Mr Balfour's Poodle(68)

At the end of the evening the enthusiasm for Halsbury and the cause he had come to represent was such that the banqueters wished to draw him in triumph from the Strand to his house in Kensington. The plan was abandoned only because his family feared the effect of the excitement upon his health. The fact that it was ever put forward shows how uphill must have been Lord Lansdowne’s struggle for the cause of dull reason.

Thereafter the revolt against the official leadership became still less restrained. Any suggestion that their movement was directed against Balfour and Lansdowne or was designed to deprive them of their positions was scouted by the rebels; but such denials are common form with political dissidents, and did not prevent the ‘ditchers’ from assuming most of the features of what would today be called a party within a party. ‘We have our meetings now not at Lansdowne House,’ Halsbury wrote to his daughter at the beginning of August, ‘but at Lord Leith’s1 and the Duke of Westminster’s, and we have our Whips. I enclose a specimen.’cc Nor was the importance of a separate propaganda appeal neglected. Special public meetings were organised at the Chelsea and St. Pancras Town Halls and at some places in the provinces; Halsbury and others attended and made appropriately defiant speeches. It was a deep and bitter schism, with both sides publicly proclaiming their respect for the motives and characters of the leaders of the other group, but with great hostility and unpleasantness present behind the scenes.

What were the lines along which the union  ists split so sharply? Almost all the obvious and attractive generalisations fail to give an answer. With a substantial part of the die-hard leadership provided by the Cecils, and with men like Bonar Law and Alfred Lyttelton firmly faithful to Lansdowne, it was hardly a case of the protectionists demanding resistance and those who were lukewarm on this issue urging submission; in any event the tariff question was much less in the forefront of politics than it had been in the immediately preceding years. Nor did the split occur clearly along any of the lines dividing the different economic interests which made up the union  ist party. With seven or eight dukes the ‘ditchers’ were rich in magnates, but they did not sweep the board in this category—how could they with Lansdowne leading the ‘moderates’?—as the anti-Home-Rulers had done in 1886. The country gentlemen were even less decisively on the side of resistance. Wyndham, as we have seen, was a violent ‘ditcher’, but he was far less typical than was Walter Long, who combined a general tendency to complain about his leaders with, on this occasion, an almost aggressive loyalty to their policies. Furthermore, the Chamberlains with their Birmingham business background (largely honorary in Austen’s case) might be on one side, but Bonar Law with the Glasgow business background was on the other.

Little help is given by considering the issue—Home Rule— which had dominated so much of the constitutional struggle. The fear that the Parliament Bill would make this a certainty may have made Sir Edward Carson a die-hard, but if so, why did it leave Lansdowne, whose political life had been largely shaped by his narrow and obstinate views on Ireland, or the Ulster landowner Londonderry, on the other side?

Was the split not perhaps a simple division between the clever and the stupid, with those who could think ahead leading the ‘hedgers’ and those whose mental processes were closer to those of bulls charging gates on the other side? This would be an entertaining theory and one containing a grain of truth, but not much more. On the die-hard there was no one, except perhaps for Milner, who did not understand English politics, of the mental calibre of Balfour, Curzon, or Lansdowne. The talent of the ‘ditchers’ was largely forensic, and clever, successful lawyers, as there are many examples to show, can be sparingly endowed with general intellectual equipment. But Carson and F. E. Smith, at least, were not fools, and Smith possessed a very cool head. Too much cannot therefore be explained away in this manner.

What then was the quality, the distinguishing quality, common to all the ‘ditchers’? It was that they were tired of the existing leadership of their party. Some of them had specific policy grievances, like Austen Chamberlain, who had spent the early part of the year suffering from ‘referendum sickness’. Others, like F. E. Smith, were made more hostile by cool personal treatment.1 Others, again, like George Wyndham, combined great personal affection for Balfour with mounting impatience at the loss of three successive general elections to the wretched radicals. It was inconceivable that rightminded Englishmen could award three successive victories to such a band of sophists and disrupters. It must be the union  ists’ own fault; the leadership must be to blame.