Asquith (77 page)

The onus for misunderstanding at the Downing Street meeting must therefore rest squarely upon Law. To say that Asquith must have lost his head, because this is the only way in which Law’s honesty can be defended, is not good enough. One or other of the two men clearly acted out of character, and we cannot now be certain which it was. In either event Law plainly neglected his duty—which was to show Asquith the resolution and let him decide for himself what it meant.

Did this omission make any difference to the outcome of the crisis? On Beaverbrook’s showing it did. It led Asquith to under-estimate (and, indeed, to alienate) his Unionist support by seeking an unnecessary accommodation with Lloyd George. On Mr. Blake’s showing, however, it did not. The Unionist support was not really there. They would all have agreed to serve under Lloyd George at any moment at which the pistol was put to their heads. These assumptions of Mr. Blake are probably correct, but he does not allow for the fact that the Conservative ministers might have been confronted with a different pistol. Had Asquith been shown the resolution, and had he, like everyone else, found it confusing, and discovered from Bonar Law that it was the product of a confused meeting, a natural reaction on his part would have been a demand to see the other Unionist ministers, who were still serving under him.

A meeting later that afternoon between Asquith and the “ three C’s ” might have had considerable effect. To begin with, he would no doubt have found them wavering. But he was not without influence over them. In the course of the discussion their doubts about Lloyd George would have come to the surface, and the conclusion might have been that they would have stiffened Asquith, and he would have stiffened them. The only obstacle to such a meeting would have been Asquith’s reluctance, due to a mixture of inertia and distaste for promoting his own interests, to take the decisive step of summoning it.

The possibility did not arise, however. Law left Asquith with the impression that the Unionists were almost solid against him. In these circumstances the Prime Minister saw his next caller—Lloyd George. Lloyd George had been summoned from Walton Heath by a telephone call from Bonham Carter. Before going to Downing Street he had called in at the War Office and had smoked a preparatory cigar with the ubiquitous Aitken. Then he walked across to see the Prime Minister. Aitken thought that he "had never seen any man exhibit so much moral courage in the face of such great events.”
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For the moment it was unnecessary. The interview with Asquith, in the words of Mon
tagu, who was present in an adjoining room and had almost assumed the role of a Liberal Aitken, was “ long and very friendly/’ Asquith gave way to a substantial part of Lloyd George’s previous demands. He agreed that there should be a small War Committee under Lloyd George’s chairmanship, operating with certain safeguards, which he subsequently defined as follows:

The Prime Minister to have supreme and effective control of War policy.

The agenda of the War Committee will be submitted to him; its Chairman will report to him daily; he can direct it to consider particular topics or proposals; and all its conclusions will be subject to his approval or veto. He can, of course, at his own discretion, attend meetings of the Committee.
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Lloyd George accepted this, and an amicable but inconclusive discussion about personalities appears to have followed. The main difficulty was still Balfour
versus
Carson as First Lord of the Admiralty. Asquith, in an earlier conversation with Montagu, had thought that this might be a breaking-point, but it did not prove so at this stage. Asquith also wanted a Committee of four (including Henderson), not of three, and Lloyd George agreed readily to this, although he had been playing with the idea of Montagu as an alternative additional member.

After the Asquith-Lloyd George meeting had made some progress, Bonar Law came back and joined them for the last half-hour. It was agreed that all ministers other than the Prime Minister should resign, and that Asquith should reconstruct on the basis of the new War Committee. Bonar Law then left for another meeting of the Unionist ministers at F. E. Smith’s house in Grosvenor Crescent. Lloyd George went back to the War Office, pausing on the way out of 10, Downing Street to tell Hankey “ that the Unionists had insisted that he should become Prime Minister, but he had flatly declined, and had insisted that he would only serve with Asquith
.”
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Thus is history quickly confused by even the most intimate participants—or misreported by even the most reliable witnesses.

Lloyd George was closely followed to the War Office by Montagu.
¹
Six days later Montagu recorded his mixed impressions of that visit:

I joined George at the War Office, where he expressed his great
gratification at the fact that he was going to work with Asquith... and see (him) every day. He recognised my share in this happy issue and urged me to persuade Asquith to put the agreement in writing that night, in order that there might be no watering down or alterations, and in order that it might not be misconstrued. I told him that I would do my best.

¹
_{It is surprising that he and Beaverbrook did not frequently collide with each other, like characters in a stage farce, as they scurried from one focus of power to another.}

As I came away I saw, with fear and foreboding in my heart, Northcliffe waiting in his Private Secretary’s room. This secret has been locked in my knowledge ever since; I have told nobody but Primrose that I know George did see Northcliffe that night.
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For the moment, therefore, the apparition of Northcliffe made no wider impact. That night Asquith dined with Montagu in the familiar ambience of Queen Anne’s Gate. Mrs. Montagu was in the country, but Crewe and Reading came in after dinner. Montagu, as he had promised, urged Asquith to enshrine the afternoon’s agreement in a late-night letter to Lloyd George; but that was not done. Instead a brief Press statement was sent out at 11.45 p.in. This merely said that “ the Prime Minister, with a view to the most active prosecution of the war, has decided to advise his Majesty the King to consent to a reconstruction of the Government.”

