morning, Asquith decided that he could write with a good conscience to Bannerman (who was in bed with a cold in Scotland) and urge him to accept the rather thankless burden. “ My object in writing to you,” he stated, “is to say at once, and without any ambiguity, that I earnestly hope you will see your way to take the lead. . .
”
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On the Wednesday Banner-man’s reply reached Cavendish Square. It was warm and friendly,
and dealt pithily and sensibly with Harcourt; but although it implied that he would accept the leadership, it did not say so:

How much more dignified and easier it would have been if the big man had written a simple note to Ellis, alleging advancing years, failing sight, loss of Lou-Lou, etc., etc. as reason for not going on. I never knew a more gratuitous bungle than the whole thing. But we can laugh over it at our leisure.... The situation is hideous. I can honestly reciprocate every word you say. I am not my own candidate, and will do my best to help another far more merrily than I should ask help for myself. I really do not know what may come of it, and can only hope that the weeks as they pass may have a settling effect.

But the big salmon will always be sulking under his stone, and ready for occasional plunges which will not always be free from a sinister intention. ... I have no doubt that we poor ex-Cabinets at least shall have no difficulty, whoever may be nominal leader, in holding together and steering straight.
^o

A day or so later, however, Campbell-Bannerman told Tweed-mouth, who visited him in Scotland, that “ if his doctor allowed him ” he would accept the leadership. By the New Year this authority (who had to be written to in Vienna) had been prevailed upon not to object, and there remained only the problem of arranging the formalities of election. No one doubted that once the other ex-ministers had made their offer to Campbell-Bannerman, and he had accepted it, the arrangement would also be accepted without challenge by the party as a whole. The only point at issue was how large a circle of front-benchers was to be consulted before the general party meeting. Tweedmouth (who had some standing as an ex-Chief Whip) wanted a prior meeting of all front-bench men, but this was strongly resisted by Campbell-Bannerman himself, who wrote to Asquith on January 2nd arguing that it was quite wrong to interpose another circle of authority between the Shadow Cabinet (which was restricted to communicant
⁴⁴
ex-Cabs ” as he called them) and the back-benchers. Asquith wrote back on January 3rd concurring with Campbell-Bannerman’s view, but saying that he was also opposed to Fowler’s idea of a meeting of all the surviving members of the late Cabinet. “ Who is entitled to issue such a summons? ” he asked. “ Are the three principal members
¹
to
be included or omitted? And is there any member of it, in either House, who wishes to see it assembled again for any purpose under Heaven?
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¹
_{Rosebery, Harcourt and Morley.}

These opinions upon which Asquith and Campbell-Bannerman concurred were very austere ones. They restricted the electing body to four men, of whom one was the new leader, and another his only possible rival. In the outcome Campbell-Bannerman was forced to modify them to the small extent of agreeing to a general front-bench dinner.

In other ways, too, the new leader began on a firmly traditional course—which may in part have been a result of his feeling that the Liberal Party, so battered from both right and left, needed continuity rather than change, and a reminder that it had known better days and would perhaps soon know them again. “As to its scene,” he wrote to Asquith on January 17th about the forthcoming party meeting, which had been arranged for February 6th, “ my disposition is all for the Reform Club. Anything else would be a confession of weakness and decadence. Why should we lose our hold on so excellent a property? And as a matter of fact I believe more of our men (certainly the best of them) belong to it than any other.... The alternative is a Committee Room, which would be to sink to the level of the Irish, who do not profess to have any home in London.”
^q

Campbell-Bannerman was also eager to create a sense of unity, cohesion and even cosiness amongst those who were left in the Shadow Cabinet. They could at least all congratulate each other on not having treated the party as badly as in their different ways Rosebery, Harcourt and Morley had done. This was a constant theme of the correspondence of Spencer, Fowler, Bamierman and (to a lesser extent) Asquith with each other.

For the future of the party the crucial factor was the development of relations between the last two. Previously they had never had close contact with each other beyond that involved in sitting first in a Cabinet and then in a Shadow Cabinet together. Their official intercourse had been perfectly agreeable but they were in no sense friends. Neither in London nor in Scotland did they move in the same social world. They belonged to different wings of the party. Asquith, largely because of his Roseberyite affiliations, was by this stage thought of as the strong man of the right. Campbell-Bannerman, beyond having supported him for the premiership in 1894, was in no sense a Rosebery
ite. He had some leanings towards the Little Englandism of Harcourt and Morley, but within the Liberal Party he was basically a man of the centre, loyal to the Gladstonian traditions although more concerned with keeping the party together than with any ideological considerations. He was sixteen years Asquith’s senior (which meant that he could not be a long-term rival) and, although both shrewd and cultivated, he was manifestly his intellectual inferior, a less accomplished parliamentarian, and not as well-known a national figure. But he was respected by his colleagues and popular with the rank and file of the Liberal Party.

Could he and Asquith work smoothly and closely together? They began excellently, with a warm and frequent exchange of letters written in mutual confidence. Asquith was at such pains to avoid any suggestion that he was not whole-heartedly behind the new leader that, when influenza prevented his attending Campbell-Bannerman’s eve-of-session dinner on February 3rd, he concluded his apology by writing: “ If a list of the guests is sent to the papers it might be as well to treat me as constructively present, and include my name. Otherwise we may have some nonsense about a
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diplomatic indisposition ’! ”
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Then in April, when the sudden death of Tom Ellis at the age of forty dealt the party yet another blow, they successfully surmounted the crisis together. After some initial hesitancy, they agreed to the appointment of Herbert Gladstone, who had been undersecretary to Asquith at the Home Office. By the early summer of 1899 it looked as though the Liberal Party might at last be approaching a calmer and more successful period. Perhaps after all the loss of Rosebery and Harcourt had been blessings in disguise. As leaders they had each of them been disruptive as well as lazy.
¹