Balfour: The Last Grandee may perhaps lack the intimate charm of Max Egremont’s biography of 1980, which first untangled the scant skeins of Balfour’s love life, but in its lucid, generous and unobtrusive fashion, it offers readers everything they need to form a judgment on this baffling character. Adams’s reluctance to be censorious may lead the reader to make that judgment sterner than it would have been. One of Balfour’s grounds for despising Rosebery was that he regarded himself as a serious philosopher and writer, while Rosebery was merely a lightweight fatally addicted to the vulgar pleasures of the turf. Balfour presented himself as a curious mixture of Bertie Wooster and Bertie Russell.
Certainly, no British prime minister has been more at the centre of a genuinely intellectual circle. His brothers-in-law were Lord Rayleigh, who became head of the Cavendish Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G. K. Chesterton, R. B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an age of waning faith, set out to contribute towards a working philosophy of religious belief. A decade earlier, several of the same cast had joined Balfour in founding the Society for Psychical Research. While claiming to be sceptical about the ectoplasm and the furniture-moving, Balfour never lost his taste for séances and lapped up messages from the astral plane. On his deathbed, he was happy to receive Mrs Willett, his brother Gerald’s favourite medium, who immediately announced that the room ‘was full of presences’ and two days later made contact with the spirits of several departed Souls of whom Balfour had been fond, especially May Lyttelton. Mrs Willett told Balfour that May had sent a message: ‘Tell him he gives me joy.’ Balfour murmured that he was profoundly impressed. Compared with all this, Tony Blair’s fear that he might be thought ‘a nutter’ for taking an interest in religion seems rather tame. Yet one wonders how deeply committed to any of it Balfour really was. In his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent universe. The famous passage in his Foundations of Belief still makes you shiver:
Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets . . . after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ‘Imperishable monuments’ and ‘immortal deeds’, death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been.
This grim scenario was only a prelude to the argument already rehearsed in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt and his opening paper to the Synthetic Society: that natural science on its own could not explain or underpin man’s sense of morality, beauty and reverence. Yet he conceded so much to evolutionary processes – their ability to generate altruism, for example – that his faith in a First Cause seems a bit pallid and residual. It sustained him, nonetheless, as an easy-going communicant in both the Presbyterian and Anglican Churches all his life. If there was a fundamental pessimism lurking beneath his blithe exterior, it does not seem to have troubled him much. He was happy whistling in the dark.
There was, though, a rather unnerving contrast between his appetite for dwelling on large speculative questions of philosophy and religion and his rather cursory attention to questions of long-term political and economic strategy (as opposed to short-term tactics, at which he was as adroit as he was on the putting green). As a young man, he liked to claim that he was prey to hopeless indecision and could never decide whether to descend from the first floor by the left or by the right of the two great staircases of his London house. What was so damaging was his affectation that political decisions might ultimately matter just as little. When his party was torn apart by the dispute over tariff reform, he infuriated both factions by making it clear that he did not care much either way. When it came to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, Balfour was initially prepared to accept that the House of Lords for the first time in two centuries might throw out a budget that had been passed by a huge margin in the Commons; then he energetically sought to resolve the ensuing crisis by inviting their lordships to back down. The budget he had denounced as unconstitutional suddenly seemed to be constitutional after all, and it was the lords themselves who were behaving unconstitutionally.
This ability to see both sides of the question but to see nothing important in either of them could result in his announcing contradictory aims in the same sentence without a blush, for example in the so-called ‘Valentine Letter’ of 14 February 1906 to Austen Chamberlain, in which Balfour asserted that ‘the establishment of a moderate general tariff on manufactured goods, not imposed for the purpose of raising prices or giving artificial protection against legitimate competition, and the imposition of a small duty on foreign corn, are not in principle objectionable.’ But what other purpose or result could these new taxes conceivably have? Not surprisingly, this facing-both-ways didn’t even succeed in warding off his prime fear, that of splitting the Tories. ‘I cannot become another Robert Peel in my party,’ he moaned. Well, the party split anyway, and unlike Peel, Balfour had achieved nothing.
In the same way, the declaration for ever associated with his name, which derived from his long-standing friendship with Chaim Weizmann, contained irreconcilable contradictions within its final wording: it called for the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, but at the same time, Edwin Montagu and Curzon, who knew what they might be in for, were to be placated by the rider that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ Balfour saw no looming conflict, and even ten years later, having in the meantime been cheered by Jewish settlers in Jerusalem and rescued by French cavalry from an angry mob in Damascus, he still maintained that ‘nothing has occurred during that period to suggest the least doubt as to the wisdom of this new departure.’
As for Ireland, in 1916 Lloyd George said that in the cabinet ‘Bloody Balfour’ fought for the new settlement ‘as if he had been a Home Ruler all of his life’.
