Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  . . . The motor slowed down; we had arrived. I jumped out and ran through the open door in front of Henry; I found the odd man labelling our luggage piled up in the hall. Not a note or a message of any kind was to be seen.

  Henry went into his library, and I rang up 21 Abingdon Street (the Liberal headquarters) on the telephone in my boudoir.

  "Not got all the returns? . . . Yes? . .. East Fife. Yes? ... Asquith beat? ... Thank God...”

  Henry came in ...

  " I'm out, am I? ” he said; 44 ask by how much; tell them to give us the figures, will you? ”

  " Give me the East Fife figures,” I said, and taking a pencil wrote:

  Asquith 6994—Sprott 8996r

  The blow was of course a crippling one. However much both he and Margot might bravely protest that, with nearly all the others out,1 it was better for Asquith to be beaten too, this was not so. It spared him the early years of a harsh and hostile Parliament, but at the price of a personal humiliation which destroyed his hope of exercising any influence on the peace settlement. He was the rejected man, whose constituency of thirty-two years’ standing had not even needed the spur of the coupon (Lloyd George and Bonar Law, with self-conscious generosity, had withheld it from the Conservative Sprott) to vote him out. The wheel of political fortune had indeed turned full circle for him.

  1 The Asquithian Liberals in fact won 26 seats, as against 59 for the Labour Party and 474 (338 Unionists and 136 Liberals) for the Coalition.

  After three decades of mounting success almost all power had crumbled away in two years. He was left with only a remnant of a party, and no forum from which to lead it. Yet he remained one of the two or three most famous Englishmen, and there were many, not necessarily amongst his supporters, who felt a sense of shock and repugnance that his years of distinguished service had been repaid in this way, and his high standards of controversy thrown back so violently in his face. A flood of letters poured in upon him in his defeat—greater in quantity and more intense in dismay than those which he had received when he was forced out of Downing Street.

  A sense of shame that it should have occurred was a frequent note “ I did not expect it of my countrymen,”s Haldane wrote in a calming but affectionate letter. “ I feel humiliated as an Englishman at such a result,”* the Bishop of Chelmsford said. His colleague of Southwark added: “ I am left today wondering whether this is really England, and I am a British citizen.... We have disgraced ourselves, I mean we ordinary people.”u And the Master of Bafliol (A. L. Smith) wrote to express “ what I find to be a feeling universal, even amongst those who would politically be far from your party—a feeling of deep regret and shame that such a thing could possibly happen to you”v

  The politicians divided into those, like Bryce (“ There has not been a time, even when Mr. Gladstone lost his two seats, when so much turned on one man’s presence.”) who were dismayed at Asquith’s absence from the House of Commons; and those like Birrell, always one for graceful withdrawal, who could see advantages for Asquith in being away from the squalid scene: “You surely are better out of it for the time, than watching Ll.G. lead apes to Hell.”w, 1

  1 He also said, a characteristic touch from a former member for Fife, “ Now that it is over I don’t mind telling you that I never did like East Fife, although I imagine the blunder is attributable to the absorption in the County of those plaguey boroughs with that fishing population which has broken the hearts of so many good (and bad) Liberals ere now. But they won’t break yours.” (Asquith Papers, box xxxiii f. 25).

  Some correspondents thought more of the past than of the future. Hankey wrote: “ When times are less breathless and the public perspective is restored, the people will learn what those who were with you at the time know well—the tremendous burden you carried through the first half of the War, and that it was you who saved the Empire from absolute disaster.”x Sir William Robertson, after referring to his experience of “ the greatest kindness, consideration and straight forwardness from you in the troublous time we have together been through,” went on to say: “ Perhaps this is a permissible occasion for me to tell you that poor K(itchener) had a great admiration and affection for you and often told me that you were a great help to him in the early and critical days of the war, and then displayed far and away more courage than most others in the Cabinet, especially than some who would have us believe they are so very courageous.”y

