Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Asquith wrote to his ministerial colleagues asking for their resignations so the government could be reconstructed on a ‘broad and non-party basis’.229 He admitted Fisher’s departure had underpinned this decision, as had the ‘more than plausible parliamentary case in regard to the alleged deficiency of high-explosive shells’. Esher told his diary that ‘the cause … of the quarrel today is that Churchill is sending everything upon which he can lay his hands to the Dardanelles, and denuding the Grand Fleet and our Home Defences. He [Fisher] bitterly complains of Churchill’s methods of corresponding with the admirals in the Mediterranean and his whole plan of concealment.’230 Churchill’s colleagues kept from him the fact that talks were under way with the Unionists; in his rather unreliable memoirs, Beaverbrook would assert that Churchill ‘was treated shabbily.’231

  Law specified that Churchill would have to leave the Admiralty; and he also told Asquith about the Unionists’ deep antipathy to Kitchener, because of his secrecy and lack of collegiality as a cabinet colleague, and said that the Field Marshal had intimated he was keen to go. Asquith thought of giving the War Office to Lloyd George, making Law Chancellor of the Exchequer and Kitchener commander-in-chief, and said so to Balfour (his prospective First Lord, replacing Churchill, on account of his long service on the Committee of Imperial Defence). He had second thoughts, further delaying a decision; the economic liberal in Asquith could not countenance a tariff reformer such as Law at the Treasury.232 The negotiations about the formation of a coalition saved both sides from embarrassment. Against Law’s wishes, Unionist MPs had tabled a motion four days earlier on the shell shortage, due to be debated that evening. At the request of the government it was postponed, because no minister of sufficient seniority could be present.

  While negotiations about the reconstruction continued, Northcliffe had The Times let rip. On 18 May the paper savaged Churchill – Fisher’s resignation was common knowledge but remained unconfirmed – saying he had been ‘assuming responsibilities and overriding his expert advisers to a degree which might at any time endanger the national safety.’233 It continued: ‘When a civilian Minister in charge of a fighting service persistently seeks to grasp power which should not pass into his unguided hands, and attempts to use that power in perilous ways, it is time for his colleagues in the Cabinet to take some definite action.’ The final blow was the recommendation that Fisher should become First Lord, a serviceman running the Admiralty as one ran the War Office – ‘which would undoubtedly command great public approval’.

  The Unionists were not united about a coalition. Lord Robert Cecil and Carson led the objectors, some of whom found the idea of serving with Liberals distasteful, others of whom wanted a general election, however unpractical that might be in the midst of war. Law considered a party meeting to discuss the matter. Chamberlain advised him against, saying he should present the coalition as a fait accompli, explaining that Fisher’s resignation left no other course. ‘I loathe the very idea of our good fellows sitting with these double-dyed traitors,’ Walter Long, a committed anti-Home Ruler and former chief secretary for Ireland, told Carson.234 Long believed, as he said to Asquith, that ‘we want to be led; we want to be governed.’235 Carson and Cecil realised the traditional function of an Opposition was impossible in the circumstances. Later, on 18 May, the shadow cabinet gave Law unanimous approval for joining the government. It was also agreed Asquith should remain prime minister, despite his lack of ‘push and drive’, that Kitchener must stay at the War Office, and that Churchill had to go, as much for historic crimes against Toryism as for recent failures.236 Fisher had urged Law to get Churchill out of the Admiralty because he was a ‘REAL DANGER’.237 This echoed what the King told the Queen during the crisis, which was that Churchill ‘is the real danger’; he told his diary three days later that the First Lord had ‘become impossible’.238

  Law needed no persuasion: he had said the previous October that Churchill had ‘an entirely unbalanced mind, which is a real danger at a time like this’.239 The Tory press were unanimous: the Morning Post had accused Churchill of ‘megalomania’ and of being ‘a danger … to the nation’.240 Chamberlain, who became Secretary of State for India, argued that Alfred Milner should be included because of his ‘brains, character, earnestness, courage, organizing power’; but because of Milner’s record of fierce opposition both to the People’s Budget of 1909 and to the Lords Reform of 1911, this was one ambition in which the Unionists failed. Milner had raised his head above the parapet during the war only to press for conscription, which also turned Liberals against him. Esher was sceptical about the changes: ‘They may call the result by whatever name they like, but it will be in reality a Coalition, and a Coalition government has never yet succeeded in this country.’241 There would be ‘an inchoate Cabinet composed of jarring elements and of men whose training and mental equipment unfit them for carrying on a struggle with the Emperor and the German Great General Staff.’ Esher deplored ‘that Milner’s services should be lost to the State’ and ‘his gifts of character … obscured by clouds of factious and unfair criticism’, for he felt Milner had the ‘moral courage and tenacity’ that were now needed.242

