Asquith by Roy Jenkins

Everyone loves a list, whether it be Kings & Queens, Presidents or in this case Prime Ministers.

There is a unique joy in exercising one’s superiority over another via shallow knowledge of a niche figure whose only truly notable feature is belonging to such a list.

Herbert Henry Asquith is one such denizen of a list. Preceded by a string of forgettable late 19th century Prime Ministers that comprise the difficult portion of the list, and followed by a figure of much greater charisma. Yet the last Prime Minister to govern as a Liberal, who laid the foundation for the modern Parliamentary constitution, and the welfare state, not to mention the whole First World War situation.

When I stumbled across a biography, itself written by another great liberal politician, my interest was piqued. How correct was the standard caricature that the list had bestowed on me, that of a leader finishing work at lunch and cracking open a good novel while thousands died in the trenches. So I set out to discover.

Riding the waves of success

H. H. Asquith was born in 1852 in Yorkshire to a solidly middle class family. Both his parents' backgrounds were in the Yorkshire woollen trade, as classically Victorian industrialist as they come. Though these Yorkshire roots did not run very deep, as family tragedy uprooted them. When Asquith was very young his father Joseph died suddenly ‘having twisted an intestine in a game of village cricket’. One stroke of luck for Asquith was relative health compared to his ailing family, with his elder brother lifelong struggling after ‘a severe kick on the spine during a school game’ and his mother Emily spending ‘most of her life lying on a sofa, suffering from a mixture of bronchitis and heart weakness’.

The result of his fathers death was that his mother became the primary influence on him, herself a ‘much stronger personality’ than his father had been, who passed on her ‘unusual conversational power’ and voracious habit of reading to Asquith. It also meant a relocation, first to Huddersfield, another Northern English industrial town, before the death of Asquith’s grandfather precipitated another move down to London to stay with his uncle. It was London that truly fashioned Asquith, with his attaining a classical education of very high quality at the City of London school. Academics were very much Asquith’s style, with his excelling netting a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford. Though his interests were not especially broad:

‘A contemporary recorded that “he had little interest in any subject except Classics and English” and that he spent his mathematics hours composing Greek verses, his chemistry hours in making “irreverant jests” and his German hours in diverting the master from the teaching of such an unimportant language’

Asquith could especially afford the odd jest as he had a uniquely powerful skill outside of his academics to fall back, that being ‘a resonant, elaborately constructed, yet beautifully balanced and lucid English diction’, with debate and speech making skills ones that came naturally to him.

The metropolitan influence of London was crucial, Asquith attended Parliamentary debates and the law courts, went along to political demonstrations such as the welcome for the great Italian revolutionary Garibaldi as well as developed a taste for theatre. This all steered him towards a wordlier perspective, avoiding the real risk of his becoming a “classical pedant” doomed to reciting Plato in some backwater schoolhouse.

Asquith’s path was instead barreling down the tracks of British public life, starting at Oxford in 1870, attending Balliol College, notable for its mid-nineteenth century character of ‘a great forcing house’ of ‘politicians, administrators, ecclesiastics and men of letters’. Asquith himself being the epitome of this trend of the pursuit of greatness, coining the phrase that defined this idea (and which somewhat haunts the College to today) that the bond that united Balliol men “might be a tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority”. Asquith’s time at Oxford certainly gave a sense of this effortless superiority, though his academics were ‘striking without being sensational’ they were achieved without any ‘excessively concentrated plodding’ leaving plenty of time for other pursuits, especially debate at the Oxford Union.

1875 brought the end of his time at Oxford, and was followed by a summer jaunt to St Andrews in Scotland, Asquith’s first trip to what would later be the constituency he represented in Parliament, and perhaps more crucially his first exposure to golf. Very much the sport of choice for the late Victorian politician, Asquith was a pioneer, with the sport young enough that Asquith and his student friends ‘were able to hire the services of the British open champion to carry their clubs.’

From the short handbook of careers for gifted middle class Victorian Oxford graduates Asquith opted for the legal profession, then even more so than now the classic route into public life. The tide of effortless superiority landed him in the chambers of a prominent lawyer, but then increasingly began to pull back. While Asquith was talented and ambitious, he was not the most naturally gifted lawyer, with his skill at political rhetoric not quite transfering to managing a jury. His earnings were negligible for the first five years, with him struggling to find his feet and build the needed connections and briefs.

Facing this first proper taste of adversity Asquith exhibited the ‘surprising but strong streak of recklessness’ in his character by putting further pressure on his shaky income and marrying Helen Melland. The daughter of a Manchester Doctor who Asquith had first met on a seaside holiday in 1870, they had begun frequently writing letters after, culminating in a secret engagement in 1874 while Asquith was still at University. She was Asquith’s first love, in his words “The first real one” and despite later tensions between them, it was a successful and loving marriage. Undoubtedly the best description comes from Asquith himself:

“She had one of those personalities which is almost impossible to depict. The strong colours of the palette seem to be too heavy and garish: it is difficult to paint a figure in the soft grey tints which would best suit her, and yet she was not neutral or negative. Her mind was clear and strong, but it was not cut in facets and did not flash lights, and no one would have called her clever or “intellectual”. What gave her her rare quality was her character, which everyone who knew her intimately (Haldane for instance) agrees was the most selfless and un-worldly that they have ever encountered. She was warm, impulsive, naturally quick-tempered, and generous almost to a fault”

This period of Asquith’s life was ‘what Asquith’s official biographers insist was a simple, but agreeable and placid married life’, which Asquith himself claimed was his desire, but which Jenkins rather doubts truly was. Considering what his life later became, it does seem fairly clear that however much Asquith convinced himself at the time that this was his desire, there was always something lacking.

