As a butcher of ministers, Asquith was in the middle grade, about half-way between Gladstone, who regarded his Cabinet colleagues, once appointed, as having the inviolate permanence of members of the College of Cardinals, and Macmillan, who in 1962 axed a third of them like junior managers in an ailing company. Asquith dropped Tweedmouth, his First Lord of the Admiralty, when he became seriously deranged, Herbert Gladstone, who was an incompetent Home Secretary but who was compensated with the Governor-Generalship of South Africa, Charles Masterman when he lost two by-elections running, and Haldane, Asquith’s oldest political friend, because the Tories, foolishly from several points of view, demanded Haldane’s head as the price for accepting a rotten lot of portfolios for themselves when they joined the 1915 Coalition. But he left the North Sea to engulf Kitchener and the Dublin Easter rebellion to destroy Birrell as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Birrell, in spite of splendid epigrams, ought to have gone much sooner before the rebellion also destroyed the prospect of Home Rule within a United Kingdom. He reshuffled some of his ministers a good deal, although not as much as Wilson, who had not a butcher’s but a circus master’s approach to reshuffling. Under Asquith, McKenna and Churchill in particular were subjected to a number of rather pointless changes.
Asquith’s own attention was mostly concentrated on the high constitutional issues of which there were plenty in the peacetime life of his government: on relations with the Lords and with the Sovereign leading to the Parliament Act, on Irish Home Rule, on Welsh Church disestablishment, and on the failed suffrage reform. Although he had himself introduced the first old-age pension in his last Budget as Chancellor before becoming Prime Minister, he left the subsequent development of national insurance as much to Lloyd George as he did foreign affairs to Grey until late July 1914. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to think of him as other than the leading figure in his own government, the one whom his colleagues naturally accepted as the fount of praise or rebuke, with the greatest command over the House of Commons, and the best-known figure to the public. In this last respect, being well known to the public, and only in this last respect, Lloyd George was a near runner-up.
Stanley Baldwin came to the Prime Ministership in a totally different way. Asquith’s was the calmest, the most certain, assured ascent this century, with the possible exception of Neville Chamberlain. But Chamberlain was twelve years older than Asquith at accession and for this, amongst other reasons, he will be seen in history as an appendage to the age of Baldwin, while Asquith, almost independently of merit, relegated his predecessor, Campbell-Bannerman, to being a prefix to the age of Asquith. Baldwin, in contrast to Asquith, came out of the woodwork a bare six months before he was in Number 10 Downing Street. Until then there were at least six Conservative politicians who were much better known than he was. Asquith had become the senior Secretary of State at the age of thirty-nine, Baldwin was fifty before he became even a junior minister. Baldwin was a Conservative, Asquith was a Liberal. Baldwin was rich, Asquith was not. Asquith was fashionable, partly but not wholly through his wife. Baldwin was not. In spite of these differences, Baldwin wished to model himself more on Asquith than on any other of his twentieth-century predecessors.
Did he succeed? His main government, that of 1924-9, was less talented, although with Churchill, Balfour, Birkenhead and the two Chamberlains, Neville and Austen, it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as negligible in this respect. He was as economical with the attention he was prepared to devote to politics as was Asquith. But his intellectual equipment was much less formidable. When asked what English thinker had most influenced him, he firmly replied, ‘Sir Henry Maine’. When asked which particular aspect of Maine’s thought had seized his mind, he said Maine’s view that all human history should be seen in terms of the advance from status to contract. He then paused, looked apprehensively at his interlocutor, and said, ‘Or was it the other way around?’ This is totally un-Asquithian. Asquith might not have had many original thoughts but he could summarize the broad doctrines of any well-known philosopher or historian as well as giving you their dates at the drop of a hat.
Baldwin’s authority within his main government in the 1920s was substantially less than Asquith’s had been. Baldwin, by then, had escaped from the anonymity of 1923; he had won a great election victory and he had made his own Cabinet, unlike his first short spell in Downing Street in 1923 when he had merely inherited one from Bonar Law. But he had made it mostly of men who were used to being his political seniors. He inspired no awe. On the other hand, partly by the devotion of vast areas of time to sitting on the front bench in the House of Commons, talking in its corridors, and hanging about its smoking room, desultorily reading the Strand Magazine, as was reported on one occasion, he acquired a considerable popularity in, and indeed mastery over, the House of Commons. His skill at the new medium of broadcasting was also a considerable and exceptional strength.