Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  VI

  The journey towards a wartime coalition government was not accomplished overnight. It was first noted at Walmer Castle on 23 January 1915, when Lloyd George told his hosts, the Asquiths, that ‘the opposition was longing for a coalition’.121 Margot Asquith claimed she had heard this before; and Lloyd George, who privately viewed such an upheaval as an opportunity for self-advancement, said that, apart from Balfour, he could not think of any other Tory whose services would be useful. No love was lost between Lloyd George and Balfour, but the chancellor recognised the indispensability of the former Unionist leader to any possible coalition. Asquith felt that Balfour – who, in more than a decade of largely unsuccessful struggle to hold the Tory line since he had become prime minister in 1902, had perfected attitudes of languor and disinterest almost to Olympic levels – was ‘the greatest fraud of our time’.122 After six years in Downing Street, and having coped with an avalanche of adversity for most of that time, Asquith still saw no reason why he should need a coalition administration behind him to prosecute a successful war against Germany. His opponents, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagreed. Lansdowne told Law on 28 January that future relations should include ‘the taking of the leaders of the Opposition into full confidence about all important matters connected with the conduct of the War.’123

  Asquith’s troubles with colleagues might have persuaded him of the desirability of choosing new ones. He remained wary of Lloyd George, who thus far was reasonably loyal to him, though that would not last much longer. Kitchener was autocratic; Haldane was under attack; Grey he thought ‘tired out and hysterical’; and he told his wife that ‘Winston is far the most disliked man in my cabinet by his colleagues … he is intolerable! Noisy, long-winded and full of perorations. We don’t want suggestion, we want wisdom.’124 Asquith had long decided Churchill was not so clever as Churchill thought he was: he told Miss Stanley on 11 August 1914 that the First Lord had spoken endlessly at cabinet, ‘posing as an expert on strategy’.125 Since she was a cousin of Churchill’s wife, Asquith was possibly understating his feelings to avoid causing offence. With the debacle of Gallipoli to come – Asquith made the remarks to his wife in early March – the absence of support for Churchill meant he could not afford to fail.

  Churchill made no secret of his belief in a coalition: Asquith had told Miss Stanley on 9 February: ‘it is not easy to see what W’s career is going to be here: he is to some extent blanketed by E Grey & Ll George, & has no personal following: he is always hankering after coalitions and odd re-groupings’.126 Asquith was even minded to offer Churchill the viceroyalty of India, shortly to be vacant with the scheduled return home of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, but doubted he would accept then, if ever. Churchill was an engine of ambition, and a coalition would provide him with new lands to conquer. One of his closest friends – F. E. Smith – was a leading Tory. However, what, surprisingly, Churchill did not grasp at the time was the level of hostility and distrust against him from almost everyone else in the party he had deserted in 1904 – though another exception was the leader he had deserted, Balfour, who had forgiven even if he had not forgotten. Many Liberals regarded Churchill as a Tory, justifiably: when he spoke of coalitions it was assumed it was to align himself with the likely next government, so colleagues distrusted him too.

  From 10 March – the day Kitchener agreed to send the 29th Division to the Dardanelles – Asquith expanded his War Council to include Law and Lansdowne. The prime minister was unimpressed by them, telling Miss Stanley ‘they did not contribute very much’. He would not, therefore, have been disappointed by Law’s telling him on 15 March that while he and Lansdowne had ‘enjoyed’ the meeting, it would ‘weaken their position in the Conservative Party’ were they to attend again.127 However, their joining Balfour on the War Council albeit temporarily proved how bipartisan the conduct of the war was becoming, and how bipartisan Asquith felt it needed to become. He asked Hankey to include them in the circulation of all the papers prepared for the War Council, but not to invite them to meetings. It was a long way from that, however, to formal coalition.

