Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  He had already told Law – who conveyed the offer from the new prime minister – that ‘that is indeed putting a pistol to my head, but I at once say, yes.’ Law felt his sense of duty was all that pushed Balfour to serve, and that otherwise he should have been happy to retire; that overlooks Balfour’s keenness to stay at the centre of events and that, though sixty-eight, he had plenty of enthusiasm left for the game. Law felt that Balfour’s intervention with the King had been crucial in enabling the new coalition, and that his serving had helped other Unionists take Lloyd George’s shilling. Balfour argued that because almost every War Cabinet decision impinged upon foreign policy, he had the right to attend any meeting: and did. His appointment drove a wedge between Lloyd George and Northcliffe, but the prime minister knew the Unionists would not tolerate their former leader’s omission. Carson, who went to the Admiralty, was also a frequent attender, as was Derby, who became Secretary of State for War.

  Other Tories assumed high offices: Long, who initially refused to serve but came round once his co-conspirator Curzon did, became colonial secretary; Chamberlain took India. The change inevitably put many noses out of joint. Lloyd George was anxious, for practical and symbolic reasons, that Montagu, talented but also close to Asquith, should take charge of (civilian) National Service, since he had drawn up a plan to establish such a directorate: but he refused, despite a serious campaign by Hankey, but after a bombardment from Mrs Asquith questioning his loyalty. Also, Montagu told Lloyd George that to take so subordinate a position would cause it to ‘be said that I have taken the only office I was offered’, which would discredit him and the government.158 Explaining Churchill’s absence, Lloyd George maintained that ‘they would not have Winston at any price. Had I insisted, the new ministry would have been wrecked.’159 The Liberals assumed Northcliffe had chosen to stay out, the better to destroy the administration when it upset him. By contrast, Law agreed to serve despite no place being found for his main confidant, Aitken, whose disappointment was no secret.

  For the first time, the cabinet worked according to an agenda, with papers circulated beforehand. The ubiquitous Hankey led its secretariat, servicing what (at Hankey’s suggestion) were its almost daily meetings. After it first met on 9 December – to consider a lengthy memorandum by Hankey on war policy – a typed copy of the proceedings was sent to the King, breaking an immemorial tradition by which the prime minister wrote in his own hand a letter to the Sovereign outlining what had happened at each meeting: Lloyd George affected that he was simply too busy for such niceties. Stamfordham said he hoped that when there was cabinet business to report, as opposed to ‘War Committee’ business, the King would get a handwritten letter: but this never happened. Lloyd George went down with so heavy a cold that he missed the War Cabinet’s first few meetings, which Law chaired.

  Robertson saw the War Cabinet as the enemy; and Lloyd George had a similar view of him. ‘He is awfully down on Robertson,’ Hankey noted on 10 December, having motored down to lunch at Walton Heath.160 Lloyd George was also disillusioned with Haig, believing Haig had ‘bullied’ Robertson, who had failed the country by not standing up to him.161 Lloyd George had asked Robertson for a candid opinion about the chances of victory, to which the CIGS had given a blunt answer: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that we can win if we will only do the right thing. If I thought otherwise I would tell you so.’162 Robertson added that manpower at home was poorly organised and the railway system near the Western Front was a disaster – both matters Lloyd George would address rapidly – and that racism was stopping an effective deployment of ‘coloured labour at home, and [we must] raise more coloured troops for use in suitable theatres abroad.’163 He also said the French were dictating terms too much in the war, and the British had to be more forceful. That further exacerbated direct conflict with Lloyd George, who would never forget Haig’s conduct of the Somme.

  The prime minister may also have discerned that Haig thoroughly disliked him, believing – with absolute justification – that Lloyd George was not honest or honourable: theirs was a clash of moral and class codes. The Unionists – notably Curzon, Long, Cecil and Chamberlain – stressed to Lloyd George that Haig’s retention was a sine qua non for them, as was Robertson’s: so the best Lloyd George could do, faced with a military establishment with which he deeply disagreed and without a party machine behind him, was to rant about them to his trusties such as Hankey. On Boxing Day Hankey found Robertson ‘in a very disgruntled state threatening to resign.’164 But as Hankey noted, the War Cabinet may not have believed in Robertson’s Western Front policy, but ‘they will never find a soldier to carry out their “Salonica” policy.’