There certainly was something lacking for Asquith in his legal work in both its content and its quantity. He tried to bring in extra income from tutoring, lecturing and writing: aiding Oxford applications, debasing himself to learning economics for teaching University extension classes ‘(a subject for which his sceptical and strictly non-mathematical mind gave him neither great affinity nor particular aptitude)’, and attempting to write a legal textbook on ‘the law of carriage by sea’ which proved a dismal failure.

The greatest success came in his political writing, working for two of the great liberal organs of the day the Spectator (then more orthodoxly liberal than now) and The Economist writing regular columns. His fortunes began to pick up through the early 1880s, scoring more success in his legal career, and expanding his social scene in London. 1881 brought the beginning of one of his most crucial and deepest friendships with Richard Haldane, another bright young London lawyer of liberal persuasions, he would go on to be a key political ally. Haldane brought Asquith into the dining clubs of young Liberals in London, increasingly enmeshing him in the political world, while on the legal side work on a government case raised Asquith’s profile to William Gladstone, then Prime Minister and dominant force in the Liberal party.

By 1886, while finally seeing moderate legal success and earnings, these new social connections paid off, with Asquith seeing himself elected as a Member of Parliament and his political life beginning.

The Right Honourable Member for East Fife

The lucky break that Asquith landed was the result of one of the challenges that would plague Asquith’s and many other British premierships to this day, of Ireland. Gladstone’s conversion to supporting home rule for Ireland led to splits within the Liberal party, with Asquith selected by the local Liberal Association in East Fife to replace the existing Liberal MP who had opposed Gladstone on the issue. Asquith’s name having been put forward by Haldane, himself recently elected just across the water of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian.

While East Fife is a pleasant corner of Scotland, Jenkins description of its Victorian form as small, isolated and rural remains accurate. A feature exacerbated by the bizarre Victorian electoral boundaries, where the only two large towns of St Andrews and Cupar were within their own separate constituency. Thankfully for Asquith East Fife was a solidly liberal land, not having elected a Tory since 1832, and would continue returning Asquith to Parliament for over thirty years to 1918.

On entering Parliament Asquith displayed one of his most infamous characteristics as he ‘succeeded from the first in making the maximum of impact upon the parliamentary scene with the expenditure of the minimum of effort’. The effortless superiority resumed, with Asquith simply assuming the profile of the front bench rather than that of ‘the rank and file’ (the front bench being the most prominent members of the government and opposition in the arcane terminology of British politics). It took nine months for him to give his first speech, though it was to significant acclaim, and on a reading it is easy to see why. Speaking on the issue of a Bill being proposed by the conservative government to empower law enforcement in Ireland Asquith sets out the liberal case:

“As to the prevalence of crime, having regard to these admitted facts, I say deliberately that this is a manufactured crisis. We know by experience how a case for coercion is made out. The panicmongers of the press--gentlemen to whom every political combination is a conspiracy, and to whom every patriot is a rebel--were the first in the field. They have been most effectively assisted on the present occasion on the other side of the Channel, by the purveyors of loyal fiction and patriotic hysterics, wholesale, retail and for exportation. The truth, whatever truth there is in the stories, is deliberately distorted and exaggerated. Atrocities are fabricated to meet the requirements of the market with punctuality and despatch; and when the home supply fails, the imagination of the inventive journalist wings its flight across the Atlantic and he sets to work to piece together the stale gossip of the drinking saloons in New York and Chicago, and ekes it out with cuttings from obscure organs of the dynamite press”

Asquith’s great skill truly was the ability to excel in his work using the least amount of time. Productivity incarnate, he only spoke two or three times in a year in Parliament, choosing occasions where he made the maximum impact, and avoiding as much ‘parliamentary drudgery’ of committee work, votes and minor debates as possible. He did more often speak out in the country than in Parliament, and was deeply active in political circles in letter writing and socialising.

All this political work combined with his legal work. An especially powerful cross-examination he conducted in a very notable libel case against The Times - for fraudulent letters they published that suggested the leader of the Irish parliamentarians Charles Parnell was complicit in the infamous Phoenix Park Murders - brought him significant acclaim among Liberals, and a promotion to a Queen’s counsel (fancy silk robes and great wig etc.)