  Other letters sought to explain away the result. The best informed of these came from James Scott, Asquith’s chairman in East Fife. He wrote:

  For a week before the election we had a swarm of women going from door to door indulging in a slander for which they had not a shadow of proof. This was used to such purpose as to influence the female vote very much against you. When the man was a weak subject, if not swayed, he was induced to abstain from voting, which latter course was followed in not a few cases. With others who had been employed on munitions, and in receipt of good wages, their pocket outweighed their principles. Again we had those who made a point of your absence from the constituency and did not hesitate to say that we never see him and are not going to work.z

  Whatever the explanation, and however great the sympathy, Asquith was out, and politically down. Politics, even had he wished them to do so, offered no employment for more than a fraction of his time. During the first six months of 1919 not a single invitation to speak reached him from any Liberal Association in the country. He was the proscribed man. His platform activities were confined to two or three non-party meetings in support of the League of Nations and other progressive causes. He travelled, he read, and he wrote. Occasionally he attended official ceremonies and banquets—the King, a loyal friend at this stage, would have seen to that, even had no-one else; and at them he retained his edge of sharp, sensible and tolerant comment:

  ‘‘We went yesterday to the Luncheon in honour of Foch,” he wrote on July 31st, 1919. “ I had a little conversation with him, and I thought he talked a lot of nonsense about Germany sinking never to rise again, etc. “ Quel domtnage (as Talleyrand said of Napoleon, not as soldier but as Emperor) que les soldats soient si mal élevés! ” Haig, who sat next to us, also has his limitations, but he got through his little speech without any flaring gaffes ”aa

  No one could have been less unbalanced by setback than was Asquith. He lived amongst his relations and friends and books, and he lived agreeably. But he lived without power, or public honour, or real occupation.

  1 The index entry for Maurice in Lloyd George’s War Memoirs is a remarkable example of importing invective into a section of a book which is normally neutral:

  “ Maurice, Sir Frederick ... comfortably placed as any politician, 1675; usbservient and unbalanced, 1685; ... his astonishing arithmetical calculations, 1763-4; the instrument by which the Government was to be thrown out, 1778;... his astounding volte face of 22/4/18, 1780-1 ... intrigues against the Government, his mind being apparently unhinged, 1784; false allegations against Lloyd George and Bonar Law published by, 1784-6; the tool of astuter men, 1786 ... his double-dealing denounced by Lloyd George, 1787-8 ... his grave breach of discipline condoned by Asquith, 1791; dismissed, 1791.”

  THE OLD CHIEF RETURNS

  1920-24

  The later months of 1919 saw a slight easing of Asquith’s isolation. In August he was asked to preside over a Royal Commission on the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and accepted. It was hardly a substitute for membership of the Peace Conference delegation, but it was something to do, and it took him to familiar old haunts at Oxford and agreeable new ones at Cambridge. He discharged his duties with some enthusiasm.1 Then, at the end of the year, together with Lloyd George, he received a special award of military medals—the 1914 War Star, the 1914-18 War Medal, and the 1918 Victory Medal— from the Army Council. At first the intention of the War Office (under Churchill) had been to give these to Lloyd George alone, but the King had demurred, and withdrew his opposition only when both of the war Prime Ministers w
ere included.

  Social life, both at the Wharf and in Cavendish Square, became more expansive. It had never been unduly restricted, but now there was a return almost to the pre-1914 pattern:

  “We drove up in good time to receive our ‘ young visitor ’ (the Prince of Wales),” he wrote on January 20th, 1920, “ the fellow guests with whom we provided him being the two Bibescae, Soveral, Birrell, Sir D. and Lady Maclean, and my niece Kakoo Granby,2 who was in wonderful looks. The Prince has excellent manners and has come on immensely in ease and savoir faire. He talked quite amusingly of his experience in America, and I think is not sorry to be off again in March, even to so dismal a goal as Australia. I fancy the evenings at the fireside of Sandringham Cottage pass with somewhat leaden feet. Both Soveral and Birrell were in excellent form, and Lady Maclean, who is still young and quite good-looking, surveyed the scene with glowing cheeks and glittering eyes. .. the meal was a great success.”a