  As well as the Unionists Lloyd George was obliged to pack into his administration in order for it to cohere, he drafted into what the Daily Mail called his ‘Ministry of Action’ those known as ‘new men’ and businessmen: Northcliffe himself was free with advice about who these dynamic individuals might be, such as urging on Lloyd George the impresario Alfred Butt, who ran twenty-two music halls: Butt would soon assist the food controller, Lord Devonport, the self-made grocery magnate who had shown his usefulness to Asquith when running the Port of London during the 1911 dock strike.165 Many new men were cronies of Lloyd George, or had done him services; such as Leo Chiozza Money, an economic theorist who had done policy work for him and would in later life develop an unfortunate reputation for molesting young women in public; and the businessmen Lord Cowdray and Sir Alfred Mond. The new administration was not, however, designed to resemble parliamentary government, but to win the war.

  Lansdowne, eminence grise of the Unionist Party and of the preceding cabinet, decided not to serve, bringing to an end almost fifty years in public life. He believed that ‘the collapse of HM Government was catastrophic, and will puzzle the historians who have to account for it.’166 The political world he had inhabited all his life was ending. He told the Duchess of Devonshire, his daughter: ‘It makes me sad that we should be washing all this dirty linen at such a time, and I would have swallowed a good deal in order to avoid it, but the situation had got out of hand.’ He for one was glad to be shot of ministerial responsibility: ‘I have long wished to be released, but this is not the kind of last act to which I looked forward for my poor play.’167

  VI

  Lloyd George realised the reputational damage the coup against Asquith had caused him, and for years sought to repair it. ‘Lloyd George told me, often, that he never wanted to replace Asquith as Prime Minister,’ Lord Boothby recalled. ‘What Lloyd George wanted was the direction of the war, as Chairman of the War Committee of the cabinet.’168 That remained the official line. Boothby was also told – not just by Lloyd George but also by Churchill – that Asquith’s dilatoriness in that role was such that he spent War Committee meetings writing to Venetia Stanley. That he stopped doing that more than eighteen months before his fall shows the nature of propaganda.

  Some of Lloyd George’s Unionist colleagues viewed his circle of friends with disdain and even disgust; as, indeed, had some of his old Liberal ones. One of the latter, Esher, noted the rise of Aitken, whose baronetcy had been for services to Law, and who now received a peerage for services to Lloyd George – not the least of which was prising Law away from Asquith – and as a consolation for not becoming, as Lloyd George had promised, president of the Board of Trade. ‘They are a dirty lot,’ he confided in his diary on New Year’s Day 1917. ‘Max Aitken’s peerage was given him because he paid £30,000 to get FE Smith out of a scrape, and because he separated Bonar Law from Asquith … it is all a sordid business.’169 It was perhaps more sordid that Esher knew, given Aitken’s silent acquisition of a majority holding in the Daily Express: something of which Lloyd George was almost certainly aware.

  When the prime minister realised the outrage it could cause to propel Aitken into so senior a post, he offered him an under-secretaryship at Munitions instead, which he at once declined. Lloyd George wanted Aitken’s parliamentary seat for Sir Albert St
anley, a railway baron whom he could make president of the board but who was not in the Commons. Thus, to create the vacancy, he offered Aitken a peerage. This sparked an eruption of anger. Aitken was just thirty-seven and a junior MP in Lancashire. Derby, patron of the powerful Unionist machine there, told Law it would upset too many people if he were elevated. Law agreed, and ordered Aitken not to accept the offer. Aitken agreed, but then Lloyd George talked Law round, ignoring the effect on Derby. However, neither had consulted the King, who regarded Aitken as entirely unsuitable. Stamfordham said the Sovereign was ‘surprised and hurt’ by the lack of consultation and ‘does not consider that the public services rendered by Sir Max Aitken justify this further high distinction’.170 Aitken himself was amused by the honour: lunching with Repington on 18 December, he joked that ‘he was sure something was coming, for he had cut himself shaving in the morning and his blood had been blue.’171

