by A. N. Wilson
Important as the Fourth Estate became in Victorian England (and prime ministers from Gladstone to Salisbury saw nothing wrong with well-managed ‘leaks’, or favourable mentions in the influential newspapers), it is all but unimaginable that in any previous generation a British newspaper proprietor could have written in such terms, believing it to be within his power and his remit to appoint the government of the day. That he should be seen as having done so was partially a sign of the times and partially a tribute to the extraordinary personality of Sir Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, Bt., 1st Viscount Northcliffe and Baron Northcliffe of the Isle of Thanet (1865–1922). His appearance is electrifying, looking as he does like the most uncanny blend between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. His hyper-energy and his dynamism still have the power to agitate as one reads his letters, or the transcripts of his speeches. One sees why he was loved – the subeditors and compositors on his papers were in tears as they made up the memorial issues of the Daily Mail and The Times on the day of his death. One sees why he was loathed. He fed off power, needed it as a vampire needs blood, and he was prepared to destroy in order to get it. Having failed to be elected as the Unionist candidate for Portsmouth at the age of thirty in 1895, he had a consistent loathing of elected politicians, and when they came to displease him he had no compunction about using any methods he could to displace them. Bonar Law and Asquith both lost sons on the Western Front. After Alfred Northcliffe lost a son, however, and after the cataclysm of the battle of the Somme – 60,000 British casualties, 19,000 of them dead in one day – the Prime Minister, Asquith, was finished as far as Northcliffe was concerned. ASQUITH A NATIONAL DANGER was one ‘splash’.9 ‘Get a smiling picture of Lloyd George and underneath it put a caption “do it now” and get the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it “wait and see”. Rough methods are needed if we are not going to lose this war.’ Wilson, at the Chief’s dictation, wrote the leader – ‘A moment in our struggle for existence has now been reached when “Government” by some 23 men [that is, the cabinet] – who can never make up their minds has become a danger to the Empire.’ Across the top of this piece, the Chief scrawled the headline: ASQUITH A LIMPET.10
Alfred Harmsworth came from Protestant Irish stock. At school his nickname was the ‘Dodger’.11 His parents were intelligent, genteel, but poor. His father was a sometime teacher and layabout, with an alcoholic weakness. Mrs Harmsworth, with a gesture which would acquire symbolic importance in Alfred’s memory, wrapped her children in newspaper to keep them warm in the winters. From an early age, Harmsworth was hyper-active, gadget-obsessed. As a boy travelling from Grantham to London, he talked his way into being allowed to travel with the driver and fireman of the train, bombarding them with questions about how the steam locomotive functioned. He did not make much of a showing at conventional schoolwork, but he edited the school magazine, making arrangements with a local Kilburn printer to set it up in decent type. (At about the same time, he was caught poaching by the gamekeeper at Ken Wood on the edge of Hampstead Heath.)
Harmsworth was truly one of the geniuses of his age in the sense that he tapped all its potential. Inspired by the success of the magazine Tit-Bits, edited by George Newnes, Harmsworth started his own version, called Answers, when he was only twenty-three. With his younger brother Harold (the future Lord Rothermere), Alfred was soon running a mass-circulation paper. He understood the importance of technology. He understood the fact that there was now a huge, largely untapped, middle- to lower-middle-class market, who had never bought the expensive newspapers such as The Times. Within a year he was making an annual profit of over £30,000.12 In 1892 he was selling over a million copies of his magazines in a year. By 1896 he had started the Daily Mail. Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister could sneer that it was a paper written by office boys for office boys, but in 1896 there were a very great number of office boys. The huge ranks of the lower middle class to which these ‘office boys’ belonged were not politically aligned. Northcliffe understood them better than did Salisbury; though it was Salisbury who helped promote the ‘villa Conservatism’ which offered the office boys protection against syndicalism. They voted Tory in 1895, and 1900; but it was office boys who would vote in the Liberals in 1906, office boys who supported Lloyd George. Office boys cheered for war in 1914 and protested against it in 1916. Office boys, a little sheepishly but in the end determinedly, wanted Votes for Women, peace, old age pensions, modern household appliances, full employment. As the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury in his blackest moods knew only too clearly, there was but a handful of marquesses and the twentieth century was not very interested in their opinions. Ever since Harmsworth started the Daily Mail, British politicians have been obsessed by what the office boys wanted or thought they wanted, and they have been guided by such thoughts. He and his brother Harold reinvented the whole political landscape. In 1903 they started the Daily Mirror, a paper exclusively for women at first. By 1908, Alfred – now Lord Northcliffe – became the chief proprietor of The Times. There was a sense that the Harmsworths’ millions of readers were voting with their pennies as they bought all these newspapers; a sense, therefore, in which popular journalism of this kind was genuinely democratic in a way that party politics, dominated by a governing class, did not intend to be.
