English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  McKinstry gives us painstaking (but never dull) blow-by-blow accounts of the endless manoeuvrings to persuade Rosebery to accept first the Foreign Office under Gladstone and then the premiership. Ambitious men who themselves would not have hesitated a nanosecond before accepting either office spent weeks trying to coax him to swallow his protestations of unfitness. Even in finally agreeing to serve as foreign secretary, he insisted on telling Gladstone: ‘I have absolutely no experience of the Foreign Office, which I have never entered except to attend a dinner. My French is I fear rusty.’ (This was quite untrue.) ‘I have never had to face anything like what you would call hard work. I have no knowledge of diplomatic practice or forms and little of diplomatic men. And I am sensible of many deficiencies of temper and manner.’ Never has British self-deprecation been taken to such extreme lengths. Why then did they all try so hard to get him, considering that he had never stood for election to the House of Commons, let alone sat in it? That remains the fascinating question, and in answering it McKinstry not only unravels the supposed mystery of Rosebery but also sheds a raking light on the impending death of Liberal England.

  The first thing is that Rosebery was a terrific public orator. In cabinet or the House of Lords, he came across as nervous and pernickety. But on a platform before an audience of thousands, he blossomed. His strong melodious voice, his dark hypnotic eyes (all the more hypnotic after a hefty dose of Sulfonel), his air of mysterious gravity relieved now and then by a bubbling up of flippancy which the Queen did not care for (‘in his speeches out of Parliament, he should take a more serious tone and be, if she may say so, less jocular which is hardly befitting a prime minister. Lord Rosebery is so clever that he may be carried away by a sense of humour, which is a little dangerous’) – all this combined to produce an effect which never left the minds of the thousands who had queued for tickets to one of his set-pieces. Augustine Birrell added that ‘a certain nervousness of manner, that suggested at times the possibility of a breakdown, kept his audience in a flutter of nervousness and excitement.’ He might have been talking about Judy Garland.

  Some of his old friends found his speaking technique stagey and contrived. Margot Asquith describes him ‘waving his little short arms à la Gladstone, resting a very round waist across the desk and coming down with an almighty crashing fist on the words “Chinese labour”’. Lord Randolph Churchill warned him: ‘Don’t think you’re going to terrify me with that poached-egg eye of yours.’

  But most people thought him the most interesting speaker they had ever heard. McKinstry says that ‘what was particularly sad about Rosebery’s oratorical prowess was that he took absolutely no pleasure in it’ and regarded it as one of the most tiresome chores of the political life. But surely this was one of his many affectations. He took enormous trouble over his speeches and never turned down an invitation if it suited his book. He could communicate with a mass audience in an almost intimate style that he could seldom manage with his peers. Like some men who are famous for being aloof and solitary (de Gaulle, for example), he positively loved crowds, rarely missing a Cup final and on the night of the Diamond Jubilee taking a four-hour bain de foule in the streets of Central London, delighting to be an anonymous celebrant. Rosebery was fascinated by the techniques he had seen in operation at the American Democratic Convention of 1873, and borrowed many of them when he persuaded Gladstone to stand for Midlothian and organized his campaign – for example, the whistlestop speaking tour from the back of an American-designed Pullman car. He insisted too that Gladstone’s daughter Mary appear on the platform, another requirement that was to become standard in mass politics. He always loved the democratic vitality of the United States and on his return found England ‘miserably smoky and narrow’, because it was so class-bound.

  This zest for the modern helped to give Rosebery his huge public appeal. When he became prime minister, he not only had Granny’s chamberpot removed, he installed electric lighting in Downing Street (resisted by Gladstone) and insisted on typewriters being used for official correspondence (resisted by the Queen). His alertness to the coming thing was not mere gadget mania. He took the advent of democratic local politics with a seriousness his colleagues found hard to comprehend. He was as diligent a first chairman of the London County Council as he had been a lackadaisical prime minister, attending over 300 meetings in his first year of office. The dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett, also an LCC councillor, remarked: ‘he really made London government a living thing.’