  H. W. Massingham, editor of the Nation, told Mrs Asquith on 24 March that Churchill was intriguing to have Balfour replace Grey, to facilitate coalition. Asquith, appalled at the notion, thought Churchill ‘a complex victim to B’s superficial charm’; he sought Lloyd George’s opinion, and the chancellor thought Massingham’s information was ‘substantially true’.128 Asquith regretted Churchill’s lack of a ‘sense of proportion’ and that he did not have ‘a larger endowment of the instinct of loyalty.’ Churchill’s machinations could be seen only as undermining a senior cabinet colleague and also the authority of the prime minister himself. Asquith said of Churchill to Miss Stanley that ‘I regard his future with many misgivings.’ He continued: ‘He will never get to the top in English politics, with all his wonderful gifts; to speak with the tongues of men & angels, and to spend laborious days & nights in administration, is no good, if a man does not inspire trust.’ Grey was suffering from serious trouble with his eyesight. However, his taking off the first half of April 1915 to go fishing, when negotiations about bringing Italy into the war on the Allied side were at a delicate stage, was not designed to inspire confidence. Haldane normally took over the Foreign Office if Grey was absent, but because of the continuing criticism of him in the press as a pro-German, Asquith stepped in.

  The other complication in Asquith’s life, and one that would badly affect his general judgement, was his relationship with Venetia Stanley. There is no evidence to suggest this was physical: but his emotional dependence upon her grew constantly in the first nine months of the war. A letter of 16 March is signed off ‘Your lover’ after ‘Good night my best beloved … my last thought tonight is of you, as will be my first thought in the morning, & my best thoughts all through the day.’129 Two days later he ended with: ‘I never loved or needed you more,’ and promised not to consider moving Lloyd George to become a full-time munitions minister until he had consulted her. (It is interesting to observe the political power thus bestowed on one of the millions of women Asquith, as a resolute anti-suffragist, thought unfit to have the vote.) The pressure this put on her was becoming intolerable, and she was (still unbeknown to Asquith) increasing her intimacy with Montagu as a potential escape. Even if she decided to marry Montagu, the business of telling Asquith – who could not marry her himself, since a divorce from his wife was unthinkable – would be grim. When, on 19 March, she hinted she might have to go abroad as a nurse, he told her of ‘the tragic pall of black unrelieved midnight darkness’ the prospect brought him.130 A month later, Mrs Asquith wrote to Montagu of her fears that she was being supplanted by Venetia, and asked him to urge her to marry him. He hardly needed encouragement.

  For a man charged with the direction of the war, Asquith led a curious existence. He would sit in his club, the Athenæum, of an afternoon and read a book when, by his own admission, he should have stayed in Downing Street and read the memoranda piling up for him. It was, like his obsession with Miss Stanley and the evenings spent playing bridge, his way of coping with stress: but what those who saw him in an armchair reading a collection of modern English essayists on a Tuesday afternoon, having had his hair cut, just after the British offensive at Neuve Chapelle had been halted (with 7,000 British and 4,200 Indian casualties), must have thought can only be imagined.131 Lloyd George told Riddell: ‘He lacks initiative and takes no steps to control or hold together the public departments, each of which goes its own way without criticism. This is all very well in time of peace, but during a great war the Prime Minister should direct and overlook the whole machine. No one else has the authority.’132

  Had the public known about the prime minister’s crise passionnelle over Miss Stanley, or of his afternoons reading belles lettres in the Athenæum, or about his evenings of bridge, matters might quickly have become unmanageable. It would have shocked the public had they also known of his propensity to drink. On 12 April Gwynne told Lieut
enant General Henry Wilson, the principal liaison officer with the French and with whom he regularly intrigued, that the prime minister ‘has been letting himself go very much of late and his example has been followed by his wife, who was so drunk in a private house about ten days ago that she was sick in the drawing room and on the stairs going away.’133 Asquith was a highly intelligent man and a gifted intellectual who could dispatch business rapidly and get quickly to the heart of a problem; he also had the intellectual’s gift of benefiting from periods of reflection, particularly when faced with unprecedented problems such as war brings to a man used only to the management of problems of peace – considerable though those had been. Nor, unlike some of his colleagues, did he spend hours each day on political intrigues. But his letters make it clear that he was tired, distracted, and still had not quite grasped – as Kitchener and Lloyd George had – the full implications, and different demands, of near-total war. Gwynne’s ungallant observation to Wilson suggests Mrs Asquith was suffering too.

