Asquith (44 page)

The private member’s bill came up for second reading on May 6th, and the House was presented with the diverting spectacle of the principal speaker in its favour being the Foreign Secretary and the principal speaker in opposition the Prime Minister. The one spoke immediately after the other. Asquith, assisted by the mounting tide of feminist illegality, was more persuasive than Grey. The bill was lost by 268 to 221, and that, parliamentarily, was the end of the matter for a time. Outside the law-breaking and the arson continued, but against growing public hostility and at the price of increasing dissension within the suffragette movement itself.

During 1912 and 1913 the troubles of the Government were increased, and its authority for dealing with them temporarily diminished, by the eruption of the Marconi scandal. Four ministers were in some form involved: Lloyd George; Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General; Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General; and the Master of Elibank, the Chief Whip. The Master had left the Government, the House of Commons, and the country (for the improbable destination of Bogota) before the scandal boiled over, but the share transactions which involved him had been made while he was still Patronage Secretary. Some of them, indeed, were not on his own account but for Liberal Party funds. Samuel, on the other hand, had dealt in no shares. The suggestion against him was that, as head of the Post Office, he had given the Marconi Company an improperly favourable contract (concluded in March, 1912) for the erection of a chain of wireless telegraphy stations throughout the Empire because its managing director was the brother of the Attorney-General. There was never the semblance of a case against Samuel, and the pretence of one was only sustained in order that the anti-Semitic overtones of
the affair might be exploited to the full. To bring together one Samuel and a couple of Isaacs in a skein of transactions bordering on the world of high finance was an irresistible attraction for Belloc and Cecil Chesterton.

The real case was against Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs. They both indulged in share transactions which, while not remotely dishonest, were certainly unwise for men in their positions, the one with his special financial responsibility, the other with his special legal responsibility. In April, 1912, Isaacs bought 10,000 shares in the American Marconi Company from a third brother who had himself obtained them from the brother who was managing director of the English company. One thousand of these he immediately sold to Lloyd George (and another thousand to the Master of Elibank). There followed a complicated series of sales and re-purchases. Eventually all three ministers lost money on their speculations, although at certain stages they realised substantial capital profits. What was more important than the net outcome, however, was the fact that they dealt in these volatile shares with the purpose (even if incompetently exercised) of making short-term Stock Exchange profits.

There was no trace of corruption in their behaviour. The contract had been concluded (although not approved by the House of Commons) before they entered the field. They used no special knowledge; they exercised no improper influence. And the American company, in which alone they dealt, stood to make no gain from any contract entered into by the English company. The English company was a shareholder in its sister, but not
vice versa.
Nevertheless there was a certain irrational sympathy of movement between the prices of the shares of the two concerns. This apart, however, the American shares, as those concerned quickly realised, were most unsuitable material for ministerial dealings.

During the summer of 1912 there were a spate of rumours and libellous statements about ministers and their relationship to the contract. As a result it was decided, in October, to set up a House of Commons select committee to investigate. Lloyd George and Isaacs in the course of the debate on the appointment of the committee intervened to deny in precise terms that they had ever had any interest, direct or indirect, in the English Marconi Company. They did not inform the House of their dealings in the American shares. This fact
only came to light in the Law Courts months later when Isaacs and Samuel took a libel action against the French newspaper
Le Matin
and the Attorney-General empowered his counsel (Sir Edward Carson, strangely enough; F. E. Smith was appearing for Samuel) to make the disclosure. The belated nature of this disclosure was one of the main counts against Lloyd George and Isaacs when the report of the select committee (which divided on strict party lines) was debated in June, 1913. If they believed in the innocence of their own behaviour, why had they not been more frank with the House in the previous October ?

Asquith was not closely involved in these matters. None of the ministers involved were his intimate friends (Isaacs was the closest to being one). But as head of the Government his advice was occasionally sought by his colleagues, and it fell to him, at the end of the affair, both to decide whether any resignations were called for, and to lay down a guide to ministers, in the conduct of their private financial affairs, which has kept its validity until the present day.

Asquith was at once unsympathetic and tolerant towards the peccant ministers. Without a trace of hypocrisy, he could not for a moment have imagined himself behaving as they had done. Although on the whole an economic as well as a political liberal, he felt an instinctive distaste for the process of money-making. At the same time he was never harsh towards human frailty. Few Prime Ministers have had less ambition to be a Savonarola within their cabinets. He greatly disliked the whole business and regarded it as “the most difficult and painful personal incident” of his public life. But he regarded much of the clamour as malicious and uncalled for and he refused to do anything which might fortify it. As one result he advised Isaacs (possibly unwisely) against taking an earlier libel action. This was in August, 1912, and the paper then complained of was Cecil Chesterton’s
Eye-Witness.
Asquith gave his advice from Scotland in characteristically unruffled terms:

“I suspect (it) . . . has a very meagre circulation. I notice only one page of advertisements and that occupied by books of Belloc’s publishers. Prosecution would secure it notoriety, which might yield subscribers. We have broken weather, and but for Winston there would be nothing in the newspapers.”
^u

Another result of this attitude was that Asquith firmly repulsed the tentative offers of resignation which Lloyd George and Isaacs made in the following January. He later told the King that this was immediately after they had told him of their dealings in the American shares, conduct which he described as “lamentable” and “so difficult to defend
.”
^v
Nevertheless, once he had refused the resignations, he was committed to this intractable defence and he discharged it in the June debate with great force and considerable success:

“Their honour, both their private and their public honour,” he told the House, “is at this moment absolutely unstained. They have, as this Committee has shown by its unanimous verdict, abused no public trust. They retain, I can say with full assurance, the complete confidence of their colleagues and of their political associates.”

