Mr Balfour's Poodle (18 page)

All this came to nothing, for Balfour, despite his initially favourable response and the gloomy fears of Unionist foolishness which he expressed both to Asquith and to Lord Esher
^cc
at about this time, eventually killed the plan. Most of the leaders whom he consulted inclined towards acceptance (although it is most difficult to believe that Lansdowne, who remained aloof from this whole negotiation, was not an exception). But Akers-Douglas, Balfour's former Chief Whip, told him that the views of the rank and file of the party would be quite different. They would not stand for such a wholesale compromise of principle and such a sudden
rapprochement
with men against whom they had worked up a quite unusual degree of personal bitterness. This appears to have been decisive with Balfour. He was obsessed at the time (in so far as so detached a mind can ever be said to suffer from an obsession) with what he regarded as the bad example of
Peel,
¹
and he was determined not to split his party on the issue. Eighteen years later, discussing with his biographer these negotiations, he stressed the relevance of the Peel precedent.

‘My own remark about Peel,' Mrs. Dugdale records him as saying, ‘that was the point. I should say it now and may well have said it then. Peel twice committed what seems to me the unforgivable sin. He gave away a principle on which he had come into power—and mind you, neither time had an unforeseen factor come into the case. He simply betrayed his party.'
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Furthermore, Balfour claimed on this occasion that neither at the time nor in retrospect was he greatly attracted by Lloyd George's plan on its merits. And his comment on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's personal attitude was sharp:

‘Now isn't that like Lloyd George. Principles mean nothing to him—never have. His mind doesn't work that way. It's both his strength and his weakness. He says to himself at any given moment: “Come on now—we've all been squabbling too long, let's find a reasonable way out of the difficulty”—but such solutions are quite impossible for people who don't share his outlook on political principles—the great things.'
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But there were undoubtedly some of Balfour's followers whose minds and principles were just as flexible in 1910 as were those of Lloyd George. F. E. Smith was the outstanding example. He put his thoughts with great frankness into two
letters to Austen Chamberlain, one of which concluded with the urgent but fortunately unheeded instruction: ‘Please burn this.'

Smith looked at political groupings with all the unprejudiced realism of a Talleyrand considering possible alliances. And he was convinced that acceptance of the Lloyd George offer would strengthen the right and weaken the left.

‘I am absolutely satisfied of L.G.'s honesty and sincerity,' he wrote. ‘He has been taught much by office and is sick of being wagged by a Little England tail. But if he proved in a year or two
difficile
or turbulent, where is he and where are we? He is done and has sold the pass. We should still be a united party with the exception of our Orangemen: and they can't stay out long. What allies can they find?'
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Later, in his second letter, Smith took an even stronger view of the weakness of Lloyd George's position.

‘I am tempted to say of him,' he rather surprisingly wrote,
'quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat
. It seems to me that he is done for ever unless he gradually inclines to our side in all the things that permanently count.'
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Smith also saw that a coalition would greatly build up the powers of resistance to economic change and weaken the position of the left outside the Liberal Party as well as within it:

‘A great sigh of relief would go up over the whole of business England if a strong and stable Government were formed. … Furthermore such a Government could (1) say to Redmond: thus far and no further, which Asquith standing alone cannot; and (2) absolutely refuse reversal of the Osborne judgment, which Asquith standing alone cannot.'
^hh

Here, leaving aside the reference to the Irish question, we catch a foretaste of the spirit of the post-1918 coalition. A strong businessman's Government, a firm front to labour, and compromise on the traditional ‘political' disputes was to be the recipe which prevailed then even if it failed in 1910. And the response which Lloyd George's proposals evoked from different politicians in 1910 presaged to a remarkable degree the attitude which they were to take up in 1921 and 1922. The enthusiasm of Lloyd George himself and of F. E. Smith was, as we have seen, undoubted. Mr. Churchill was equally eager. It was a scheme after his own heart.

Austen Chamberlain, to whom Smith's letters had been addressed, had a less mercurial mind. Unlike Smith and Churchill, he was a little shocked, although not without a touch of pleasure, at the sudden boldness of the plan. ‘What a world we live in, and how the public would stare if they could look into our minds and our letter-bags,' he wrote. But he also appreciated the solid advantages which might accrue from it:

‘We equally recognise the vast importance of the results which Lloyd George holds out to us. To place the Navy on a thoroughly satisfactory basis, to establish a system of national service for defence, to grant at once preference to the Colonies on the duties immediately available, and to enquire, not with a view to delay but with a view to action at the earliest possible moment, what further duties it is desirable to impose in the interests of the nation and the Empire—these are objects which silence all considerations of personal comfort and all individual preferences or antipathies. And in saying this please understand that I am as assured as you are yourself that Lloyd George has made this proposal in perfect good faith
and without any unavowed or unavowable
arrière pensée.'
ⁱⁱ

Despite one or two detailed objections, he was moving steadily towards a position of firm support for the plan.

Here, then, lined up behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1910 (even if, in some cases, eager to push as well as to follow), were the three men—Birkenhead (as Smith had then become), Churchill, and Chamberlain—who in 1922 remained loyal to the coalition to the end and paid the penalty of brief periods in the political wilderness; none of them was a member of the Bonar Law-Baldwin Government.