  Tories like F. E. Smith and Austen Chamberlain complained that Rosebery could never make up his mind completely on any subject. On the contrary, when it came to policy rather than politicking, Rosebery was usually consistent and often far-sighted. Although he was a confessed Liberal Imperialist, he had a decided view of the proper limits of Empire, and he was remarkably cool and resolute during his two brief spells as foreign secretary. British interests had to be defended and Britain’s position made clear beyond any possibility of misunderstanding, but ‘we cannot afford to be the knight errant of the world.’ He did have a weakness for Cecil Rhodes and played a dubious role in the Jameson Raid – though not as dubious as Joe Chamberlain – but he had sense enough to see that imperial preference was a non-runner. At the same time, he never lost sight of traditional balance-of-power considerations in Europe. He was one of the very few public figures to come out against the Entente Cordiale: ‘You are all wrong. It means war with Germany in the end!’ Having an informed view of Germany’s growing economic and military might, he began to warn of the horrors that such a war would bring long before it was on the public horizon. Is it fanciful to imagine that if Rosebery had accepted office in Asquith’s cabinet and managed to stick it out, he might have steered Europe away from war? I fear it is, because Rosebery’s prescience was inseparable from his independence. His unwillingness to compromise was the obverse of his freedom from wishful thinking.

  But it was in domestic affairs that his prescience was most marked. He saw that no modernizing Liberal programme had any chance of success until the House of Lords was reformed – he wanted a mixture of life peers, hereditaries and ex-officio members not unlike what we have today. He came to believe that the old Liberal Party was drawing to its end, and years before the formation of the Labour Party feared that the elimination of liberalism would leave ‘the two forces of reaction face to face’.

  In his groping for what we would now call a Third Way between high-taxing socialism and laissez-faire Toryism, he was lured into some sottises that have become familiar. He began to hanker for an iron-willed dictator and a cabinet composed entirely of businessmen – though when he did come into contact with an iron-willed businessman in the shape of Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) he found the experience discomfiting. Rosebery refused Harmsworth’s peremptory instruction to deliver a series of ten big speeches against tariff reform, and so the press baron, in true Lord Copper style, went over to the other side and began boosting Chamberlain.

  In his obsession with ‘national efficiency’, Rosebery also started burbling about ‘the need for a model race’ to halt ‘the physical degeneracy of our people’ – a curious echo of his short-lived father’s only recorded effusion, ‘An Address to the Middle Classes on the Subject of Gymnastics’. Partly through his old acquaintance Beatrice Webb, he dallied with the Fabians and even sipped at their poisonous brew of eugenics. He had long believed that ‘the over and reckless production of children is debasing our race’. All this came poorly from someone who was now conspicuously tubby after a lifetime of truffles and claret. Edmund Gosse described Rosebery, not yet sixty, in horrific terms: ‘The flesh is so puffy and thick on his cheeks, and his eye-orbits so deep, that it looks as if he had a face over his face. His colour is unhealthy, a dull, deep red.’

  But these lapses can perhaps be forgiven, when set against Rosebery’s abiding virtue, which was to pay attention to the facts of late-Victorian society and to consider the possible consequences for public policy. Ev
en though his actual time in office was so brief and his official achievements so meagre, his influence on events from the margin was considerable. By insisting as his price for joining the government in the first place that there be established a minister for Scotland, which almost nobody in the cabinet wanted, certainly not Gladstone, he unleashed a long process of devolution which arguably saved Scotland for the Union, just as Home Rule in Ireland might have saved thousands of lives, though perhaps not the British connection, if only the House of Lords had not stood in the way. In the end, it was Rosebery’s intervention in favour of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget (which he actually detested) that saved it and saved George V from having to flood the Upper House with new peers. He was besides an untiring champion of better working conditions, the minimum wage and trade-union rights. After he had successfully arbitrated in a miners’ strike – the first cabinet minister to attempt such a role – he was so delighted that he said ‘this would have been a good day to die on.’ His initial opposition to the People’s Budget was much derided at the time. In opposing a budget that raised income tax and death duties and introduced a land tax and a supertax on high incomes, was he not revealing his real allegiances, to his class and his unearned income?