  In mid-March Lloyd George had C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian and the high priest of Liberal journalism, to breakfast and told him he thought the war ‘would last another two years.’134 The minimum terms the government would accept from the Germans was the surrender of Alsace and Lorraine, annexed from France in 1871, but that could not be sought until ‘the Germans have been driven back to the Rhine’: of which there was little immediate prospect. He told Scott that Poland had to be ‘reclaimed’ and that ‘it was not a question of “crushing” Germany but of defeating her.’ However, ‘if we could produce 12 million shells a month instead of three the whole situation would be transformed.’ Lloyd George told him he had visited France and seen the superior output of their munitions factories, and wanted something similar in Britain. ‘The supreme need in this country was to organise the production on business lines and speed it up to the utmost … the difficulty was Kitchener.’135

  Pressure increased on the government to mastermind a breakthrough as casualties rose and the public’s attitude became more tense. Women in mourning became a routine sight in the streets, as did men in uniform on leave; and local newspapers featured rolls of honour with photographs of the often youthful dead, rolls that seemed to lengthen progressively. With no end in sight, the question of whether the direction of the war was in the right hands began to be more freely debated. Northcliffe’s newspapers were not slow, after the problems of Neuve Chapelle and of the Dardanelles became apparent, to highlight them. In April 1915 Northcliffe told Riddell, his fellow press baron, that Asquith was ‘indolent, weak, and apathetic’ and thought ‘LG may be the man.’136 His sense of his own importance had yet to attain its full bloom. McKenna drew Asquith’s attention to favourable comments in the Northcliffe press about Lloyd George, and suggested the two might be conspiring, perhaps with Churchill in tow. It was an idea ahead of its time – there was no plot – but it worried Asquith and his friends.

  On 29 March Asquith confronted his chancellor with the rumours, and told Miss Stanley that ‘I have never seen him more moved’.137 Lloyd George thought McKenna was motivated by hatred of Churchill, and that the Tory press had been critical of Asquith because they believed Kitchener – who was really responsible for the ammunition shortages that were hampering the war – was a Tory and therefore should not be attacked. In Asquith’s account, Lloyd George told him ‘that he wd rather (1) break stones (2) dig potatoes (3) be hanged & quartered (those were metaphors used at different stages of his broken but impassioned harangue) than do an act, or say a word, or harbour a thought, that was disloyal to me … his eyes were wet with tears, and I am sure that, with all his Celtic capacity for impulsive & momentary fervour, he was quite sincere.’

  That last observation, made to his closest confidante, reveals how unequal Asquith was to grasping Lloyd George’s true character. He did not know it at the time, but Lloyd George was swift to tell his cronies about drift at the top of the administration, as he had Riddell. He also had a private life that made Asquith’s tendresse for Miss Stanley seem childlike in its innocence, and in the spring of 1915 it was going through an especially baroque phase. He had started driving to his house at Walton Heath in Surrey whenever he could, claiming he could not sleep in London. The truth was that he was afraid of high explosive, and going there took him away from Zeppelin raids; and he would pick up Frances Stevenson, his mistress, on his way out of London, and take her with him. She was ill in March and April 1915; Lloyd George’s biographer, John Grigg, speculates on whether she had had a miscarriage, or even an abortion: she noted at the time ‘the idea of our love-child will have to go for the time being’.138 According to Grigg, she told the daughter she eventually had with Lloyd George that she had had two abortions. Such a pregnancy, had it been known, would have ended the career, even in wartime, of the most indispensable minister.