  Lloyd George disguised his enthusiasm for the change by agreeing with Mrs Asquith, when they discussed it some days later, that to an extent they had been ‘blackmailed’ into it, but ‘sooner or later it was bound to come.’ Unwisely, given what the Asquiths thought of Northcliffe, Lloyd George said the press baron had been right to harry the government about the shell shortage. Mrs Asquith was livid, and told him: ‘Northcliffe will run you against Henry.’243 Lloyd George protested to her, as he said he had to Churchill, that ‘wicked I may be, but I’m not a damned fool … Do you really think I don’t know what Northcliffe is? Why, he’ll turn on me and stab me in the back at any moment.’ Mrs Asquith had spotted Lloyd George’s susceptibility to flattery, and his readiness to hitch himself to any wagon that might further his ambition. Asquith never believed the coalition would run the war better than the Liberal government; but he did see it was inevitable, and knew how hard it was in politics to ignore momentum.

  VIII

  Most Britons first learned about the changes in the country’s, and the war’s, political direction in reports on 19 May that Opposition leaders had agreed to serve in a coalition government, details of which were awaited. The irreconcilable differences between Churchill and Fisher were stated as fact; as was the news that Churchill was ‘packing up’ his office.244 Fisher had not been seen at the Admiralty for three days, but there was a widespread belief that he was, as Northcliffe hoped, biding his time until Churchill went and the call came. Fisher reappeared that morning to state the price of his return: the removal of Churchill, a replacement other than Balfour, and he as First Sea Lord to have such power that the First Lord would ‘be reduced practically to the position of an under-secretary.’245 He wanted status equivalent to Kitchener’s, with ‘absolutely untrammelled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever.’246 Hankey told him the idea was ‘impossible’, and Asquith was ‘greatly incensed’ by it. That was the end of Fisher. Asquith may also have been consonant with what Hankey wrote in his diary that evening, that Fisher was ‘intriguing horribly with Northcliffe, the Unionist Party et hoc genus omne.’247 Esher’s view was that ‘the group controlled by Northcliffe and his press have been desirous all along to replace Asquith by Lloyd George; failing this, they wish to substitute Lloyd George for Lord K at the war office, and put Mr Balfour at the Admiralty.’248

  According to Esher, at 1 p.m. on 19 May Asquith saw the King to explain the reconstruction, which he said was caused by disquiet over Fisher’s resignation and Repington’s report in The Times. He told the King that Fisher’s demands ‘showed signs of mental aberration.’249 The King told Queen Mary: ‘I am glad the Prime Minister is going to have a National Government. Only by that means can we get rid of Churchill from the Admiralty. He is intriguing also with French against K[itchener], he is the real danger.
’250 However, this conversation, according to the King’s diary, seems not to have taken place until 22 May, when he returned to London after five days visiting shipyards, munitions factories and military bases in Scotland and the north: on 19 May he was in Newcastle.

  Asquith made a statement to the Commons on the afternoon of 19 May. He had sat up until two o’clock that morning talking to his wife, and seeming ‘very, very unhappy’, before lunching with her and Sylvia Henley.251 ‘I cannot say more at the moment than that steps are in contemplation which involve the reconstruction of the Government on a broader, personal and political basis.’252 He said nothing was settled other than that he would remain prime minister, and Grey would remain at the Foreign Office; and the policy of fighting the war against Germany would continue unchanged, ‘with every possible energy and by means of every possible resource.’ Any changes made would be for the purposes of the war, and not for any other reason. Given the eagerness among some Unionists to settle scores, not least with Churchill, that remark was disingenuous, to say the least. Law joined him in this mendacity, telling the House that ‘the best method of finishing the war successfully’ was the ‘sole consideration’, and that ‘we shall leave out of our minds absolutely all considerations, political or otherwise, beyond the war.’253 Long told Law that day that ‘the view of the great majority [of Unionists] is that this Government are so unscrupulous, so dishonest, that it is almost impossible for two honest English gentlemen [Law and Lansdowne], however able they may be, to be even with them.’

