Mr Balfour's Poodle(46)

On foreign policy, his last point, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was rotund rather than penetrating. ‘Such a Government,’ he wrote, ‘representing as it would, not a fragment but the whole nation, would undoubtedly enhance the prestige of this country abroad.’ That was the end of the memorandum.

There is some conflict of evidence as to what Lloyd George did with it. F. E. Smith’s biographer says that Mr. Churchill and Smith were used as intermediaries by the Chancellor, and that Balfour first heard of the proposals from Smith, and Asquith from Mr. Churchill. w The Times, in its obituary of Balfour, published on March 20, 1930, makes no mention of communication through Mr. Churchill or Smith, but speaks of an ‘intrigue’ and of ‘Mr. Asquith being excluded’. This is explicitly denied by Asquith’s biographers. ‘It may be stated with confidence,’ they write, ‘that Asquith believed himself to be fully informed of all that was going on, and he was certainly aware that Mr. Lloyd George was conferring with Mr. Balfour’.x They do not, however, confirm Sir Harold Nicolson’s belief that the memorandum was shown to Balfour by Asquith himself, after he had received it from Lloyd George and discussed it with five more of his Cabinet colleagues.y This view cannot be reconciled with Sir Charles Petrie’s statementz that Balfour did not at first realise that the Prime Minister was privy to the proceedings, but it is probably nearer to the truth than the others which have been mentioned. The consensus of opinion is that no approach was made to Balfour without the approval of the Prime Minister and the knowledge of Crewe, Grey, Haldane, and Mr. Churchill. Smith and Mr. Churchill were certainly eager skirmishers for coalition, but the second Lord Birkenhead is too flattering in the roles which he ascribes to them.

When the proposal reached Balfour, by whatever method it had come, he thought it worthy of the closest consideration. In Lloyd George’s own words, he ‘was by no means hostile; in fact he went a long way towards indicating that personally he regarded the proposal with a considerable measure of approval. He was not, however, certain of the reception which would be accorded to it by his party.’aa This he endeavoured to ascertain by consulting some of his colleagues. The other union  ist members of the Constitutional Conference were brought in, and so, amongst others, were Bonar Law, Akers-Douglas, and Gerald Balfour.1 F. E. Smith, although informed by Lloyd George, was not directly consulted by the leader of his party.

All this took time—the negotiations were still in progress at the end of October—and during this period some of the proposals were given a sharper edge. Attention strayed from the more original and constructive parts of Lloyd George’s plan and became concentrated upon a series of straightforward and mutually compensating party bargains. The union  ists were to get a stronger Navy, compulsory military training (which they had never publicly advocated, but which they were not thereby inhibited from regarding as a great prize), and (possibly) tariff reform. In return they were to allow the Liberals to proceed with Home Rule (although under the much less offensive guise of federal devolution), to agree to a compromise solution of the denominational question in education which would probably be nearer to Liberal desires than to their own, and (although there was no mention of this in Lloyd George’s memorandum) to envisage Welsh Church Disestablishment. An agreed solution to the House of Lords question, along the lines discussed within the conference, was necessary as a prerequisite to the wider agreement, of course.

The provisional horse-trading, so far as the more eager advocates of coalition were concerned at any rate, went further than this. It extended to the allocation of offices. Asquith was to remain Prime Minister, but was to meet the fate which he had tried to thrust upon Campbell-Bannerman in 1905. He was to go to the Lords and leave the leadership in the Commons to Balfour, who would also be Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Lansdowne was to have the Foreign Office, Mr. Churchill the War Office, and Austen Chamberlain the Admiralty. Lloyd George, although he at one stage offered, inevitably rather rhetorically, to retire if this would ease union  ist difficulties,bb was to remain at the Exchequer. For the rest the offices were to be divided on a strictly equal basis between the two parties.

All this came to nothing, for Balfour, despite his initially favourable response and the gloomy fears of union  ist foolishness which he expressed both to Asquith and to Lord Eshercc at about this time, eventually killed the plan. Most of the leaders whom he consulted inclined towards acceptance (although it is most difficult to believe that Lansdowne, who remained aloof from this whole negotiation, was not an exception). But Akers-Douglas, Balfour’s former Chief Whip, told him that the views of the rank and file of the party would be quite different. They would not stand for such a wholesale compromise of principle and such a sudden rapprochement with men against whom they had worked up a quite unusual degree of personal bitterness. This appears to have been decisive with Balfour. He was obsessed at the time (in so far as so detached a mind can ever be said to suffer from an obsession) with what he regarded as the bad example of Peel,1 and he was determined not to split his party on the issue. Eighteen years later, discussing with his biographer these negotiations, he stressed the relevance of the Peel precedent.