  Yet his anxieties about the ever-increasing role of the state do not seem quite so blinkered and selfish today, not least in education: ‘the lesson of our Scottish teaching was “level up”; the cry of modern teaching is “level down”; “let the government have a finger in every pie”, probing, propping, disturbing. Every day the area of initiative is being narrowed, every day the standing ground for self-reliance is being undermined.’ Easy enough for him to say, who never had to rely on anything but a steady flow of rents and dividends. Yet just as with Gladstone, people felt that he was saying something that could make a difference to their lives, even if they were not always sure what it was. There was a serious vein in him which throbbed all the more thrillingly because it was encased in such a glittering carapace. He was a Scottish Kennedy or Roosevelt, without their hunger for office.

  By the time he was sixty, he had taken to calling himself ‘a well-preserved corpse’. But as hypochondriacs often do, he lived on to a good old age. In accordance with his wishes, he breathed his last to the sound of Cory’s ‘Boating Song’ on the gramophone. Perhaps someone should have recited Cory’s threnody for Heraclitus too. The line ‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake’ would have made a great epitaph for such a melodious insomniac.

  ARTHUR BALFOUR: A FATAL CHARM

  On a cycling holiday in Scotland, A. C. Benson went to meet Arthur Balfour at Whittingehame. The prime minister was out practising on his private golf course. They saw him ‘approaching across the grass, swinging a golf club – in rough coat and waistcoat, the latter open; a cloth cap, flannel trousers; and large black boots, much too heavy and big for his willowy figure. He slouched and lounged as he walked. He gave us the warmest greeting, with a simple and childlike smile which is a great charm.’ Even across the width of a fairway, the author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was already melting under the impact of A. J. B. Lord Vansittart, a junior at the Foreign Office when Balfour was foreign secretary, confessed that he found it ‘hopeless to avoid devotion’. The secret of Balfour’s charm was his nonchalance. Staying cool seemed to be his only rule. Vansittart thought that he viewed events ‘with the detachment of a choirboy at a funeral service’. Almost alone among politicians, he was indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies. He kept no diary, made no attempt to preserve his papers.

  His sloth was legendary too. He seldom appeared before 11 a.m., though as First Lord of the Admiralty before the Battle of Jutland he did consent to be called at nine. As a young MP, it was only when his third session in the House loomed that he showed up, spurred on by his Aunt Georgie Salisbury’s chiding that it was time to show some ‘overt signs of parliamentary activity’. He claimed never to read the newspapers, made no effort to get to know his backbenchers or to frequent the Members’ Dining Room and Smoking Room, and refused to stay on the front bench until the end of Question Time. In any case, he had such a wretched memory for names that he would not have remembered whom he had met or been listening to.

  But he had an endless appetite for the lighter pleasures. He never refused an invitation and would play after-dinner games with the Souls deep into the night or would entertain them on one of his four concertinas. He was sports mad, startling Gladstone by turning up at Hawarden on his bicycle, missing lunch with the Kaiser in order to see the Eton and Harrow cricket match and throwing bread rolls with deadly accuracy at the Lyttelton dinner table. When in Scotland he liked to play two rounds of golf a day, to keep his handicap down to ten (about the same as Ian Fleming and better than P. G. Wodehouse). On the links at North Berwick, when he made a bad shot, he would turn away and gaze over the Forth and then turn round again, smiling. At times he sounds like a fully paid-up member of the Drones Club.

  No one, after all, was better equipped to live a life of a sporting fainéant: he had inherited 180,000 acres at Whittingehame from his grandfather, a nabob who had secured the Admiralty contract for provisioning all ships of the Royal Navy in Indian waters. Yet A. J. B. led the Unionist Party for longer than anyone before him since Pitt the Younger. He was a minister for longer than anyone else in the twentieth century, even Churchill. He was the only Unionist invited to join Asquith’s first war cabinet, and he continued in the government as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power. Churchill commented sourly: ‘He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street.’ Twenty years after Balfour had ceased to be prime minister, and by then in his late seventies, Baldwin sought him out to shore up his fragile government. He remained indispensable to the last.