Northcliffe’s attitude to the war, therefore, was of huge importance and was deemed to be crucial, not just by the leader-writer on the Daily Mail but by public and political opinion in Germany. In the German Cologne Gazette in the summer of 1916, it was said that when Asquith and Lloyd George came to stand before the Judgement Seat, Christ would say: ‘Father, forgive them, for they knew not what they did,’ but that when Northcliffe came, ‘Christ would look the other way’.13
Northcliffe was one of those who entered with enthusiasm into the arms race with Germany. Visiting German factories in 1909 he pointed at the chimneys and said, ‘Every one of those factory chimneys is a gun pointing at England.’14
The Daily Mail with unambiguous enthusiasm, and The Times with slightly more muted reasoning, had urged the British government to go to war with Germany. On 5 August 1914, as the Chief wanted, there was a ‘splash’ on the front of the Mail: ‘Great Britain declares war on Germany’. The streets of London were packed with people, and the crowds sang the National Anthem. The Mail editorial staff, and the compositors at Carmelite House, were denying themselves sleep as they planned the stories and decided who should join ‘our army of war correspondents’. To their astonishment, however, the Chief was not pleased. In fact, he was furious. ‘What is this I hear’, he cried, ‘about a British Expeditionary Force for France? It is nonsense. Not a single soldier shall leave this country. We have a superb Fleet, which shall give all the assistance in its power, but I will not support the sending out of this country of a single British soldier. What about invasion? What about our own country? Put that in the leader. Do you hear? Not a single soldier will go with my consent. Say so in the paper tomorrow.’15
Northcliffe, no doubt in common with most of the crowds who sang ‘God Save the King’ outside Buckingham Palace, thought – or ‘thought’ – you could have a war in which only foreigners got killed. Many of the minor wars in Queen Victoria’s reign had been a little like this; and even the Boer War had casualties which, by the standards of twentieth-century wars, were remarkably small.
When war had been a matter of armchair politics, Harmsworth had been content to wage it. As long ago as 1900, he had dictated a leader – ‘England must remember a fact with which Mr Churchill does not deal – that the Navy is a purely defensive force. We must be able to strike as well as to ward off blows, unless in the contests which the future may force upon us we are content to see hostilities languish on for an indefinite period.’16
As soon as it became clear, however, that the army was going to France, and that the war would be of long duration, Northcliffe seized the moment, and thought himself into a central position. Everything which happened from now onwards happened against a
background of his whims and desires, and such was the strength of his solipsistic vision that not merely he and his newspaper employees but the wider political world came to believe it. He quickly arranged for the Daily Mail to be dispatched to the serving troops in the Western Front, so that it became their chief source of information about the war, their mirror on reality. As early as 18 August 1914 one of his staff was noting in his diary:
George Curnock, who, the Chief tells me, is the best reporter Fleet Street ever had, sent from France today his dispatch describing the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force. It came by courier from Boulogne. George made great play of the soldier’s marching song, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, and the Chief has given us orders to boom it, to print the music so that everyone shall know it. He says, thanks to Curnock’s genius, we shall soon have everybody singing it.17
Northcliffe, with his passion for detail, his bossiness, his obsession with military history and his close personal identification with Napoleon, was not alone in thinking that he would have made an ideal war leader. H. H. Asquith, by contrast, could scarcely have been a less suitable prime minister to lead an empire into the greatest conflict in history. When the war broke out, he was approaching his sixty-second birthday. He was the father of a large, clever, grown-up family which, thanks to his early snobbery and judicious marriages, belonged to a higher social notch than that of his middle-class parents in the North. He himself was languid, emotional, sexually obsessed and clever in a second-rate sort of way. He would have been fun as a dinner companion, unless, like some young women, you objected to his habit of seizing women’s hands and thrusting them inside his trousers. He could quote Latin poetry and he ‘knew everyone’, but he was indecisive, vain and fundamentally idle. When he broke the news to his socialite second wife Margot that the country was drifting towards war, he did so in her boudoir while she was dressing for dinner. Her reaction was ‘How thrilling! Oh! tell me you aren’t excited, darling!’ He was chiefly obsessed, that day, by his emotional need to talk about it to his young confidante Venetia Stanley, a friend of his daughter’s with whom he was madly in love. The outbreak of the war forced him to cancel a visit to Venetia, and he wrote: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment. All these days … full of incident and for the most part anxious and worrying – I have been sustained by the thought that when to-day came I should once more see your darling face.’18
All this is personally attractive, but it is hardly the behaviour of a war leader. He was more than vaguely appalled when, at the first meeting of the war cabinet, ‘Winston dashed into the room radiant, his face bright, his manner keen and he told us – one word pouring out on the other – how he was going to send telegrams to the Mediterranean, the North Sea and God knows where! You could see he was a really happy man. I wondered if this was the state of mind to be in at the opening of such a fearful war as this.’19
A year into the war, he admitted to himself that his preoccupation with Venetia had clouded his judgement, and not allowed him to think clearly enough about war strategy. And there are moments in his letters to her when the reader could be forgiven for thinking that her decision to get married and, horror or horrors, to marry a Jew, Edwin Montagu, weighed more on the Prime Minister’s mind than the calamities being enacted in the Dardanelles. Montagu, a cabinet colleague of Asquith’s, used to spend cabinet meetings writing love letters to Venetia, only half a dozen chairs away from Asquith who was doing the same thing.
