Asquith

Index

Introduction: The Noblest Roman

Herbert Henry – H H – Asquith was the Liberal Prime Minister of Britain and Ireland for eight and a half years between 1908 and 1916 – the longest uninterrupted period of office for any premier in the 160 years between the administrations of Lord Liverpool and Margaret Thatcher (and, as I write this, Tony Blair). As he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for two years before becoming Prime Minister, Asquith’s continuous period in the two highest offices of government totalled very nearly 11 years.

During his premiership, the British Empire reached its zenith and, with the onset of the First World War, began its ultimate decline. It was a period in which the Prime Minister and his government faced a series of crises that would have rocked many administrations and confronted challenges, both domestic and international, that were as great as any faced by ministers at any time.

There was a lengthy constitutional confrontation with the House of Lords, after the government’s introduction of the People’s Budget which, with its inauguration of old age pensions, launched one of the most far-reaching social reforms of the 20th century. There was serious labour unrest, culminating in a series of major strikes, a flurry of anarchist terrorism, a mild but still shocking harbinger of what was to come later in the century, and the suffragettes’ seething and increasingly militant campaign to secure votes for women, which would also see echoes in later pressure groups. There was also an escalating crisis over Ireland and Home Rule, which briefly pitched the government against some of the officers in its own army and briefly created uncertainty about how far ministers could conduct the defence of the country. All this and then an expensive arms race against a background of intensifying international tension. And, ultimately, there was the outbreak of the First World War, the first continental conflict in which Britain had engaged for 100 years and one of the most devastating clashes that the world has ever seen.

The debate about how well Asquith and his government handled these crises has been controversial among historians. Indeed many of the issues these Edwardians had to address 100 years ago are still unresolved today, not least the problem of Ireland and Britain’s long, slow, agonising disengagement from its troublesome neighbour.

To examine these events again is to enter a time that is both strikingly similar to and enormously different from our own. It was a country of great wealth, with the mightiest empire in the world and a huge, though slipping, industrial and trading base, but also great disparities of income, housing and education. It was a world in which a small civil service was beginning to direct widening areas of life but in which statesmen and politicians communicated through letters and telegrams, not telephones or, usually, personal meetings.

No American presidents had yet left the shores of their country during their terms in office, so British prime ministers never encountered them. Nor for that matter did Sir Edward Grey, Asquith’s Foreign Secretary, who only ever went abroad once. When Mr Asquith went to meet the King on becoming Prime Minister, he caught the scheduled train on his own down to Biarritz where Edward VII was wintering, without security guards or even a private secretary to accompany him. A few years later, when he was assaulted by militant suffragettes while playing golf on holiday at Lossiemouth in Scotland, he had to fend them off for himself with the aid of his daughter Violet.

It was an age moreover when the Prime Minister could take a taxi if he needed to go somewhere. Asquith was the first Prime Minister to be filmed and archive newsreel exists of him getting out of a cab in Downing Street and paying the driver. When he wanted to communicate in Parliament he made a speech and when he had something to say to his fellow countrymen he addressed a public meeting, often one attended by thousands of spectators, most of whom presumably could hardly hear him since he spoke without a microphone. The Prime Minister did experiment with at least one recorded speech: a three-and-a-half minute defence of the People’s Budget, given in 1909, shows him to have had a strong and pleasant, accent-less voice, and an easy manner, to have spoken in sentences, using complicated words such as ‘exigencies’ – not a word you would hear many politicians using today. There were definitely no sound-bites.¹ Rather endearingly, at the end you can just hear him asking the sound engineer slightly impatiently: Will that do? Such a recording was rare, however. Presumably it would have had to have been bought as a gramophone record by those who wished to listen to it and would not have reached a wide national audience.

Many voters may have had only a hazy idea of what the Prime Minister looked like. In fact he was a handsome, authoritative-looking man, in his mid-50s when he took charge of the government, after 22 years in Parliament, with a full head of white hair, growing longer and more straggly the longer he remained in office, something a media consultant would not allow today. He became an increasingly portly figure in office too, with a rubicund face, the result, so his enemies and sometimes his friends alleged, of good living and periodic heavy drinking. The alcohol was not usually incapacitating but it did earn him the private nickname of ‘Squiff’. Such a habit would have been nearly insurmountable for a national leader in the intrusive world of today, but then the Prime Minister was not omni-present in the lives of his countrymen, nor did he seek to interfere or regulate much of what they did. He – and they – would have thought it both impertinent and unnecessary.

