Portraits and Miniatures(51)

I begin my excursion with the currently ill-regarded and underestimated Asquith. A couple of years ago I came to re-read my life of him, first published in 1964, after an interval of nearly nine years. I was struck again by the quality of his mind and temperament and hence by his capacity to lead a government. It was not an adventurous mind which breached new frontiers, but he had knowledge, judgement, insight and tolerance. And for at least his first six years as Prime Minister he presided with an easy authority over the most talented government of this century. How would I illustrate his quality in government? I give two examples.

First, a memorandum on the constitutional position of the Sovereign, which he wrote on holiday in Scotland in September 1913 without any official advice, probably without any reference books to look at, and sent off direct to King George V. It was in reply to a rather pathetic cri de coeur from the King, complaining that he would be vilified by half his subjects whether or not he approved the Irish Home Rule Bill and almost suggesting that he had an equal constitutional choice between the two courses. Asquith’s dismissal of this foolish idea was done with erudition and succinctness presented in a framework of muscular argument while treating the King with a firm courtesy untinged with any hint of obsequiousness. I can think of no other Prime Minister this century who could have written such a document out of the resources of his own mind with equal authority.

Second, as late as the eighth and penultimate year of his premiership he gave a brilliant and effective display of his talents as an effortless administrator. Kitchener (Margot Asquith’s ‘great poster’ successfully masquerading as a great man) had by 1915 become a focus of indecision at the War Office. It could be held that Asquith ought to have sacked him, but given Kitchener’s hold on public opinion that course was well beyond the limits of Asquith’s courage. What he did was to encourage Kitchener to go on a month’s visit to Gallipoli, temporarily himself to take over the War Office (as he had done four months after the Curragh mutiny in 1914) and quickly to lance several boils that Kitchener had allowed to fester for half a year or more. It was a last display of an exceptional administrative talent, and the fact that he enjoyed doing it contradicts the view that he was over the hill and had become indolently ineffective by 1914 at the latest.

Asquith was lazy only in the sense that because of his remarkable skill in the speedy (but perhaps too coolly detached) dispatch of public business he was able to keep a lot of time for pastimes outside politics. Nevertheless, I think he was in office too long and his style was unsuited to the demands of wartime leadership. It was not so much that Lloyd George, when he replaced him, was a better war leader. His errors of strategic judgement and his ineffectiveness in controlling a High Command backed by the King were just as great as were those of Asquith. But Lloyd George had the zest and the brio to behave as though he were a better war leader, and that was half the battle.

Asquith did not like the frenetic drama, the mock heroics, of politicians’ war, although he certainly did not insulate his family from the tribulations of soldiers’ war, and he could not be bothered to pretend to an enthusiasm he did not feel. The lady who, as a conversational gambit in 1915, said, ‘Mr Asquith, do you take an interest in the war?’ was nearer to the bone than perhaps she imagined. His pattern of government should therefore be studied mainly in its peacetime manifestation, although part of the complaint against him was that this pattern was hardly changed when the war began.

Although in general his authority in the government was good, with no suggestion that he was frightened of strong ministers, of whom he had plenty, or that they were disrespectful of him, I do not think it could be said that he operated the Cabinet tautly. There was then no written record of its proceedings, apart from his own handwritten letters to the King after each meeting. That sounds unimaginable today, but it was a practice that he had inherited from all his predecessors, including one as efficient as Peel and another as energetic as Gladstone. I think the lack of tautness had other causes. He did not talk much in Cabinet himself. He had other Cabinet occupations. But he rather believed in letting discussion run on, almost exhausting itself before he could see developing what he liked to describe as a ‘favourable curve’ for bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

These methods made him good at holding rumbustious colleagues together and good too at avoiding foolish decisions. It made him less good at taking wise decisions ahead of time and at galvanizing the less energetic members of his government. This latter deficiency must be seen in the context of his indisputable achievement of presiding over one of the only two major reforming left-of-centre governments of the past hundred years. He did not greatly interfere in the work of departmental ministers and when he did it was to give them necessary but slightly reluctant support where needed, rather than to correct them. Lloyd George, ironically in some ways, was the foremost beneficiary of this support, both in getting the Budget of 1909 through a reluctant Cabinet and at the time of his Marconi peccadilloes. Asquith allowed Edward Grey an almost complete independence at the Foreign Office, but as that somewhat insular and priggish birdwatcher was, in my view, one of the most overrated statesmen in the first half of this century the results were not altogether happy.