by Simon Heffer
Lloyd George faced a similarly uphill task in trying to persuade Samuel to remain home secretary. Samuel told him he had ‘greatly disliked’ the way the change of ministry had been made, and had found the press attacks on Asquith – which, like Asquith, he believed Lloyd George had inspired – ‘intolerable’.122 Lloyd George denied any involvement, blamed Asquith for having changed his mind on Lloyd George’s proposals, and asserted that he had ‘foretold every disaster that had come upon us during the war’ but had been ignored. Such a petulant, and barely honest, display hardened Samuel’s resolve. Therefore Lloyd George had to rely heavily on the support of the Unionists – including Curzon and Chamberlain, who disliked Lloyd George’s style and had had to be persuaded by Law – and the Labour Party, and a minority of backbench Liberals. In return Curzon, Cecil, Chamberlain and Long had Law extract a promise from Lloyd George ‘that he had no intention of asking Mr W Churchill or Lord Northcliffe to join the Administration.’123 Churchill, slow to understand that the Unionists would not tolerate his return to office, wormed the truth out of Aitken (according to the latter) at a dinner on 5 December with Smith and Lloyd George – after Lloyd George had left and, in a cowardly fashion, deputed it to Aitken to break the news – and was outraged. He sought to challenge the account in Beaverbrook’s memoirs and was placated by a rewrite of the passage: it may or may not have happened, like much in those memoirs.124 Cut off from most of the Liberal Party, unable to appoint two key figures who would have supported him, and heavily dependent on Unionists who disliked and distrusted him, Lloyd George would need to form a government without any of his long-term political allies. He could not have realised it, but his rift with Asquith had dug the grave of the Liberals as a party of government. It would be ninety-four years before its successor party had even a share of power in peacetime again, and then with similarly debilitating consequences for its future.
Lloyd George met Labour MPs on the morning of 7 December and, after some initial hostility, they backed him. He felt the early difficulty was because he had attacked Sidney Webb, who was not an MP but was present, and Snowden, who had been ‘very unpleasant’.125 Webb told his wife: ‘Lloyd George was at his worst, evasive in his statement of policy and cynical in his offer of places in the government.’126 At a private meeting after Lloyd George had left, the vote to accept office was carried by 18 votes to 12: Webb felt this ‘a decision disastrous to the Labour party’.127 The Northcliffe press, Aitken’s Express and other newspapers were on board at once: The Times said that ‘the burden is now set fairly and squarely on the right shoulders, and we believe that they are broad enough to bear it.’128 Two days later the paper obediently ridiculed talk of a ‘well-organised conspiracy.’129 Davidson noted that Asquith ‘had been outmanoeuvred in a field in which he had never operated or could bring himself to operate, namely political intrigue, mainly conducted through the columns of the less reputable newspapers.’130
The change was hugely popular with the public, who could hardly have cared less about the schoolboy antics around Westminster that had achieved it. In the period of gloom after the Somme, the end – or the hoped-for end – justified the means. The Times also claimed that ‘the spirit of “pacifism” has been effectually exorcised, and the control of our whole war policy is to be vested in a small body of vigorous and resolute men.’131 Yet it was the cultural change Lloyd George represented that was truly seismic, and Davidson’s observation hints at it. Miss Stevenson captured a part of it in her diary of the day her inamorato became prime minister: ‘It was very amusing to see them tonight when they came to see D and confer with him. They were actually kept waiting ten minutes or a quarter of an hour – all these great Tories – Curzon, Cecil and the rest, who a few years ago would not have shaken hands with him and who could find no words strong enough to express their bitterness and hatred – now waiting to be granted an audience of the little Welsh attorney!’132
Curzon had said: ‘I would rather die than serve under Lloyd George.’ When he became one of the key figures in the new administration, Asquith supposedly remarked: ‘It is an almost unbelievable story.’133 In that meeting, convened after Law had asked the Unionists present – Long and Chamberlain being the other two – on Lloyd George’s behalf whether they would serve in the government, the putative prime minister claimed to have the support of 136 Liberals ‘and believed that numbers would grow’, according to a ‘very secret’ account written afterwards by Chamberlain.134 It was confirmed to the Unionists that Churchill would not serve, and nor would Northcliffe, and that terms had been agreed with Labour. After this meeting Lloyd George realised he had sufficient support to return to the King and say he could form a government.