  Stamfordham ordered – an order quickly disregarded – that neither the prime minister nor any of his colleagues should ignore the Prerogative in future. It was left to Law to explain to Stamfordham that the offer had already been made, and the King, to his fury, was bounced into agreeing. The main casualty was Law’s reputation, which appeared to have been sacrificed to give Lloyd George’s chum a bauble. On 1 January Stamfordham sent a long memorandum on the subject of the King’s being ‘the fountain of Honour’ and as such expected to approve all awards: it was an instruction of how to behave.172 Manners were now in short supply, for the memorandum also noted that no reply had been received to the last letter of complaint about the failure to consult the Sovereign. It therefore ended with the comparatively threatening: ‘His Majesty trusts that he may now receive an assurance that no offer of Honours or promise to recommend a grant of Honours shall be made by Ministers to any of His Majesty’s subjects until his approval shall have been accorded either formally or informally.’ Law had no interest in honours and rather despised those who did; as such he took an, at times, casual attitude to their grant: on 23 December the King was so cross he had promised Sir Hugh Graham, another Canadian press baron, a peerage that Stamfordham spelled out ‘the recognised constitutional procedure: the Minister advises: the Sovereign assents – and the course adopted – but in this instance there was nether advice nor assent!’173

  The Commons waited for Lloyd George to take it into his confidence: but when it assembled on 12 December, Law reported that the new prime minister was confined to bed with a chill, and proposed to adjourn the House for two more days. McKenna, from the Opposition front bench, said Asquith would be present when the time came, to engage in the debate: Asquith had said he regarded himself as a supporter of the new government, so there seemed no question of his becoming Leader of the Opposition. Law made the mistake of observing that there were no ‘parties’ in the war, which provoked William Pringle, a Liberal MP, to declare that ‘we have had enough of that cant’.174

  Lloyd George’s succession marked a massive expansion of government and, in particular, an enormous growth in officials, with civil service numbers rising from 75,000 in 1914 to over 200,000 by 1919, though they would soon start to fall.175 As new areas of civilian life required direction and control, so officials had to direct and control them, enforcing what would become a torrent of regulations. Realising he had lost his party but conscious that one day he would have to fight an election to retain his position, Lloyd George set up a ‘policy unit’ known as the Garden Suburb, because it was housed in corrugated-iron buildings in the gardens of 10 and 11 Downing Street. Into these huts he packed young intellectuals of his acquaintance and ordered them to have ideas to help win the war and, perhaps more significantly, improve the country after the peace.

  Devonport was appointed food controller on 14 December. Lloyd George established a Ministry of Labour immediately on taking office. By Christmas he had established Ministries of Shipping, Food and Pensions, a key responsibility of the last being to ensure support for the many severely disabled men badly wounded or blinded in the war; and that efforts were made to rehabilitate them and train them for work, if possible. The Red Cross would be closely involved in the ministry’s work. A Ministry of Reconstruction would follow in August 1917, of National Service in November, an Air Ministry in January 1918 (to prepare for the creation, that April, of the Royal Air Force) and a Ministry of Information – late in the day, given the government’s long-term propaganda effort, in February 1918. This bureaucratic revolution was expensive: one of the first things the new government did was hold a vote of credit in the Commons for another £400 million.

  The new order further suspended the constitutional practice dating from Queen Anne that an MP, on his appointment to most ministries (there were some designated exceptions), must resign his seat and fight a by-election to secure his constituents’ approval. It was again temporarily dispensed with by an Act passed in a day on 15 December; it would not go permanently until 1919. The argument was that ministers who should be concentrating on securing victory, and available to the Commons to answer questions and explain policy, should not be in their constituencies seeking the favour of voters. Everything was subordinated to directing the war.