Asquith formed a coalition government without consulting his Liberal backbenchers, on 26 May 1915. Nobody realized it at the time, but it brought to an end the political life of the Liberal party as the alternative party of government, which only eight years before had won so resounding a landslide victory in the General Election. There would never be a Liberal government again. Asquith’s decision to rule with a group of the political elite – his old clubland cronies, combined with the rising stars – was an admission that for the first year the war had been conducted with culpable lack of efficiency, and terrible loss of life. The professional army had suffered terrible reduction at Ypres. Churchill’s involvement with the Dardanelles venture had, it seemed, cost him his political fortune, as well as leading to the pointless death of tens of thousands of young men. No progress had been made towards the defeat of Germany. Asquith might have felt more politically safe with this government of national unity, surrounded by the Conservatives Lord Curzon as Lord Privy Seal and Arthur Balfour as First Lord of the Admiralty, but he had, as he half knew, begun his own walk down the plank.
Margot Asquith believed Churchill’s assessment of David Lloyd George as ‘the direct descendant of Judas Iscariot’, who had ‘blackmailed’ Asquith into a coalition by threatening to resign.20
Lloyd George held one of the key positions in the new cabinet: minister of Munitions. This job had been created very largely because of the agitations in the Northcliffe Press. At the beginning of the war in August 1914 the Mail had seen Lord Kitchener as an essential architect of victory. ‘The Nation’ – by which it meant Lord Northcliffe – ‘Calls for Lord Kitchener’. By the spring of 1915, it had changed its policy to ‘Kitchener Must Go’.21 A week before Asquith’s decision to create a coalition, The Times had carried the message from a military expert, Colonel Repington, that the British advance at Ypres had been stopped by the lack of a high-explosive shell. ‘The Tragedy of the Shells: Lord Kitchener’s Grave Error’ was the Mail’s splash on 20 May 1915. Kitchener had ordered tons of shrapnel, ‘when any expert could have told him it was no good for breaking down wire and trenches’. At this point, the government began to censor the Harmsworth papers, and the police turned up each night to read the proofs of The Times and the Daily Mail. But this was in itself an admission of Northcliffe’s power. He replied by sending uncensored proofs to Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions and to Curzon. ‘We can get things done,’ Northcliffe boasted. ‘What these people in Downing Street loathe is publicity.’22 When, inevitably, Asquith was ousted by a cabinet coup and Lloyd George became the Prime Minister on 7 December 1916, Lloyd George held a meeting with the national executive not of his own party, the Liberals, but of the Labour party, and told them: ‘Politicians make one fundamental mistake when they have been in office. They think that the people who are in office, or who have been in office, are absolutely essential to the Government of the country, and that no one else is in the least able to carry on affairs. Well, we are a nation of 45 millions, and, really, if we cannot produce at least two or three alternative cabinets, we must really be what Carlyle once called us – “a nation of fools”.’23
One of those who watched most carefully as Lloyd George triumphantly seized the controls was a Canadian backbench MP named Max Aitken (1879–1964), with a face like a very amused monkey, and a bank account larger than anyone else’s in the House of Commons. In those days, Canadians enjoyed full British citizenship. Aitken was the son of a Presbyterian minister of Scottish origin from Newcastle, New Brunswick. He made a fortune – with scrupulous Presbyterian honesty – by trading in bonds and was a multi-millionaire by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Apart from making money in prodigious quantities, his other genius was for political fixing, and he became the close confidant of another Canadian in British political life, Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923). Aitken helped Law make a lot of money by his judicious financial advice. Law helped Aitken become the Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyme, a suburb of Manchester. Aitken had very light political baggage. He supported the Empire, and he believed in tariffs to protect imperial trade, but beyond that, it was largely a matter of chance that he was a Unionist rather than a Liberal. He quickly became Bonar Law’s most intimate friend in the House of Commons,24 at the time when Law became leader of his party.
While followers of Northcliffe attribute the collapse of Asquith and the advancement of Lloyd George to their hero’s public trumpeting, the worshippers of Aitken see the coalition as the creation of the quiet
Canadian.25 At his country house in Surrey, Cherkley, Aitken brokered three secret meetings between Law and Asquith during the autumn of 1914, in which the Conservative leader promised his support for the government on condition that Asquith backed down from imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Certainly, by the time he had got his peerage, in 1917, and had become Lord Beaverbrook, Aitken saw himself as the sole architect of the new prime minister’s career. ‘It was not Mr Asquith’s judgement that I distrusted; it was that of the kind of barnacles, especially in the general staff, which had affixed themselves to his administration. I believed with good reason as the event showed, that Mr Lloyd George’s military opinions were better than those of Sir William Robertson and the War Office, and that the united command and all else was impossible unless the generals could be put under proper control by the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister.’ That was what he told Mrs Asquith when the war was over.26