  Unlike Lloyd George, Asquith disliked the press, despite having one or two journalists (notably J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette and a Balliol man like himself) close to him. However, he took seriously Massingham’s interpretation of how fragile the cabinet was. (He did not realise it, but the fragility was clear also to Gwynne of the Morning Post, who was advising Law on the question.) Gwynne believed a coalition ‘would weaken the Conservative party and break up the Liberal party’, giving the Tories a short-term advantage only; he was convinced a coalition was unnecessary to the national interest.139 Gwynne’s preference would have been for a general election, or to let nature take its course without any help from the Tories. Asquith had to tread carefully with the press. Led by Northcliffe, proprietors were already angry with the government over censorship, and Asquith felt Fleet Street’s claim that the public were being manipulated – or ‘being unduly soothed and elated’ – was entirely true.140 He and several other ministers, and the censors, Buckmaster and Sir Frank Swettenham, met a deputation of proprietors and editors from all the London papers except The Times on 1 April. He said he was optimistic about ultimate victory; but repudiated any notion that the government was putting out entirely false statements of optimism.

  An article about a plot against Asquith appeared in the Daily Chronicle on 30 March, and later that day he summoned Lloyd George and McKenna to clear the air (Churchill had been invited, but declined, feeling no need to defend himself). The chancellor accused McKenna of having put the Chronicle’s editor up to write the piece. McKenna denied it ‘hotly’ and blamed Balfour. Asquith ended a raging argument by saying he would resign at once if he thought any colleague had reservations about him. The three men agreed that Churchill was far too intimate with the former Unionist prime minister.141 Asquith then had to broker a row between Kitchener and Lloyd George over the Munitions Committee. It was paradoxical that with matters of life and death being paramount, matters of vanity should absorb him so. Nevertheless, on the day he had to referee the McKenna–Lloyd George fight, he found time to write four letters to Venetia Stanley.

  The next day a small group of Asquith, Churchill, Kitchener and Hankey met to approve the joint naval and military assault on the Dardanelles, de Robeck having signalled Churchill two days earlier to confirm that the naval one alone had failed. Lloyd George said afterwards that ‘the calculations had gone hopelessly astray.’142 Churchill had done much more of the planning than Fisher, whose enthusiasm for the plan ended by being non-existent, which is why so much blame for what happened would rest with him. A week earlier, on 6 April, Hankey had warned a meeting of ministers that landing troops would be difficult, but Churchill had brushed him aside – ‘he anticipated no difficulties in effecting a landing,’ the minutes record.143 Putting men on the ground was now the only hope of salvaging the campaign.

  The cabinet had been told the terrain was flat and the ships’ guns could wipe out any Turkish soldiers trying to hold ground. It was nothing of the sort, and the Turks were easily able to dig themselves in. ‘There are risks,’ Asquith told Miss Stanley, ‘but I am sure we are right to go throu
gh with it.’144 He likened the chances of a favourable outcome, however, to ‘so much depending upon whether the coin turns up Heads or Tails at the Dardanelles’, which suggests an element of fatalism. Provided Britain and France could find the weaponry to do so, they were planning a joint offensive in early May to drive the Germans back to the Meuse. Asquith told Miss Stanley that if the coin landed the right way up in the Dardanelles, and the Allies’ ammunition supplies improved in France, ‘the war ought to be over in 3 months.’ Few shared his optimism. When word reached England of the extent of casualties in the initial wave of landings, Gwynne, writing to Lady Bathurst, denounced the expedition as ‘a mad Churchillian scheme.’145

  The problems in the Dardanelles were symptomatic of the challenges now facing Asquith from every quarter, whether military or domestic. Miss Stanley’s dilemma about her future was coming to a head. Montagu stayed with her and her family for the weekend of 16–18 April, and they appear to have decided to get married. Shortly after he had left Alderley to return to London, Miss Stanley wrote to him that ‘this Sunday has made it very difficult to go on writing to the P.M. as tho’ nothing had happened. Darling what am I to do?’146 Asquith was, two days later, scheduled to make a big speech at Newcastle about the war, and she was reluctant to tell him before that. What must have cheered Montagu enormously was her envoi: ‘Darling I think I love you, Venetia.’ She did write to Asquith with a hint about the future – her letter to him is lost – about (and he quoted her) her ‘potentiality of making me wretched’, but he added that ‘if you were to tell me tomorrow that you were going to be married, I hope I should have the strength not to utter a word of protest or dissuasion.’147 She did not tell him she was going to marry – families had to be consulted – but she did say that if she did marry her feelings for Asquith would not change. He, however, required her undivided attention.