  Yet, if brutally summarized, the concrete results of his efforts can only seem pitiful. He fought three general elections as party leader and lost them all. The premiership he had inherited from his uncle, Lord Salisbury, almost as a family heirloom, lasted less than four years and ended in the Liberal landslide of 1906, the greatest electoral humiliation for the Conservatives until 1997. At that election, he became the only prime minister in the twentieth century to lose his own seat. Some, like Curzon, maintained that Balfour’s sloth was partly a pose and that he was in fact a hardworking and capable minister. Yet with suspicious regularity his policies came to pieces in his hands or in the hands of his successors or even, as his ministerial career was so long, when the pieces were back in his hands again. His first impulses were often borrowed or dictated by more powerful wills than his own.

  As Irish secretary, he obeyed to the letter the priorities of his Uncle Salisbury: ‘The severity must come first. They must “take a licking” before conciliation will do them any good.’ For the Irish, he became indelibly ‘Bloody Balfour’ as a result. Like many mild-tempered men, Balfour thrilled to the smack of firm government and was not averse to taking a hand in the smacking. No doubt something needed to be done to restore the rule of law as well as to meet the piteous plight of the peasants in the west of Ireland, but there was no need to say, as Balfour did, ‘I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law’ – a bit like George Bush describing the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. Balfour’s land reforms in Ireland lived on after him; he claimed that ‘the Ireland the Free State took over was the Ireland that we made.’

  Yet the legacy of his insensitivity lived on too. At times, it seems, he simply did not think hard enough about political choices and their consequences. He did not have to fight for his own interests – his waspish sister-in-law Lady Frances Balfour said: ‘Arthur’s opportunities were all made for him’ – and he found it hard to imagine that those less fortunate would fight for theirs. He told his sister Evelyn Rayleigh
that ‘his mind did not naturally turn to politics. He never thought about them in bed, which was the test.’ Unlike the great platform orators such as Rosebery and Churchill, his speeches tended to be delivered spontaneously with little preparation, with the result that they were often too long and flawed by digression and tangled argument. He was unwilling to campaign for his own leadership or for his policies to be seen in a better light. After the Battle of Jutland, the Kaiser was quick to declare a German victory, although it was the German fleet which had fled, never to venture out again. The First Lord of the Admiralty declared nothing at all. Only after several ambiguous official communiqués was there a more forthright and upbeat report, drafted at Balfour’s request by his predecessor Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, author of the ‘palm-without-the-dust’ dissing of the boy Rosebery, described Balfour as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’.

  Balfour (1848–1930) and Rosebery (1847–1929) were nearly exact contemporaries. They were both huge landowners in the Lothians, both hypochondriacs, famously charming, subject to fits of indolence, lovers of motor cars and all modern gadgets, believers in popular democracy and votes for women – though decidedly odd in their relations with them. Naturally, they hated each other. When Rosebery became prime minister, Balfour said that he was unaware of any particular quality that Rosebery had demonstrated save a talent for self-advertisement. Rosebery said that Balfour had done wonderfully well ‘for an amateur politician’. In 1911, Balfour cautioned the Palace against awarding the Order of Merit to Rosebery. Five years later, Rosebery bitterly opposed Balfour’s OM. It is perhaps over the top for R. J. Q. Adams to subtitle Balfour, ‘The Last Grandee’, with Rosebery lurking up the Firth of Forth getting steadily fatter and redder in the face, while Balfour remained lithe and bonny on his thirty-six holes a day. But Adams gives us a worthy companion piece to Leo McKinstry’s Rosebery, just as readable and equally sure-footed on the politics – he is the biographer of Bonar Law and a historian of British domestic and foreign policy from 1890 to 1945.