Although Asquith was not aristocratic he was a man of high education and learning, his personal probity so extreme that he often failed to see corruption, deceit or malevolence in others. He was by nature magnanimous, bore no grudges, and was not alert to offence or insult; there was much animosity in the process of bringing down his coalition, but others mostly exercised it, especially McKenna and Lloyd George. He had managed his party superbly through the vicissitudes that the six years of his peacetime premiership had thrown at him between 1908 and 1914. He was generally a good judge of character. His handicap was the classical education of the high Victorian period that he had enjoyed and that had provided his own social mobility from the middle to the upper-middle class: an education designed for a world of certainty, peace and a Whiggish idea of progress. It created not merely a world view, but a complacency and an attitude ill-equipped for total war. Just as the idea of liberalism had effectively died, one of its finest late practitioners would see his political career die with it. Hankey, writing half a lifetime later of the reasons why the first wartime coalition fell, said there were ‘too many rancorous memories, too deep a distrust’ between old adversaries for it ever to work: it was, he said, ‘a coalition that never coalesced.’135 Asquith’s failure to find the wit or the resources to change gear when war broke out was not for want of trying; but the challenge to British power required a different sort of leader to meet it.
Lloyd George was that man. He has been described as the first working-class man to become prime minister; but his father had been a teacher, and although the uncle who brought him up was a shoemaker he was also a Baptist minister, so the young Lloyd George, destined from his schooldays to train as a solicitor, had a firm hold on middle-class life. His traits were of the man on the make, having lacked the refinement Asquith enjoyed from his minor public day school, Oxford and the Bar. He was schooled in deceit, exhibited in the Marconi scandal and his baroque private life; manipulative, as he had proved in his cultivation of Northcliffe and the almost as unlovely Riddell; rampantly ambitious; happy to challenge every institution from the monarchy downwards with as much insolence as necessary and irrespective of collateral damage. This could not have been further from Asquith’s demeanour; but where Lloyd George would really change the climate was in the people he would bring into government, some of whose morals and manners were even less elevated than his. These were the precursors of Baldwin’s ‘hard-faced men’.136 They helped win the war, but altered the tenor of public life in Britain for ever, and for the worse.
V
With the exception of Addison, Asquith’s former cabinet colleagues stood by their decision not to serve: thus passed from office men such as Grey and McKenna, on the Liberal front bench in one capacity or another since 1905. Grey, relieved to be leaving the Foreign Office, stated after Asquith’s death that ‘Ll G was determined to oust Asquith and take his place.’137 The lead that Asquith – said by Lord Burnham to be ‘very bitter’ – had given them was instrumental in splitting the party, and creating an Opposition.138 Asquith retained the admiration of former Unionist colleagues as well as of Liberals: Cecil wrote to him that ‘Lloyd George has many qualities, but he will never equal his predecessor in patience, in courtesy, or in that largeness of mind which despises the baser arts by which
political success is attained.’139 Asquith had never been in it for himself.
Late on 7 December, stranded from his party and with few friends, Lloyd George sent for Hankey to discuss what sort of administration he could assemble. Law was in and out of the room: Hankey found himself consulted so widely that he thought Lloyd George would offer him a cabinet place. The new prime minister told Hankey – with what degree of sincerity one can only conjecture – that he was ‘the most miserable man on earth’.140 He knew, though, that if he could not sustain an administration that would allow him to command a majority in the Commons, there would be no choice but to have a general election.