Beaverbrook thought that from Asquith’s point of view this was a “ disastrous statement ”—because it alerted both the unconsulted Liberals and the unconsulted Unionists—and he attributed the mistake to Montagu’s insistence. For once Beaverbrook was imperfectly informed about developments within the Bonar Law camp. Law had written to Asquith earlier that evening (presumably during his visit to F. E. Smith’s house, for the letter was on Attorney-General’s writing paper), demanding just such a statement:

My dear Prime Minister,

I think it is almost certain that it will be stated in the papers to-morrow that the Unionists Ministers have sent in their resignations. The only way to prevent the danger resulting from this is, in my opinion, that it should be formally stated tonight that you have decided to reconstruct the government.

Yours sincerely,

A. Bonar Law.
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That night, however, Asquith worried neither about the statements nor about the possible machinations of Lord Northcliffe. He
believed that another very disagreeable crisis was nearly over, and expressed his thoughts in a private letter:

I drove down to Walmer yesterday afternoon hoping to find sunshine and peace. It was bitterly drab and cold, and for my sins (or other people’s) I had to drive back soon after n this morning.

I was forced back by Bongie & Montagu and Rufus to grapple with a “ Crisis ”—this time with a very big C. The result is that I have spent much of the afternoon in colloguing with Messrs. Ll. George & Bonar Law, & one or two minor worthies. The “ Crisis ” shows every sign of following its many predecessors to an early and unhonoured grave. But there were many wigs very nearly on the green
.
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On this occasion Asquith’s calm was misplaced. The situation changed sharply the next morning, and the Government reached its grave earlier than did the crisis.

The next morning (Monday, December 4th)
The Times
published a leading article which grew to a fame unmatched by any similar emission until 1938. This article was written throughout in a tone that was hostile and insulting to Asquith. From the Northcliffe Press the Prime Minister was used to this. Such a fact alone would not even have caused him to show much interest, let alone to react strongly. What was more significant was that the article (and the despatch from the Parliamentary Correspondent which appeared alongside it) had obviously been written or inspired by someone who was privy to Sunday afternoon’s Downing Street discussions, and who was interpreting them to mean that Asquith, persuaded even by “ his closest supporters ” that he was ineffective as a war leader, had made a complete surrender of power to Lloyd George.

Asquith had not been told of Northcliffe’s visit to the War Office on the previous day. But even without this enormous piece of circumstantial evidence he assumed that Lloyd George was the source of the leak, and that it was due, not to carelessness, but to a deliberate policy of using the Press to make the Sunday arrangements unworkable except on the basis of a complete Lloyd George hegemony.

In a narrow sense his suspicions were probably unfounded. The article does not appear to have stemmed directly from Lloyd George. Northcliffe left Tom Clarke of the
Daily Mail,
who was close to him at the time, with the impression that he had written the leader himself.
¹

¹
_{“Then he (Northcliffe) came to town, saw L.G., and then wrote a two-column article on the political crisis,” Clarke wrote on the Monday.
(My Northcliffe Diary,
p. 106).}

But there is strong evidence that Dawson, the editor, was in fact the
author, and that he acted independently of Northcliffe. Hankey wrote:

Long after I learned the true history of this episode. It was at dinner at Reading’s house on Sunday, December 15th, 1920, on which I wrote in my diary:

... Perhaps the most interesting item was contributed by Lloyd George, who said that 011 the previous week-end he had learned the true history of
The Times
article, which four years ago, wrecked Asquith’s government. Geoffrey Dawson had told him that he wrote the article himself at Cliveden (the Astors’ place on the Thames) without prompting from anyone, and without communication of any sort or kind with Northcliffe, and because he disliked the arrangement agreed between Asquith and Lloyd George. The particulars of the proposed arrangement had been given him by Carson.
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But Carson could hardly have supplied this information before Dawson left for Cliveden, for it was not then available. Beaverbrook avoided this contradiction by explaining that Dawson wrote the first half of the article in the country on the Saturday, but completed it in London on the Sunday after talking to Carson. This is confirmed in Sir Evelyn Wrench’s life of Dawson.

It still leaves two points for explanation. First, if there was no collusion between Lloyd George and Northcliffe, why was the latter paying such frequent visits to the quarters of the Secretary of State at the War Office? Northcliffe was not the man to waste his time in pointless errands. Yet he was there on the Friday morning (December 1st), the Saturday morning (December 2nd) and the Sunday evening (December 3rd). No politician, at a moment of acute crisis, should expect to hold such a series of private interviews with a partisan and editorially active newspaper proprietor, who is the sworn enemy of his own governmental chief, without accepting that some of the responsibility for what then appears in the proprietor’s political columns will be pinned upon him.

Secondly, where else except from Lloyd George did Carson get his detailed knowledge of the Downing Street arrangement to pass on to Dawson? And if he received facts was it not likely that he received views as well? It is not, after all, in dispute that he and Lloyd George were working in the closest association. The introduction of Carson as an intermediary does not therefore, as Hankey for instance assumes, dispose of the view that
The Times
article gave Lloyd George’s interpretation of his agreement with Asquith.