  Much more important for Asquith than either the small signs of public recognition, or the revival to full pressure of his and Margot’s social life, was the growing public disillusion with the Coalition. The post-war honeymoon was over. Some of the ill-considered cries and extravagant promises of the Coupon election were already coming home to roost. For an independent Liberal the political climate was still chilly, but no longer so frigid that it was suicide for him to venture out of doors. Over the turn of the year Sir John Simon was the first of the old front benchers to make a foray. He was narrowly defeated at Spen Valley. If Asquith himself was to come back the attempt could not be too long delayed. Inevitably, his desires were mixed. After thirty-two years of dominant membership, he missed the House of Commons. But he knew that the 1918 Parliament could never be one in which he would enjoy sitting. Its atmosphere was too alien to his views and style. A hazardous contest was also unattractive. He never much enjoyed electioneering, even at the best of times, and least of all was he likely to do so after the disaster of the previous year at East Fife. Another failure would be almost a final blow. Transcending all these considerations, however, was his massive disapproval of both the policy and methods of the Coalition, and his obligation to give the most effective possible expression to this view. This he could not do from the sidelines.

  The glimmering of an opportunity came early in the New Year of 1920. The death of one of the small band of independent Liberals created a vacancy at Paisley, a Lanarkshire industrial town on the edge of the Glasgow conurbation. There, in 1918, with strong local ties behind him, the dead member had been returned by the bare majority of 106. It was not clear how transferable was his support. Nor was it clear that the local Liberal association wanted Asquith. At that time the position within local Liberal associations was rather like that in Berlin in the early days of the cold war. No one doubted the enmity of Lloyd George and Asquith, but the adherents of both attempted to co-exist within the same associations, running them as single units upon the basis of two (rather than four) power control. The introduction of Asquith as a candidate was obviously likely to have a fissiparous effect, and those members who inclined in a Lloyd George direction were, to say the least, cool towards the idea.

  The question of an invitation remained in doubt for several weeks after it was first mooted. But on January 21st a favourable decision was taken by a majority of 25 or so in a meeting of several hundreds.

  “As you would see by today’s paper,” Asquith wrote to Mrs. Harrissonon the 22nd, “ the Paisley people have at last got down on the right side of the fence. I don’t look forward with much pleasure to the adventure, which however has to be faced. For one tiling I am not very fond of going back to Scotland, for another the issue is extremely doubtful, notwithstanding that the press is practically all with us. My present plan is to leave here by the night train on Monday.”b

  On arrival in Glasgow on the Tuesday morning his first task was to install himself, Margot, his daughter Violet, and his secretary Vivian Phillipps in the Central Station Hotel there. His second was to proceed to Paisley and to turn a tepid and divided Liberal association into a compact body of enthusiastic supporters. That night he met 600 members at the Liberal Club, and in a short, thirty-minute speech achieved a remarkable success. From then until polling day, sixteen days ahead, his campaign never looked back.

  He even showed signs of enjoying it himself, despite the strain of four and five meetings a day and the unfamiliar experience of soliciting women’s votes.

