Asquith (76 page)

¹
_{The fact that he was misinformed about Carson’s whereabouts makes his reason still stranger. Reading told Montagu, with whom he breakfasted on the Saturday morning, about the interchange, and the latter recorded it.}

It sounded a tangled situation, and so indeed it was. Montagu, and not only Reading, tried to intervene with Lloyd George that afternoon. The three of them had an hour’s talk at the War Office. “We could not shake (Lloyd George’s) determination. He insists upon the Chairmanship of the War Committee and upon removing Balfour from the Admiralty,” Montagu noted.® Montagu also wrote a long letter to Asquith and sent it down to Walmer with Bonham Carter. It was a letter of near despair:

Audacious as I am of advice, I am at a loss to give any. I receive very bitter letters from Margot, but I have not had time or courage to answer them. She, like McKenna, attributes everything that has happened in the Press to L.G., notwithstanding the fact that the views of the Press are nearly all inconsistent with L.G’s scheme. I remain of opinion, based not only on affection but on conviction, that there is no conceivable Prime Minister but you.

I remain of opinion that Lloyd George is an invaluable asset to any war government. ... I would most earnestly suggest that you should come to London to discuss this matter. You may entertain your own opinion, as I have expressed mine, of the vital mistake Lloyd George is making in plunging the country into this condition. But it is for you as Prime Minister, I assume, to try and prevent this wherever the fault. I cannot believe that this can be done by the mere exchange of two formal letters.... It is all a nightmare to me
^r

Influenced by this letter, by Bonham Carter’s verbal persuasion, and perhaps by his inability to find Carson (who had not left London), Asquith agreed to return on the Sunday morning (December 3rd). He reached Downing Street at 2.0 p.m., was greeted by Montagu, and immediately sent for Crewe, who joined them at the end of a late luncheon.

While Asquith had been motoring through Kent the Unionist ministers had met at Bonar Law’s house in Kensington. On this occasion there is no doubt that there were two absentees. Balfour was in bed, and Lansdowne, who had retreated to Bowood on the Friday evening, taking Grey with him, was pleased to discover, when he received the summons, that there were no trains which would get him to the meeting in time. Several other aspects of this meeting remain shrouded in mystery. A resolution, which ran as follows, was carried for transmission to Asquith:

We share the view expressed to you by Mr. Bonar Law some time ago that the Government cannot continue as it is.

It is evident that a change must be made, and, in our opinion, the publicity given to the intention of Mr. Lloyd George makes reconstruction from within no longer possible.

We therefore urge the Prime Minister to tender the resignation of the Government.

If he feels unable to take that step, we authorise Mr. Bonar Law to tender our resignation.

The reference to “ the publicity given to the intention of Mr. Lloyd George ” was provoked by an article which had appeared in
Reynolds
'
newspaper that morning, and which Beaverbrook subsequently described as “ like an interview with Lloyd George written in the third person.” It gave the readers of that newspaper, who apparently included all the Conservative ministers, a full inside picture of the game at that stage from Lloyd George’s point of view, including the information that if his terms were not accepted he intended to resign and appeal to public opinion.

These revelations gave great offence to the assembling ministers. They were already aggrieved by Bonar Law’s tardiness in telling them what was happening. It was intolerable that they should be better informed as readers of
Reynolds'
than as colleagues of the Unionist leader. Furthermore they regarded Lloyd George’s fault as completely in character. They were eager to give him a sharp rap over the knuckles. But what else did they intend to achieve with the remainder of their resolution?

This remains the greatest mystery of the whole crisis. It was not a mystery to everyone. Lord Beaverbrook gave a perfectly clear explanation of what they had in view. “ .. . the tone of the meeting,” he wrote, “ had changed since Thursday from one of passive hostility to Lloyd George’s plan to an active determination to force an issue and compel Lloyd George to accept the domination of the Prime Minister or retire from the Government.” When Asquith resigned, Lloyd George would be forced to try to form an administration. “ On his failure, which was thought certain, Asquith would return stronger than ever, and Lloyd George and his few friends would be thrown out of the Government on its re-formation.”
^s
But is this a convincing explanation?