Asquith, equally presaging the future, was always cool towards the Lloyd George plan. It is true that he did not dismiss it out of hand, nor seek to discourage Lloyd George from making what he could of it. But the latter's statement that ‘Mr. Asquith regarded the proposal with considerable favour …'
^jj
is almost certainly too strong. Asquith's own biographers write in quite a different tone:

‘For himself,' they say, ‘he was wholly sceptical about any coalition being possible which would have effected the desired objects of settling the House of Lords question and carrying the Home Rule Bill and other controversial measures by consent, and he would certainly not have been willing to pay the price (compulsory military service, imperial preference, etc.) which, according to rumours current at the time, the Tory leaders would have required for their connivance. He thought the ground treacherous and dangerous for both parties, but with his accustomed tolerance, he was willing to let those who thought otherwise try their hand; and he watched the
progress of the business to its inevitable conclusion with a certain detached amusement.'
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On an issue of this sort Asquith's essential conservatism made him a better radical than Lloyd George. He was a great man for guiding the plough to which he had set his hand, rather than for searching the horizon for some new task. In consequence he was much less willing to abandon the struggles to which he had grown accustomed—Home Rule, the battle with the Lords and the defence of free trade—in return for the excitement of a fresh twist to the political kaleidoscope. Confronted with a new issue, Asquith's instinctive reaction to it would have been far more conservative than would Lloyd George's. Confronted with an old one, he could be far more stubbornly radical.

The breakdown of the coalition negotiations, coming as it did just before the breakdown of discussions on the narrower point within the Constitutional Conference, reinforced the feeling amongst leading politicians that progress by compromise and secret conclave was impossible. The next round would have to be fought out in public.

This was instantly appreciated by Mrs. Asquith when, on November 10, she received a telegram from her husband announcing that all the talks were over. With a very full sense of the duties of a Prime Minister's wife, she reacted, in her own words, as follows: ‘It was clear to me that there was nothing for it but for us to have another General Election as quickly as possible before the discontent of our party could become vocal. I sent our Chief Whip—the Master of Elibank—a telegram to this effect, and another to Henry, who had gone to Sandringham to see the King.'
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Fortunately the Chief Whip had no conflicting orders to try to obey, for the Cabinet took roughly the same view as
did Mrs. Asquith. But a dissolution raised some delicate problems. It necessarily required the King's consent, and, in the view of the Government, on this occasion it required also to be preceded by some Royal guarantee that, if the Liberal Party were again returned, the Parliament Bill would pass into law. These were not obtained without difficult constitutional negotiation.

On Novemberc 10, the day of the breakdown of the Constitutional Conference, Asquith did not go to Sandringham to see the King, as the quotation from his wife's autobiography at the end of the last chapter suggests. He held a Cabinet in London, at which it was decided, with some doubters, that the correct course was to dissolve at once and to get the election over before Christmas.
¹
It was only on the following day that he travelled to Norfolk, not, in his own words, ‘to tender any definite advice, but to survey the new situation created by the failure of the conference, as it presents itself at the moment to His Majesty's Ministers.…'
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As part of the survey he informed the King of the decision to seek an early dissolution, said that if this were followed by another Government victory the issue with the House of Lords would have to be put to a conclusion, and, while pointing out that it would be theoretically possible for this
to be done by the Crown either withholding writs of summons or exercising the prerogative of creation, stressed that there were precedents for the latter course but not for the former. He added that he had no doubt that the
threat
of creation would alone be sufficient to bring about an agreement.

The King, however, was so pleased with one aspect of this audience that he could hardly notice anything else about it. ‘He asked me,' he wrote in his notebook after the Prime Minister had gone, ‘for
no guarantees.'
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‘(Mr. Asquith) did not ask for anything from the King,' Sir Arthur Bigge
¹
confirmed in a minute written the same night:
‘no promises, no guarantees during this Parliament.'
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Neither the King nor his private secretary understood that this was merely a preliminary discussion, intended to show the way the mind of the Cabinet was moving, and that exact advice would follow later. It was, indeed, an example of Asquith's over-delicate method of approach to the King on the constitutional issue. ‘Unaccustomed as he (King George) was to ambiguous phraseology he was totally unable to interpret Mr. Asquith's enigmas,' Sir Harold Nicolson has written.
^d
A more direct, even if more brusque, approach would have been better understood. It might have avoided the very delicate situation which arose three days later, when Lord Knollys came up from Sandringham to Downing Street and discovered that the Prime Minister's intentions had become more definite. ‘What he now advocates,' Knollys wrote to the King, ‘is that you should give guarantees at once
for the next Parliament.' The King's response was to instruct Bigge to telegraph to Vaughan Nash, Asquith's private secretary, in the following terms: ‘His Majesty regrets that it would be impossible for him to give contingent guarantees and he reminds Mr. Asquith of his promise not to seek for any during the present Parliament.'
^e
This message was despatched and received on the same morning (November 15) that the Cabinet was giving final approval to a minute to the King, formally outlining ‘the advice which they feel it their duty to tender to His Majesty', of which the key paragraph read:

‘His Majesty's Ministers cannot, however, take the responsibility of advising a dissolution, unless they may understand that, in the event of the policy of the Government being approved by an adequate majority
¹
in the new House of Commons, His Majesty will be ready to exercise his constitutional powers (which may involve the prerogative of creating peers), if needed to secure that effect should be given to the decision of the country.'
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The minute added the suggestion that the understanding should not be made public unless and until the actual occasion should arise.

The King and his Ministers were rapidly moving into positions of direct conflict. And the situation was not made easier by the fact that the Sovereign was receiving directly contradictory advice from his two private secretaries. Lord
Knollys, in London, was for accepting the wishes of the Cabinet. ‘I feel certain that you can safely and constitutionally accept what the Cabinet propose,' he wrote in a letter accompanying the Government minute, ‘and I venture to urge you strongly to do so.'
^g
He had the advantage, in the King's eyes, of greater experience of the constitutional issue, having served King Edward VII and seen the difficulty develop from the beginning.