Hankey, concerned the government should suffer no rupture so great that the war could not be properly carried on, correctly assessed that, given how the new prime minister planned to run the government, he was creating something like a civil dictatorship, or what he called ‘a dictatorship in commission’.141 Lloyd George lacked the expertise to override his military and naval advisers; but that did not stop him conceiving strategic goals, and expecting the Armed Forces to achieve them. A. J. P. Taylor, an earlier historian of the period, called the events ‘a revolution, British-style. The party magnates and whips had been defied. The backbenchers and the newspapers combined in a sort of unconscious plebiscite and made Lloyd George dictator for the duration of the war.’142 Balfour said: ‘If he wants to be a dictator, let him be. If he thinks that he can win the war, I’m all for his having a try.’143
The press, especially Northcliffe’s but also Gwynne at the Morning Post, had played a considerable role in bringing down Asquith. On 8 December Asquith addressed a Liberal Party meeting at the Reform Club, singling out the leader in The Times on 4 December as the reason why he could not support an arrangement with Lloyd George. Had he served on those terms he would soon have been regarded as surplus to requirements, and the press would have urged his colleagues to get rid of him. Irrespective of what Northcliffe believed, Asquith told his colleagues that he and Grey had been targeted by ‘a well-organised, carefully-engineered conspiracy’.144 The party meeting showed overwhelming support for Asquith; Lloyd George would face stiff opposition, comprised entirely of those who until a few days earlier had been his colleagues.
It was ironic, given the press support he enjoyed, that when Lloyd George met Unionist ex-ministers, including Curzon and Austen Chamberlain, on the evening of 7 December, they discussed ‘the desirability of taking further powers for the suppression of the kind of Press attacks which had done so much to discredit and finally to bring about the downfall of the late Administration.’145 Lloyd George observed that ‘restriction of the Press’ would not be an ideal way to launch the new regime, but suggested enquiries be made about what the French government’s policy on this question was. The next day he wrote to Gwynne to thank him for the ‘brilliant help’ the Morning Post was giving him.146 Within a few weeks Gwynne was confiding in Lady Bathurst that ‘I have no illusions about the little Welshman. He’s cunning and sharp and quite unscrupulous but had good courage and means to win the war. Still, we must keep an eye on him.’147 Hankey, visiting Lloyd George on 10 December, had their meeting interrupted when Lloyd George took a long call from Northcliffe, ‘whom he seems to funk’.148 The previous day, on Northcliffe’s explicit instructions, the Daily Mail had run a front page jammed with photographs of effete-looking men in top hats and frock coats under the headline ‘THE PASSING OF THE FAILURES’: they were members of Asquith’s cabinet, and the page exemplified the disrespect with which Northcliffe intended to treat any government that displeased him.149
Lloyd George announced his War Cabinet on 11 December. Law sat in it not as leader of his party or as Chancellor of the Exchequer (which post he also assumed), but as Leader of the Commons: a role that a prime minister in the Commons had always held. Lloyd George did not wish to be detained in Parliament, but to apply himself to winning the war, attending the Commons only when something of great significance had to be discussed. Law would represent him there. It upset the Commons, who expected a prime minister to attend if he was an MP; but Lloyd George was unrepentant. He knew he owed his place to Law, and handled him with respect and judiciousness: the two became friends. This entailed Law’s turning a blind eye to some of his chief’s excesses; but he knew that if he allowed his high sense of honour to take over and be applied to Lloyd George, he would bring the government down. As he said to Long, ‘there is, I think, no alternative.’150 That Law deputised so frequently for the prime minister meant Lloyd George had to consult him on everything, and they sometimes spoke for two hours a day. Lloyd George also knew too well the ease with which an aggrieved Law could bring him down. Law had unimpeachable integrity, something vital at the top of an administration led by Lloyd George.