First, it must be said that if the intention of the Conservative ministers was to strengthen Asquith and destroy Lloyd George, they behaved with an almost unbelievable ineptitude. Their resolution, which was to be transmitted by the one man amongst them who had gone over to Lloyd George, breathed no word of confidence in Asquith. On the contrary, the instruction that if he would not resign himself, he must accept their resignations struck a distinctly hostile note. How was this likely to strengthen his hand against Lloyd George?

This particular instruction apart, the whole resignation gambit, which they urged upon Asquith, was a most hazardous one. Lord Beaverbrook, and other commentators following him, have written as though this was a weapon frequently and successfully employed by Prime Ministers. They assume that a short visit to Buckingham Palace is a time-honoured way of dealing with a recalcitrant colleague or a confused Cabinet situation: the resigning Prime Minister can confidently expect to be recalled within a day or so. In fact there is not a single post-1832 example of a Prime Minister behaving in this way and strengthening his position. Gladstone in 1873 tried to force Disraeli to form a minority administration, but that was because he wished to escape from office before the forthcoming election; he failed in his objective and led his party to a heavy defeat. In 1885 he tried the same tactic on Salisbury, who took office for six months, and then made an unexpectedly good electoral showing.

On both these occasions the party situation was relatively stable. There was no question of another Liberal stepping into the place which Gladstone had vacated. A more fluid situation existed in 1931 which was a precedent for Beaverbrook and the other commentators, although not of course for Asquith or the Tory ministers. On this occasion MacDonald did from some points of view strengthen his position by going to Buckingham Palace to resign—but only because he was careful not to leave again until he had secured a commission to form a new Government. He did not make the mistake of allowing anyone else to try first.

For the Unionist ministers to have assumed—if they did—that the best way to help Asquith was to demand his resignation was therefore extraordinarily foolish. But was this the way their minds worked? There is contrary evidence, from both Curzon and Austen Chamberlain. Curzon wrote to Lansdowne a few hours after the Unionist meeting. There is such a difference between the beginning and the end of his letter that it is possible almost to sense the mind of
that patrician but flexible character adjusting himself to a new situation as he rapidly added one spidery sentence to another. He began with strong criticism of Lloyd George. Then he defended the tactic of the Unionist resolution. It was designed, he said, to bring Lloyd George face to face with the facts of political responsibility. “ His Government will be dictated to him by others, not shaped exclusively by himself.” The assumption was that Lloyd George would form a government, not that he would fail to do so. Curzon concluded with some harsh remarks about Asquith:

Had one felt that reconstruction by and under the present Prime Minister was possible, we should all have preferred to try it. But we know that with him as Chairman, either of the Cabinet or War Committee, it is absolutely impossible to win the War, and it will be for himself and Lloyd George to determine whether he goes out altogether or becomes Lord Chancellor or Chancellor of the Exchequer in a new Government, a nominal Premiership being a protean compromise which, in our view, could have no endurance.
^t

Curzon behaved in a double-faced way throughout the crisis. A day later he wrote to Asquith to assure him that “ my resignation yesterday was far from having the sinister purport which I believe you were inclined to attribute to it.”
^u
; and there is a widely believed story that he followed this up by a verbal assurance to the Prime Minister that he would never serve under Lloyd George. Even so, he can have had no motive for dissimulating in Lloyd George’s favour when writing to Lansdowne. Curzon’s letter is strong evidence that the feeling at the Unionist meeting was much more confused than Beaverbrook allowed.

Curzon’s evidence is supported by Austen Chamberlain. Chamberlain was more straightforward, less clever, and much less ambitious than Curzon. He was at least as suspicious of Lloyd George,
¹
although at a later stage he was to be much more loyal to him.