  Concern grew in the succeeding months about the reduction in Parliament’s perceived importance, as Lloyd George attended so rarely. It gave credence to the contention that the war provided an excuse to create a dictatorship that could evade proper accountability. In this the Liberal press thought it detected the hand of Northcliffe – who, as the Daily News would soon say, was seeking to fashion a ‘mob dictatorship’ and ‘drive every self-respecting man out of public life.’ It continued: ‘The object is to destroy the authority and power of parliament … Lord Northcliffe … has no use for Parliament and is leading the mob against that institution. He is engaged in establishing government by the press.’176 Northcliffe professed no desire to be in Downing Street, but otherwise his views were not far from what his opponents attributed to him.

  As well as seeking to tighten the governance of the country, the new administration sought strategic change in the war. On 15 December Lloyd George, still stricken with a cold and sore throat, summoned Robertson and Haig to Downing Street. He wanted to move two divisions from France to Egypt, for an attack on the Ottomans at Jerusalem; and to move two hundred of Haig’s heavy guns to Italy for the winter, returning them in the spring. Haig protested, explaining the preparation needed for the next summer’s offensive, which would be undermined by losing so many men and so much materiel. Lloyd George ‘could not believe that it was possible to beat the German Armies [on the Western Front] – at any rate, not next year.’177 Further discussion was postponed until after the Christmas holidays, when, with the help of the French, Lloyd George would make his views about Robertson’s and Haig’s ideas abundantly clear. So far as he was concerned at this stage, another Somme-like offensive of the sort Haig seemed to have in mind was out of the question.

  On 12 December, driven by food shortages at home, but also as part of an attempt to divide their opponents, the Central Powers made their first peace overtures, in notes sent to the neutral United States. The King warned Lloyd George that the overture required ‘the utmost care and delicate handling’.178 The press and public saw it as a sign of weakness, and of the success of the blockade, but also as an attempt to test what The Times described as the ‘cohesion’ of the new government.179 The War Cabinet considered the German note, and concluded – as did their allies – that it was, in Hankey’s words, ‘a boastful and vainglorious piece of propaganda.’180 It was felt to be a ruse to buy time while enemy sea power was built up. The King, however, urged Lloyd George not to reject the note until it was clear what terms were being offered, not least to keep neutral countries – notably America, where President Wilson had just been re-elected and was seeking to broker a peace – from siding against Britain. Lloyd George put the matter before Parliament on 19 December, when he addressed it for the first time as prime minister.

  His throa
t still sore, he made a speech laden with the tones of destiny:

  I appear before the House of Commons to-day, with the most terrible responsibility that can fall upon the shoulders of any living man, as the chief adviser of the Crown, in the most gigantic War in which the country has ever been engaged – a war upon the event of which its destiny depends. It is the greatest War ever waged. The burdens are the heaviest that have been cast upon this or any other country, and the issues which hang on to it are the gravest that have been attached to any conflict in which humanity has ever been involved. The responsibilities of the new Government have been suddenly accentuated by a declaration made by the German Chancellor, and I propose to deal with that at once.181

  He, like the French and the Russians, believed the failure of the German note to spell out terms for peace helped prevent the War Cabinet from taking the overtures seriously. He said he saw his ministry’s task as ‘to complete and make even more effective the mobilisation of all our national resources’ and that a ‘speedy victory’ would not happen.182 He praised an Army with whose leadership he was about to enter a bitter conflict; he explained he had given the role of leading the Commons to Law ‘because we came to the conclusion that it was more than any one man, whatever his energy or physical strength might be, could do to undertake both functions in the middle of a great war.’183

  He explained he had chosen ‘men of administrative and business capacity rather than men of Parliamentary experience, where we were unable to obtain both for the headship of a great Department.’ He sought to ingratiate himself with his old clientele in the trades unions, promising ‘a franker and fuller recognition of the partnership of Labour in the Government of this country. No Government that has ever been formed to rule this country has had such a share – such a number of men who all their lives have been associated with labour and with the labour organisations of this country. We realised that it is impossible to conduct war without getting the complete and unqualified support of Labour, and we were anxious to obtain their assistance and their counsel for the purpose of the conduct of the War.’184 He had dispensed with the peacetime system of a cabinet of twenty-three men in the interests of quick decision-making. ‘We are all perfectly certain,’ he said, ‘that the Allies have suffered disaster after disaster through tardiness of decision and action’.185