Mr Balfour's Poodle(33)

VII The Beginnings of the Parliament Bill


The new parliament, which had looked as though it might be difficult to lead, did nothing to belie this reputation in its first few weeks of life. But this may have been due more to Asquith’s temporary loss of nerve and touch than to the inherent complexity of the situation. The left-wing parties had between them a very substantial majority, and they were firmly united on the two main issues of the day: they were all anxious to curb the veto and to give Home Rule to Ireland. The Irish (and a fortiori the Labour Party) could have found no basis of alliance with the union  ists, and while they had their differences with the Liberals, it was never likely that they would carry a dispute to the extent of putting the Government out. The dispute on the Budget, which even in the freedom of the previous Parliament had not led the Nationalists to vote against the third reading of the Finance Bill, was about the Irish share of a £1,200,000 increase in the spirit duty. It was a trivial item to set against the other issues at stake.

The essentials of the situation were therefore that the Government was committed not by the exigencies of the parliamentary position but by its own desires to giving the Irish the main things they wanted, and that, this being so, the Irish could easily be brought to heel on points of detail or precedence.

The Prime Minister did not appear to see this as clearly as he should have done. He may have been frightened by the rather threatening tone of Redmond’s speech at Dublin on February 10, or by the independent attitude which was taken up by the Labour Party at its Conference at Newport on February 8, but it was unlike Asquith not to be able to ride out heavier storms than these without concern. The probability is that the end of the election found him mentally exhausted and with a temporarily relaxed grip on affairs, that he found it difficult to adjust himself to governing with a greatly reduced and less cohesive majority, and that his equanimity was troubled by his failure to extract, before the election, a definite promise from the King to sustain the Government by a wholesale creation of peers if this should prove necessary.

This question of the ‘guarantees’, as they were called, gave the Government a very bad start in the new Parliament. Asquith, it will be remembered, had stated in his Albert Hall speech at the beginning of the campaign that ‘We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the legislative utility and honour of the party of progress.…’a It was widely assumed that this meant that he had obtained from the King a promise, if the Liberals won the election and if the peers proved recalcitrant, to exercise the prerogative to the extent of creating a Government majority for the passage of a ‘veto’ bill through the House of Lords. In fact, however, he had not even a hint of such a guarantee when he spoke. And five days later Asquith’s private secretary had an interview with the King’s private secretary which was recorded in the following terms for the Prime Minister:

‘Lord Knollys asked me to see him this afternoon and he began by saying that the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new peers (say 300) until after a second general election and that he, Lord K., thought you should know of this now, though for the present he would suggest that what he was telling me should be for your ear only. The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords and he thinks that before a large creation of peers is embarked upon or threatened the country should be acquainted with the particular project for accomplishing such destruction as well as with the general line of action as to which the country will be consulted at the forthcoming elections.’b

How long the Prime Minister was intended to keep this rather heavy confidence to himself is not clear. It must, in any event, have been confided to all his Cabinet colleagues soon after the result of the polling was known, when they were called upon to determine whether they should continue to hold office, and then, having decided to do so, what their line of action should be. Early in February the King was asking to be informed of the intentions of the Government, and a Cabinet minute dated February 11 told him that they involved no request for the exercise of the Royal prerogative until plans had been submitted to Parliament and the actual necessity arose. Asquith then had to perform the more difficult task of informing the House of Commons and the nation of the position and of the limited extent to which anything had been settled by the general election. This he did in no spirit of apology.

‘I tell the House quite frankly,’ he said on February 21, in the debate on the Address, ‘that I have received no such guarantee, and that I have asked for no such guarantee … to ask in advance for a blank authority for an indefinite exercise of the Royal prerogative in regard to a measure which has never been submitted to or approved by the House of Commons is a request which in my judgment no constitutional statesman can properly make, and it is a concession which the Sovereign cannot be expected to grant.’c