  Most of Asquith’s MPs, few of whom had thought a coalition likely, were shocked and angry. The toll on him was enormous: his daughter-in-law Lady Cynthia Asquith, who lunched with him on 21 May in ‘a tremendous atmosphere of tension and distress’, noted that ‘I have never before seen him look either tired, worried, busy, or preoccupied … but this time he looked really shattered with a sort of bruised look in his eyes’.254 Lloyd George, due to visit industrial cities in the north to exhort the workers to higher production, but whose tour was cancelled, told Mrs Asquith the coalition was the result of the ‘two Tories’ in the Liberal cabinet, Churchill and Kitchener, an assertion that was only half-true and that helped him to conceal his own excitement and support for the idea.255

  Liberal MPs gathered to express their outrage; but Asquith walked into the meeting, in a committee room, and spoke to them. He could not give his full reasons for having agreed to the coalition – he did not wish to expose disunity any further by going into details about the fight between Fisher and Churchill – but asked them to trust him. He also denied he had taken the step because of pressure from Northcliffe or any other press baron. He appealed to his colleagues’ patriotism, and for them to believe he had done the right thing for the country: such was his popularity and their inherent trust in him that he won them round. His MPs, rebellious minutes earlier, cheered him. The next morning, however, The Times sought to take credit for the change: it reported that the main factor, since Asquith had declared the previous week in response to a question from an MP that there was no prospect of a coalition, had been its publication of Repington’s dispatch and the outcry about the shell shortage. It added that the trouble at the Admiralty ‘made it doubly plain that things could not go on as they were’, and the coalition was ‘the only patriotic way out of the difficulty.’256 The unpatriotic alternative would have been an election, which would have crippled the conduct of the war for the duration of the campaign, and given a propaganda opportunity to the Germans.

  As Mrs Asquith drove through London that evening she saw the words ‘Are we to be governed by Northcliffe and Bottomley?’ printed on posters.257 Given what Northcliffe had set out to achieve, the posters asked a pertinent question.

  On the afternoon of 18 May Churchill had gone to the Commons to make a statement about his new Admiralty Board; but was told no such thing could be announced because of the reconstruction, of which he heard for the first time. He was also told to expect to have to leave the Admiralty; and so, in his desperation to stay in the political front line, and at Lloyd George’s suggestion, he said to Asquith that were he to be offered the Colonial Office he might see his way to staying in politics. However, he had made too many enemies; Lord Emmott, a former under-secretary at the Colonial Office, told Asquith bluntly that Churchill ‘has neither the temperament nor manners to fit him for the post.’258 Liberal MPs believed Churchill had brought down the administration not just by his mishandling of Fisher, but that his intrigue with French had led to Repington’s revelations. On the evening of 19 May, having – it seems – belatedly acquired some self-knowledge, he told Violet Asquith: ‘I’m finished.’259

  A near-hysterical letter his wife sent Asquith on 20 May, before his fate was decided, did not help. Mrs Churchill (who was far from being a hysteric, so the nature of the cataclysm of her husband’s dismissal was clearly awesome to them both) said the Admiralty would not recover from his dismissal, and that public confidence would be restored by it only in Germany. ‘If you throw Winston overboard,’ she wrote, ‘you will be committing an act of weakness and your coalition government will not be as formidable a War machine as the present Government.’260 Mrs Asquith thought the letter betrayed ‘the soul of a servant’ with its ‘touch of blackmail and insolence, and the revelation of black ingratitude and want of affection’.261 The Asquiths wondered whether the letter was her idea, or whether her husband had dictated it to her. Violet believed Churchill ‘could not have perpetrated such a bêtise’.262 It was not merely his long-perceived disloyalty to Asquith that caused disquiet with the prime minister and, more particularly, his wife, on whom he now leant heavily after Miss Stanley’s departure from his life. Lloyd George, whom Churchill might have regarded as a loyal ally, had told Asquith a few days earlier that ‘Winston … has not merely bad judgement, but he has none.’263