In private he was, not unnaturally, a little more critical. “I think the idol’s wings are a bit clipped,” he said to Masterman one day on the front bench, when they were listening to Lloyd George addressing the House. “A bit clipped,” he repeated with a typical shrug of his shoulders. But in public he gave Lloyd George, already thrusting hard behind him, a support as complete as it was necessary.

Mrs. Donaldson’s recent penetrating study of the case,
¹
however, suggests that Asquith, while undoubtedly firm and loyal, was also a little disingenuous in pretending that he was kept in ignorance of the American transactions for much longer than was in fact the case. To the King, as has been seen, he fixed January, 1913, as the time when Lloyd George and Isaacs “confessed” to him. And writing many years later in
Memories and Reflections,
he implied (although he did not state) that he was unaware of the American transactions at least until after the debate of 11th October, 1912. Samuel’s
Memoirs,
however, state that the author informed the Prime Minister about the American purchases in or soon after June, 1912, and that Asquith showed that he had assimilated the information to the extent of commenting that “our colleagues could not have done a more foolish thing
.”
^w
If this was so, it is suggested, Asquith must bear some part of the blame for not forcing Lloyd George and Isaacs to make a full disclosure on 11th October.

¹
_{The Marconi Scandal
by Frances Donaldson (1962).}

Was it so? Samuel, despite attributing to Asquith such an uncharacteristic phrase as “our colleagues” was a reliable witness, and
his testimony is to some extent supported by the Master of Elibank. On the other hand, the only reference to the Marconi case in a voluminous private correspondence which Asquith was conducting at the time
¹
is in a letter dated 7th January, 1913. In this correspondence there was no question of Asquith writing “for the record.” He recounted events as they occurred, and this January letter fits in with the date which he gave to the King three months later, and is more consistent than not with his having just heard for the first time of the American transactions. “I am bothered with various things,” he
wrote, “-the latest being certain follies wh. Rufus Isaacs and Ll.
George have committed in regard to Marconi shares.”

There can now be no certainty on the point one way or another. But had Asquith known the full facts it seems unlikely (although not impossible; he always allowed his ministers a wide latitude of judgment) that he would not have remonstrated strongly against the narrowly accurate but misleading denials of 11th October. He might not have been in time to prevent them, for he was ill at the time, and he might have preserved the public front, for this was always his instinct when ministers made mistakes, but it is difficult to believe that he would not have commented sharply in private correspondence. And why, if the Prime Minister had been fully informed all along, should the issue of resignation have arisen at all in January ?

Six weeks after the final Marconi debate in the House of Commons, Isaacs wrote to Asquith again suggesting resignation. This time it was because publicity was being given to his having falsified his age, thirty-four years earlier, in order to secure membership (most unfortunately for himself as it turned out) of the London Stock Exchange. Asquith’s reply was clear, succinct, and perhaps a little weary. “Certainly not,” he wrote. Two months after this he appointed Isaacs Lord Chief Justice, and by so doing provoked Kipling’s poem
Gehazi
, one of the most vitriolic in the English language. It would have been much easier both for the Prime Minister and for Isaacs if the appointment could have been postponed. But Alverstone, the incumbent Chief Justice, was determined to resign. Once he had done so, Asquith did not hesitate about appointing Isaacs. The Attorney-General traditionally enjoyed the reversion to this office. Isaacs was an Attorney of outstanding legal quality. To have denied him the job in these circumstances would have undermined his position almost as much
as allowing the House of Commons to carry the Conservative motion which had been proposed against him and Lloyd George in the previous June. Asquith had used his authority to defeat this, and he did not weaken in the autumn. Lloyd George and Isaacs were both lucky in the Prime Minister under whom they made their errors of judgment.

Apart from the ill-fated Franchise Bill, the long session of 1912-13 was occupied with the Government’s two remaining major legislative commitments. The third Home Rule Bill was introduced by Asquith on April nth, 1912, and completed a laborious passage through the Commons on January 16th, 1913. A fortnight later it was summarily rejected in the House of Lords by a vote of 326 to 69. The Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill moved along a roughly parallel course. Clearly neither measure could pass into law without the protection of the Parliament Act and the three laps of the parliamentary circuit which this involved.

The Home Rule Bill was eventually to produce a crisis still more acute than the battle with the peers, and a threat of violence still more menacing than anything the suffragettes could command or industrial unrest might unleash. The positions which made this crisis inevitable were taken up by the Unionist leaders (and by their Ulster supporters) between July and September, 1912. Nevertheless, the period in the middle of the Home Rule Bill’s slow progress towards the statute book was one of relative political calm. This was particularly true of the short session of 1913, which lasted only from March to August, and which was almost entirely occupied with a second passage of the two rejected bills. The Commons had discussed them before. They knew they would have to discuss them again. However threatening the prospect, the intermediate stage of the process was inevitably one of
longueur.
The Cabinet, as Asquith’s letters to the King clearly show, was more than usually concerned with routine matters during these months. If, during the whole of his long premiership there was any period of lull, it lay in this short session and the months on either side of it: from December, 1912 to January or February, 1914.