Asquith did not give interviews – like many prime ministers he despised the press, often with good reason, and he certainly did not cultivate it, though he occasionally dined with sympathetic editors such as C P Scott of the Manchester Guardian – nor did he employ a press officer or communications department, still less a spin doctor, had he or any one else in those days known who such a fellow was, or what he did.

He wrote copious letters, often several times a day, each up to a thousand words in length, and sometimes couched in the sort of intimate terms to women friends that would bring any politician’s career to a grinding halt if they occurred today. With the postal service as it then was, he could post a letter in Downing Street in late afternoon and know it would arrive elsewhere in London that very evening.

He spent most weekends in the country, sometimes at his home outside Oxford, bought with the private assistance of the American banker J P Morgan who was at the same time commercially engaged with both the British and the US governments – something he did not think for a moment was potentially corrupting because he was not personally corrupted. But Asquith also often stayed at house parties attended not just by political allies but by opponents as well and he took long holidays, often abroad and sometimes out of touch with his colleagues and the government.

Such then was the world of Edwardian politicians and such were the crises which confronted Asquith and his government. It might be wondered that such serious events were surmounted for as long as they were. What is more remarkable is that for three-quarters of the duration of his administration, from 1910 onwards, the Liberal government did not have a parliamentary majority on its own but relied upon a series of coalitions to retain power. That it did so successfully was in no small measure due to the character and leadership skills of the Prime Minister.

Asquith – known as Herbert to his first wife, Henry to his second and, universally, as H H to his colleagues, friends and to contemporary newspapers – has often been called by his admirers the last, or noblest, of the Romans. It was a description that would have appealed to a man whose Victorian classical education and erudition led him to pepper his speeches and writings with classical allusions. To his followers it signified a political leader whose benign imperturbability transcended and scorned partisan politics and low quest for advantage over his opponents and the men of his own government who eventually schemed to bring him down. His enemies called it indolence and complacency. Such loftiness came at a price: Asquith was the penultimate Liberal prime minister and Liberalism’s descent from the heights of power to the status of a distant third party throughout the last 80 years was at least partly his responsibility.

But there is much truth in the view that Asquith did indeed define the national interest for a prolonged period, in idealistic rather than partisan or self-interested terms. He was impervious to the manoeuvrings that accompany high office, in a way that does indeed seem old-fashioned today.

He certainly did not see the need to engage in frenzied activity, or change for change’s sake, as proof of his government’s existence and vitality. Quite the reverse: in office his most famous and enduring maxim was wait and see, which eventually, as the First World War became bogged down, increasingly disturbed his friends, aggravated his enemies and annoyed and antagonised the press. His leadership was certainly neither dynamic nor charismatic at a time when something of that sort was needed.

But despite this quaintness to modern eyes, it would perhaps be truer to see Asquith as the first of a new breed of 20th-century politician: the first prime minister to enter politics not out of a sense of noble obligation, or dynastic inheritance, or because he had time on his hands or money to spare for an occupation, but because he viewed it as a professional career.

Asquith did not come from a particularly wealthy or metropolitan background (though his family was much more comfortably off than that of his successor Lloyd George), nor did he have an influential patron to set him on the road to success at Westminster. He had to make his own way on his own efforts and talents. Moreover, he had been a successful lawyer and his need to earn money to maintain his family (and an extravagent wife) delayed his political advancement and provided a continuing source of insecurity.

Even when he was Prime Minister, King George V thought him ‘not quite a gentleman’,² although they actually got on well together. The writer Hilaire Belloc talked of people jeering behind his back and spoke of his ‘ridiculous middle-class manner’,³ opinions undoubtedly shared by many of those with whom Asquith had to deal in office. They thought it was astonishing that he had come so far – or that he lasted so long as he did. But they underestimated his capacity, authority and resilience.

Part One

THE LIFE

Chapter 1: The Means of Ascent

H H Asquith was born on 12 September 1852 in Morley, near Leeds, the second son of Joseph Dixon Asquith, a 27-year-old wool merchant and his wife Emily. The family seems to have been long-established in Yorkshire – the surname may derive from Viking roots – and had a lengthy association with both religious nonconformity as Congregationalists and political liberalism. The Asquiths were loyal attenders at the local Reheboth Chapel and if in later years Asquith himself was not a regular church, or chapel, goer, his background remained both Nonconformist and beyond the established pale, unlike almost all his predecessors (and most of his successors) in Downing