Even when he saw clearly, he seldom saw steadily. ‘If Constantinople fell,’ Adams imagines him reasoning when it was first suggested that the slaughter on the Western Front could be shortened by a diversion to the East, in particular by an attack on the Dardanelles, ‘who would then possess it and control the Bosporus? For that matter, would a campaign to topple Turkey, or a successful Russian assault in the East, really “finish the war”? Might it not be “regarded as merely subsidiary”, inflicting its wounds but leaving Germany undefeated and the Western Front essentially as it was?’ Yet, little by little, more passionate advocates like Churchill wore him down, and by the end of the tragic venture he was the last man in the cabinet arguing against the evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula.
He accused his successor as prime minister, the Liberal Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, of being a ‘mere cork, dancing on a torrent which he cannot control’. But the same could just as well be said of himself. After following Balfour through some of his serpentine manoeuvres, one often feels like echoing Campbell-Bannerman’s exasperation: ‘The Right Honourable Gentleman comes back to this new House of Commons with the same airy graces – the same subtle dialectics – and the same light and frivolous way of dealing with great questions. I say . . . enough of this foolery.�
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It was impossible ever quite to pin Balfour down. He was as flirtatious and elusive as Cherubino. In his youth he had always been a pet. To Randolph Churchill and the young bloods of the ‘Fourth Party’, he was ‘Postlethwaite’; to the Souls he was ‘Adored Gazelle’. Charm he had in abundance, but more than charm he would not give. In responding to (and returning) a love letter from Mary Elcho (née Wyndham), he said: ‘I do not regret that I said nothing in my last epistle of the kind which perhaps you wished. Such things are impossible to me.’ Echoes here of his contemporary Henry James, allegedly, to Hugh Walpole: ‘I can’t, I can’t.’ In another letter, he wrote: ‘Whether I have time for Love or not, I certainly have no time for Matrimony.’ He was, nonetheless, expected to marry May Lyttelton, and was described as being ‘staggered to the last degree’ by her death from typhoid at the age of twenty-five. Yet there is no hint in any of his or May’s letters of any such attachment or plan. He was often deeply upset by the death of his friends, and was always glad to hear news of them from the Other Side.
Naturally, he was said to be quite sexless. Beaverbrook said: ‘Balfour was a hermaphrodite. No one ever saw him naked.’ Not quite true: though he usually dictated in his dressing gown, he would sometimes do so in his bath. For most of his adult life he enjoyed what was at the least an amitié amoureuse with Mary Elcho, but she wrote sadly after thirty years of it: ‘I’ll give you this much, tho, for although you have only loved me little yet I must admit you have loved me long.’
There are stray hints in their correspondence, always from her side, that they had paddled a little further together, perhaps in an unorthodox direction. In November 1911, just after he had resigned as party leader, she wrote: ‘It seems to me a pretty tribute that upon yr attaining yr liberty a certain (white) slave should also be liberated. What think you?’ In 1905, after seeing a play about a finishing school, she wrote: ‘It reminded me, not that it in any way resembled it, of our school – the one I have aptly named and rather wittily named “the finishing school” – certainly, in many respects you gave that poor young girl a “liberal education” and left no regions of her little body! unexplored, after that night there will have been few surprises left for her.’ Two years later: ‘I must send you a valentine tonight . . . the Valentine objects are somewhat obscure – to the left is a birch rod, to the right a brush and a tin of squirting grease (smells of peppermint).’ Perhaps we’ll just leave it there.
It is not surprising, in view of her weird lover and her faithless husband, that Mary consented to be thrown to the ground in the most straightforward manner by the poet-lothario Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, her cousin twenty years her senior, who was leading Mary and her children on an expedition into the desert. As Irish secretary, Balfour had had Blunt jailed for nationalist agitation. Knowing of A. J. B.’s tendresse for Mary, the old goat may have derived extra satisfaction when he crept into her tent. Balfour was scarcely likely to compete with the words Blunt claimed he had whispered through the tent flap: ‘It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh saying open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled, for my head is filled with dew and my locks with the drops of the night.’ I do think, though, in view of the track record, that Adams is being a little charitable when he protests that the Souls ‘only occasionally lapsed (within the group, at any rate) into actual adultery’.
In the end, I am afraid, the charm is all that remains. On coming to the end of Balfour’s almost interminable public life, I cannot help feeling a little like Anthony Blanche after going round Charles Ryder’s exhibition: ‘Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art’ – and it’s not too good for Scotsmen either.