The small War Cabinet (as it would be known) contained two peers of huge proconsular experience, Curzon and Milner. Curzon, who had seized the opportunity to serve without consulting any other Unionists, had great political experience too. He was fifty-seven, a man of significant intelligence, and one who had developed a capacity for duplicity and self-preservation in order to survive. The son of Lord Scarsdale of the palatial Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, his grandeur was already so marked by the time he was at Oxford that a Balliol rhyme was made about him that began: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/I am a most superior person.’ He had become Viceroy of India in his thirties and did, by general consent, a superb job for which he was under-rewarded on his return home. He excited the jealousy of Balfour, which is why it took Curzon five years to acquire the earldom he thought, with much justification, was his by right. He divided opinion, but had, before some aggressive displays of partisanship in the tumultuous years before the war, always managed to have friends and enemies on both sides of politics. He had learned much of his deviousness from his experiences at the hands of Kitchener, when Kitchener was commander-in-chief of the Indian army during Curzon’s viceroyalty. His political ambition, like his intellectual certainty and sense of his own significance, remained undimmed by age, hence his rapid acceptance of Lloyd George’s offer to serve in his elite ministerial team.
Milner had never held ministerial office, though was considered Britain’s most able administrator. His absence from the front rank of those conducting the war had been widely criticised. Both were adept at the dispatch of business, and Lloyd George used them to chair committees the War Cabinet set up to solve specific problems. He had told Riddell that Curzon was valuable because ‘he has travelled a lot; he knows about the countries of the world. He has read a lot; he is full of knowledge which none of us possesses. He is useful in council. He is not a good executant and has no tact, but he is valuable for the reasons stated.’151 Lloyd George also felt that ‘Curzon’s great defect is that he always feels that he is sitting on a golden throne, and must speak accordingly.’152 He did not like him, but had he limited his choice of close colleagues to his friends he would have struggled. Curzon told the Lords that the new government was not for those willing to be led, but of those demanding to be driven.153
Of Milner, Lloyd George said: ‘I think Milner and I stand very much for the same things. He is a poor man, and so am I. He does not represent the landed or capitalist classes any more than I do. He is keen on social reform, and so am I.’154 Lloyd George’s equation of himself socio-economically with Milner says much about his relationship with the truth: Milner’s father had been a physician and his mother the daughter of a major general, and he had been to a public school followed by Balliol. Throughout 1916 Milner, Carson and Lloyd George had dined together frequently, so Milner’s inclusion gave Lloyd George a colleague he knew he could trust and with whom he saw eye to eye. He might also have recognised that Milner was a deeply deliberative person, a quality he had in short supply and which was not pronounced in all War Cabinet ministers. Carson successfully argued for Milner’s inclusion; but did not himself get a place because – according to Lloyd George – the new prime minister had to appease je
alous Unionists who ‘resented’ the idea of his promotion.155 In a conversation Lloyd George had with Stamfordham on 9 December there was an allusion to the King’s strong desire for Carson to become First Lord of the Admiralty – which he did – and to be occupied by those duties rather than sitting on the War Cabinet, which he would attend regularly because of his office.
The final member was Arthur Henderson, leader of the Labour Party since the day after war broke out, because of Ramsay MacDonald’s resignation. His presence completed what Hankey cynically called ‘the façade of national unity’.156 Henderson was fifty-three, the same age as Lloyd George, and his acceptance of office in the Asquith coalition had made him Labour’s first cabinet minister. The son of a Glaswegian textile worker and a housemaid, he spent his youth in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, serving an apprenticeship in an iron foundry between the ages of twelve and seventeen. He was a devout Methodist and, on becoming unemployed in 1884, had spent some time as a preacher. His route to the Labour leadership had begun in 1892 when he became a paid union organiser for the Friendly Society of Founders. In 1903 he won a by-election as the candidate for the Labour Representation Committee, and when Keir Hardie resigned as Labour leader in 1908 Henderson replaced him for two years. His second leadership of the party began when he succeeded MacDonald. A man without side, guile or pretence, he was universally popular and known inside his party and beyond it as ‘Uncle Arthur’. One of his three sons, a captain in the Middlesex Regiment, was killed in action in 1916; the other two fought and survived, and both ended up in the House of Lords.
Apart from Law, all these ministers were without portfolio, so they could focus entirely on the war. Lloyd George then appointed departmental ministers, with the rank of cabinet members, who could attend the War Cabinet only when invited to discussions concerning their briefs. Balfour succeeded Grey at the Foreign Office – which he agreed to do only because, as he told Lloyd George, ‘you put a pistol to my head.’157