¹
_{He had strong family reasons for disliking him, and these were always powerful with Chamberlain.}

In his already quoted letter to the Indian Viceroy, Chamberlain described the situation with which, as he saw it, the Unionist ministers were confronted on the Sunday morning:

Lloyd George was in revolt and the controversy on his side was being carried on in the Press by partial and inaccurate revelations. Asquith, Grey and Balfour were being openly denounced and told
they must go. No Government could continue to exist on such terms, and since the Prime Minister had failed to assert his authority and to reorganize his administration in time, we thought that the ordinary constitutional practice should be followed and the man who had made the Government impossible should be faced with his responsibilities. If he could form a Government, well and good. If not, he must take his place again as a Member of an Asquith Administration, having learned the limits of his power and deprived thenceforward of the opportunity for intrigue. In any case, power and responsibility must go together and the man who was Prime Minister in name must also be Prime Minister in fact.

It seemed to us at that time that the only hope of a stable Government still lay in combining somehow or another in one administration the separate forces represented by both Lloyd George and Asquith. It was not for us to say which of the rival Liberals could secure the greatest amount of support in the Liberal Party and the Parties which habitually worked with it
.
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If the hope of these Conservative ministers was to combine the forces of Asquith and Lloyd George, it was singularly foolish of them to stand indifferently aside and leave the Liberal battle to be fought out—particularly as they knew that their own leader was pursuing no such policy of neutrality. But this was typical of the ineffectiveness of the “ three C’s ” (and of Long) throughout the crisis. Not knowing quite what they wanted, and without close contact with Asquith, Lloyd George, or even Bonar Law, they never managed to exert much influence on events.

Nevertheless the clause in the Conservative resolution rebuking Lloyd George for his press disclosures might well weaken Bonar Law’s hand when he showed it to the Prime Minister. So at least Aitken thought. He spent the whole of Sunday luncheon trying to persuade Law to delete it. “ But he did not take my persistency in good part,” Aitken wrote. Eventually Law fled from the table, but Aitken quickly followed him upstairs to his study and renewed the pressure. It was then agreed that F. E. Smith, who maintained a fairly detached position throughout the battle, should be brought in to give a third opinion. He gave it unequivocally against deleting the disputed clause. To do this would be to pervert the intentions of the Unionist ministers.

Bonar Law then drove to Downing Street to see Asquith. He went with the resolution in his pocket, and there it remained throughout
the interview. About this there is no dispute. It is stated by Asquith,
^w
and confirmed by Law, who says that although he communicated the contents, “ I forgot to hand him the actual document.”
^x
But how completely and how accurately did his verbal explanations convey the contents? About this there can never now be certainty. Asquith took the meaning to be that all the Unionist ministers had swung into a position of complete hostility to him. Aitken, to whom Law returned immediately after the interview, confirms this, although he claims that this misapprehension was Asquith’s own fault: “ (He) seized on nothing in the Tory resolution except the demand that he should resign. This single word
resignation
frightened him.... The point that caught his sole attention was not therefore the motives which induced the three C’s and Walter Long and others to urge him on to resignation—but the mere fact that they demanded that he should resign.”
^y

This passage is part of a long refutation of the possibility that Law could have acted dishonestly. Such behaviour, Aitken argued (and so later did Mr. Robert Blake), would have been so out of keeping with his character as to be inconceivable. The much more likely explanation, Mr. Blake suggests, is that Asquith lost his head—about as uncharacteristic a piece of behaviour, it might be thought, as any temporary fall on the part of Law from his normal high standards of probity. Furthermore, it is clear from what is known that Law was behaving most oddly that afternoon. Had the morning’s resolution been in the terms he wanted, and had he therefore given it little further thought before going to see Asquith, his failure to produce it, while careless, might have been comprehensible. But as nearly the whole of the three hours between the end of the morning meeting and the beginning of the interview had been occupied with a wearing dispute as to whether part of the resolution could be deleted (the starting point being fear about the effect on Asquith of reading this part) his “ forgetfulness ” becomes simply incomprehensible. Nor can any faith be placed in his ability to have given Asquith an equally satisfactory verbal explanation. In the first place Bonar Law himself did not know exactly what the resolution meant. (Nor probably did anybody; but this was an additional reason for allowing Asquith to make his own interpretation.) Secondly, Law was notoriously ineffective, as there were many previous examples to show, in exposition to Asquith.