Mr Balfour's Poodle(48)

Despite one or two detailed objections, he was moving steadily towards a position of firm support for the plan.

Here, then, lined up behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1910 (even if, in some cases, eager to push as well as to follow), were the three men—Birkenhead (as Smith had then become), Churchill, and Chamberlain—who in 1922 remained loyal to the coalition to the end and paid the penalty of brief periods in the political wilderness; none of them was a member of the Bonar Law-Baldwin Government.

Asquith, equally presaging the future, was always cool towards the Lloyd George plan. It is true that he did not dismiss it out of hand, nor seek to discourage Lloyd George from making what he could of it. But the latter’s statement that ‘Mr. Asquith regarded the proposal with considerable favour …’jj is almost certainly too strong. Asquith’s own biographers write in quite a different tone:

‘For himself,’ they say, ‘he was wholly sceptical about any coalition being possible which would have effected the desired objects of settling the House of Lords question and carrying the Home Rule Bill and other controversial measures by consent, and he would certainly not have been willing to pay the price (compulsory military service, imperial preference, etc.) which, according to rumours current at the time, the Tory leaders would have required for their connivance. He thought the ground treacherous and dangerous for both parties, but with his accustomed tolerance, he was willing to let those who thought otherwise try their hand; and he watched the progress of the business to its inevitable conclusion with a certain detached amusement.’kk

On an issue of this sort Asquith’s essential conservatism made him a better radical than Lloyd George. He was a great man for guiding the plough to which he had set his hand, rather than for searching the horizon for some new task. In consequence he was much less willing to abandon the struggles to which he had grown accustomed—Home Rule, the battle with the Lords and the defence of free trade—in return for the excitement of a fresh twist to the political kaleidoscope. Confronted with a new issue, Asquith’s instinctive reaction to it would have been far more conservative than would Lloyd George’s. Confronted with an old one, he could be far more stubbornly radical.

The breakdown of the coalition negotiations, coming as it did just before the breakdown of discussions on the narrower point within the Constitutional Conference, reinforced the feeling amongst leading politicians that progress by compromise and secret conclave was impossible. The next round would have to be fought out in public.

This was instantly appreciated by Mrs. Asquith when, on November 10, she received a telegram from her husband announcing that all the talks were over. With a very full sense of the duties of a Prime Minister’s wife, she reacted, in her own words, as follows: ‘It was clear to me that there was nothing for it but for us to have another General Election as quickly as possible before the discontent of our party could become vocal. I sent our Chief Whip—the Master of Elibank—a telegram to this effect, and another to Henry, who had gone to Sandringham to see the King.’ll

Fortunately the Chief Whip had no conflicting orders to try to obey, for the Cabinet took roughly the same view as did Mrs. Asquith. But a dissolution raised some delicate problems. It necessarily required the King’s consent, and, in the view of the Government, on this occasion it required also to be preceded by some Royal guarantee that, if the Liberal Party were again returned, the Parliament Bill would pass into law. These were not obtained without difficult constitutional negotiation.





X The King and then the People


On Novemberc 10, the day of the breakdown of the Constitutional Conference, Asquith did not go to Sandringham to see the King, as the quotation from his wife’s autobiography at the end of the last chapter suggests. He held a Cabinet in London, at which it was decided, with some doubters, that the correct course was to dissolve at once and to get the election over before Christmas.1 It was only on the following day that he travelled to Norfolk, not, in his own words, ‘to tender any definite advice, but to survey the new situation created by the failure of the conference, as it presents itself at the moment to His Majesty’s Ministers.…’a

As part of the survey he informed the King of the decision to seek an early dissolution, said that if this were followed by another Government victory the issue with the House of Lords would have to be put to a conclusion, and, while pointing out that it would be theoretically possible for this to be done by the Crown either withholding writs of summons or exercising the prerogative of creation, stressed that there were precedents for the latter course but not for the former. He added that he had no doubt that the threat of creation would alone be sufficient to bring about an agreement.