OUR STATESMEN
Marble and bronze are hopeless materials for the job. To model modern British statesmen, you need some fleshly substance. That latex foam they use for the Spitting Image puppets might be appropriate, with its rude, bungy, punchable quality. Anyone who looks into the outstanding political figures of the past century must be baffled by the complaint that the colour has gone out of politics. What bounders and bon viveurs most of them were. Lloyd George and Mosley and Eden were insatiable adulterers, Mosley in particular being an Olympic swordsman in every sense. Asquith and Roy Jenkins were not far behind in that department. As for their other appetites, twentieth-century statesmen – Asquith, Churchill, Healey, Jenkins – downed Homeric quantities of booze between them. Heath’s gluttony, especially in his latter years, demanded Gillray’s pencil. Macmillan, one of the few prime ministers to make even a pretence of piety, was at the same time no flincher from the glass, which is not surprising since he belonged to half-a-dozen West End clubs and virtually lived in them.
Perhaps we should forgive them their indulgences, for to be a British statesman throughout the twentieth century was to be on the receiving end of history. ‘Events, dear boy, events’ was Macmillan’s famous, possibly apocryphal reply to someone who asked him what was the most important thing in politics. What a battering they all took. Several – Asquith, Churchill, Macmillan – made a fine show of being imperturbable, or unflappable as Supermac was described in his heyday, which was a terrific performance because he had undergone long-term treatment for depression and continued to throw up before making a big speech in Parliament.
The onslaught of hostile and untamable forces was relentless: the Irish Question which had bedevilled British governments since the 1870s and was to resurface no less bloodily in the late 1960s, the recurrent industrial unrest that boiled up in 1911 and lasted another seventy-odd years, the implacable rise of German militarism segueing into the rise of fascism, the implosion of the Liberal Party, the venomous quarrels within the Labour Party, which split twice within the period (and could well do so a third time), the communist threat at home and abroad. Two world wars, a general strike, a seemingly endless economic depression, or rather series of depressions between the wars, the virtual bankruptcy of the United Kingdom after the Second World War, and, partly as a result, the headlong break-up of the British Empire. These were huge and mostly terrible events which no individual politician could hope to master. Often all that could be done was to rescue as much as could be rescued from the debris and put a brave face on it.
Like many people who write about politics, I used to be pitiless about the inadequacies of our masters. But I now feel more inclined to salute the courage and charm with which these men usually met what was coming at them, their resourcefulness when they were so short of real resources, although I continue to log their absurdities and self-deceptions.
Then almost at the end of the period, a quite different character pops up: a woman to start with, puritanical by nature, with none of the ordinary vices, lacking in natural charm or much in the way of humour, lacking too that easy sociability which had sustained most of her predecessors, above all, more tenacious than they had dared to be and unwilling, as they had not been, to admit that history would get the better of her. She was lucky of course. She came along at a time when the overweening pretensions of the trade unions had exhausted public patience and the Soviet Empire was beginning to fall apart from within. Even so, her conspicuous triumphs – the Falklands and the miners’ strike – were close-run. And from the beginning to the end of her time in office, half her colleagues were longing to see the back of her. What can be said is that she made the most of her luck, which is all that anyone can do. But I think it fair to say that the men who came before her were dealt poorer hands and played their cards as best they could.
MARGOT, A SQUITH AND THE GREAT WAR
The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) . . . ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?’
Millions of people then and ever since have shared the bafflement a
nd anguish of Prince Lichnowsky and have asked the same questions. If the Kaiser’s ambassador to London, a warm Anglophile, felt so impotent and overwhelmed by events, no wonder the lightning onset of the Great War has remained the historical question of the last hundred years. Or rather questions, for following on the heels of ‘How did it start, and why?’ comes ‘Could it have been prevented? – and if so, by whom?’, ‘Who was to blame?’ and, for the British anyway, ‘Could we have kept out of it?’
No other event has generated such an endless line of huge books, some reaching back to the Franco-Prussian War, others obsessively going over the last few days leading up to the declarations of war on 3 and 4 August. The pace of events is so hurtling, the outcome so tragic, that for all their length most of these books are impossible to put down, and accordingly tend to be received as magisterial masterpieces, although their conclusions may be utterly different from one another. The question is never laid to rest. The hunt goes on for the smoking gun, the killer fact (these often deployed metaphors being the worst possible in the circumstances).
Margot Asquith kept a diary for forty-seven years, off and on, starting when she was twelve years old. Yet it is only the two and a half years from July 1914 to Asquith’s fall in December 1916 that Michael and Eleanor Brock have chosen to publish. Even within this period, they tell us, they have excluded most of her musings on her family, as well as lists of many of the guests she entertained so frenetically. On the other hand, the book is plumped out by the editors’ introduction of 116 pages, mostly sketching the domestic and international background to the crisis and occupying nearly half as much space as the diary extracts themselves. Margot’s journals too, it seems, are to be conscripted into the hunt for the truth about the war.
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