  “We are having a wonderful time here,” he wrote on January 30th, “ and if outward enthusiasm were a reliable index we should not have much doubt as to the result. But street crowds and photographers and meetings are most untrustworthy guides. There are about fifteen thousand women on the Register—a dim, impenetrable, for the most part ungettable element—of whom all that one knows is that they are for the most part hopelessly ignorant of politics, credulous to the last degree, and flickering with gusts of sentiment like a candle in the wind. Then there are some thousands of Irish, who have been ordered by their bosses to vote Labour—as if Labour had ever done or was ever likely to do anything for them. It is on the whole an incalculable problem. The only certain fact is that the Coalition man—a foul-mouthed Tory—will be well at the bottom of the poll. The meetings are wonderful: always a lot of opponents there, but when I speak they never interrupt and you could hear a pin drop. They are among the most intelligent audiences I have ever had, but the heckling is of very poor quality. Violet is a marvellous success as a speaker.”c

  The Labour candidate was J. M. Biggar, who had fought the seat in 1918 and come within an ace of victory. He had the advantage on this occasion, so strangely does time alter political alliances, of a message of support from Lord Haldane. If Asquith was to be beaten it would be by him, and not by the “ foul-mouthed Tory,” J. A. D. MacKean. Yet Asquith directed the main effort of his campaign against the Coalition. Partly this was because it corresponded with his feelings; partly because it was a sound electoral tactic. The Labour vote was big and solid, but not a majority. Asquith’s task was to defeat it by securing every available Liberal vote and some moderate Tory ones as well.

  He did not attempt to do this by a soft approach. He roundly attacked the whole policy of trying to grind Germany into the dust by the exaction of impossible reparations. He was equally forthright —and far-sighted—on Ireland. Nothing short of immediate dominion status, a proposal which was at the time denounced by the Government as “ insanity,” could avoid a future of violence, bloodshed and bitterness. Less controversially, he upheld the future of the League of Nations, and warned of the danger of the new states—and the old ones—engaging in damaging tariff wars.

  He was supported in the campaign, apart from local workers, by those two eminent Liberal lawyers, Sir John Simon and Lord Buck-master, both outstanding platform orators. But his daughter Violet was better than either of them. Using a peculiar combination of highly-charged emotional phraseology and polished political wit, she was the great success of the contest. “ Her father,” as Churchill was later to write, “ ... found in his daughter a champion redoubtable even in the first rank of Party orators.”d Each night Asquith retired to the Central Station Hotel in Glasgow to read Dr. Thorne and Framley Parsonage and to contemplate with quiet satisfaction this new addition to his strength and a more generally favourable development of events than any tiling he had known for several years.

  Polling day was on February 12th, but there was once again a delay of two weeks before the counting. As in 1918 Asquith went south as soon as the voting was over, but this time he did not stay there for the result. Nor did he waste much time on this second “ Paisley excursion,” as he called it. The whole family travelled up by sleeper one night and back by sleeper the next.

  “I was present during most of the counting,” he wrote the following day, “ and it was clear after the first half-hour that we had won, but the majority steadily increased as fresh ballot boxes were opened till it mounted to close upon 3,ooo.3 Perhaps
the most satisfactory feature of the whole business was the sorry figure cut by the wretched Coalitionist MacKean: he fought dirtily and deserves the penalty he has to suffer of losing his deposit.

  We had a gigantic farewell meeting—nearer 5,000 than 4,000— in the early evening, at which Violet made one of her best speeches, and when we took the night train (at) Glasgow we were nearly done to death by the demonstrative attentions of the University students.4 However, we got through and after another tumultuous greeting at Euston this morning, arrived here (Cavendish Square) for a late breakfast. We found a magnificent wreath over the front door, a characteristic gift from Lady Tree: and more letters and telegrams than it is possible to count.

  It is Elizabeth’s birthday, and Puffin is up from Winchester for the day. We are all going this afternoon to a matinee of B. Shaw’s Pygmalion with Mrs. Campbell and Marion Terry in the chief parts. e

  Amidst all the letters and telegrams which flowed in there was none from any leading supporter of the Coalition. No personal note came from Churchill or Montagu, from Balfour or Curzon, from Austen Chamberlain or Walter Long, let alone from Bonar Law or Lloyd George.1 Less surprisingly, the public welcome which Asquith received from the Government benches (then five-sixths of the total) in the House of Commons was equally chilly. But it was counterbalanced by extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm outside.