  His overriding of Fisher about the Dardanelles counted enormously against him. His enthusiasm for war was also regarded as distasteful: Lloyd George told Mrs Asquith that ‘he has no real imagination of the kind that counts.’ He related to Frances Stevenson a story of Churchill losing his temper with him, accusing him of not caring ‘whether I am trampled underfoot by my enemies’ or for ‘my personal reputation’.264 Lloyd George allegedly told him tartly that he was right, because ‘the only thing I care about now is that we win this war.’ (That was not strictly true: Lloyd George wanted to win the war, certainly, but in a way that brought as much credit on him as possible.) When Riddell went to see Churchill on 20 May he found him ‘very worn out and harassed’ and proclaiming: ‘I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished! … Finished in respect of all I care for – the waging of war; the defeat of the Germans.’265 Churchill also wrote to Law begging to be retained in his job; but Law told him, curtly, that his end was ‘inevitable’.266

  ‘What a satire,’ Mrs Asquith had noted during the deliberations, ‘if the coming coalition Gov of which Winston has gassed so much should not contain him!’267 When Churchill realised how isolated he was he started to act to save a vestige of a career. He told Asquith he would ‘accept any office – the lowest if you like – that you care to offer me.’268 That is what Asquith did, when they met on 22 May: ‘I know you will ply a stout and labouring oar, whatever seat in the boat may be assigned to you,’ his chief told him.269 Churchill was, indeed, lucky Asquith managed to keep him at all, in the lowly post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, without departmental duties. He burned with resentment, but Asquith – whom Churchill dismissed as ‘terribly weak – supinely weak’ – had no choice.270

  Conscious that the public blamed him for the Dardanelles fiasco, Churchill’s principal mission in life became to convince them otherwise. His main argument from even before his demotion was that Fisher had approved everything, and he had acted on advice from Carden and de Robeck. The argument would rest on whether Churchill had interfered in the minutiae of planning the expedition, which he adamantly claimed he had not. Eighteen mo
nths later Lloyd George would tell C. P. Scott that Churchill’s problem was his ‘egotism’ – a subject about which Lloyd George himself knew a thing or two.271 ‘In the Dardanelles affair our failure was primarily due to his eagerness to do the whole thing off his own bat and his reluctance to wait for the co-operation of the land forces and thus to share the credit of success with Lord Kitchener.’

  Lloyd George was quite right in that judgement; but his friend’s misfortune in losing Fisher and forcing the government’s reconstruction as a coalition would be his own great opportunity. The establishment of a Ministry of Munitions, under him, was the key element of the new government. Law, ideal for the job having worked as an iron merchant, wanted to lead the new ministry: but Lloyd George implored him, at Asquith’s behest, not to insist on the job. He accepted, instead, the role of Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘bitter at being given such a second-class post’, according to his confidant, J. C. C. Davidson.272 Law’s entrance into government brought into public life his close friend, confidant and fellow Canadian Sir Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook: Law was reluctant to make the slightest move without his counsel. Given Law’s importance to the coalition he had a perfect right to Munitions. However, Lloyd George wanted the post because it furthered his ambition to direct the war and become prime minister; Asquith did not want Law to have it because he thought the Colonial Office was what his talents merited. That misjudgement was one of a series of crucial slips that ultimately cost Asquith his job.

  Soldiers and civil servants in the War Office had overseen the production of arms; Lloyd George wanted to consign their practices to history, to work closely with business, and to use businessmen, who understood more about the rudiments of production. He described the Ministry of Munitions as having been ‘from first to last a business-man organisation.’273 The new minister immediately recruited such people – whom in March he had called ‘men of push and go’ – to handle negotiations with suppliers.274 He succeeded in his new department through his ability to spot talent, and find men who could get things done, in this case transforming the rate of production of weapons of war. It was, as Wells put it, the end of conducting war as a ‘gentleman amateur’.275 Lloyd George, who as the term was understood was certainly not a gentleman and when it came to politics deployed the full, unscrupulous armoury of the professional – helped by the strong-arm support of DORA – gave a constant rhetorical lead, crossing the country in the weeks after his appointment explaining his plans, and enlisting the help of the working people. It was a new, more demotic, and more ruthless mode of government.