This increasing tide of success was met by tragedy however as a 1891 late Summer holiday to Scotland saw one of the children infected with influenza, alongside Helen. Though the child recovered, Helen had in fact caught typhoid and passed away after three weeks. Asquith’s usually active pen recorded in his diary alongside the dates of the trip only “infelix atque infaustum iter” - an unhappy and unlucky journey.

Jenkins is quick to remind us that ‘Such austere classicism of expression now suggests a certain want of feeling. But there is no reason to suspect this. A Roman reserve was always natural to Asquith. He fought against any expression of his stronger feelings.’ While the two had been undoubtedly growing apart in important ways, with Helen’s focus and joy emerging form their five children, and Asquith increasingly looking to further political ambitions, ‘He was bound to his wife by nearly twenty years of unforced intimacy, and he never spoke of her, either before or after her death except in terms of affection and admiration’. Asquith’s earlier description of Helen comes from a letter he wrote on the anniversary of her death, where he went on:

“I used sometimes to reproach her with her “pessimism.” What has happened to me lately would have given her little real pleasure; indeed, I doubt whether, if she had been here, I would have taken such a step. She was the gentlest and best of companions, a restricting rather than a stimulating influence, and knowing myself as I do I have often wondered that we walked so evenly together. I was only eighteen when I fell in love with her, and we married when we were little more than boy and girl. In the cant phrase our marriage was a “great success”; from the first to last it was never clouded by any kind of sorrow or dissension; and when the sun went down it was in an unclouded sky”

While Jenkins fairly sees the claim that Helen would not have supported his further achievement as an exaggeration, she does present a stark contrast to the woman who Asquith would later enter into his second marriage with, and never fully comfortable with the world that Asquith was entering. After a period of intense grief, where Asquith fell back on his consistent emotional support of the literary world, reading ‘four Balzac novels, Moltke’s Franco-German War, Rose’s Ignatius Loyola, and Bishop Wandsworth’s Reminiscences’, he began his true ascent in the political world.

Secretary of State for the Home Department

The 1892 election saw significant gains for the Liberals, which meant alongside support from the Irish Nationalists they were able to form a government with Gladstone once again as Prime Minister. The reward for Gladstone’s writing, speechmaking and socialising was a ticket into the cabinet, and to the respectable position of Home Secretary. Asquith was well suited to such a role:

‘…in addition to his obvious quality of quick comprehension, he was cool and decisive. He had an intellectual self-confidence which left him in little doubt about the rightness of his own decisions. His energies were devoted not to re-considering his actions but to demonstrating their wisdom, sometimes in an unconciliatory way. On top of this he had a moderate, but not excessive, taste for innovation. He liked to move, but in well-tried directions.’

This would equally be a good description of his later time as Prime Minister. Asquith was above all a capable manager, effective at managing personalities, delegating well and making patient well thought through decisions. For the kinds of problems that being Home Secretary threw his way these were virtues. His first major task was managing the right of assembly in Trafalgar Square, a central public space in London, just down from Parliament and 10 Downing Street. Assembly had been banned by the Tory government, while those on the more radical side of the Liberal party were demanding full resumption. Asquith brought some textbook enlightened centrism to bear, finding a compromise where assembly was permitted on saturday afternoons, sundays and bank holidays - if the police had been given prior notice. Ending what had been a long running controversy with a compromise that has proven very long-lasting brought him significant praise.

Not all such disputes were as simple however, a rather more unfortunate one arose soon after where in response to coal strikes over pay reductions in the North of England, Asquith approved 400 London policemen to be sent. When this failed to quell the disorder, he agreed to dispatch the military, where in a subsequent confrontation they fired on the crowd and two men were killed, neither of whom had been involved in the strike. When the two separate inquests into their deaths found in contradiction over whether the there had been sufficient grounds for the troops to fire, the matter was escalated to Asquith, who formed a special commission to investigate the issue. On this commission were his old Master from Oxford, a Tory MP and his old friend Haldane as the ‘left-wing’ member. It produced a report ‘which was notable to the public for completely exonerating the magistrates, officers and troops’.

Asquith ran into his ‘persistent tendency to be a little too concerned with what my be called “Athenaeum opinion” and not sufficiently concerned with a more general and less urbane public’, his never doubting the impartiality of the upstanding gentlemen he appointed with little regard for how it might be seen from outside. The issue would go on to stain his working class reputation:

“Why did you murder the miners at Featherstone in ‘92?” someone shouted at him at a meeting many years afterwards. “It was not ‘92, it was ‘93,” was his characteristic reply.’

Asquith was always the rational patrician, his views coinciding with popular support rather than ever being drawn from them. The best insight comes from the woman who soon after becoming Home Secretary Asquith spent ‘two years on a see-saw of alternating hope and despair’ in pursuit of. This was Margot Tennant, the daughter of a rich, self-made Scottish Liberal baronet, and the mirror image of Helen. A woman who occupied herself moving ‘around the hunting counties displaying an unusual talent for borrowing horses and for reckless riding’, especially enjoyed the friendship of great and powerful men and meeting them with ‘the unexpected, provocative remark’ - for instance on meeting General Booth (of founding the Salvation Army fame) she informed him that ‘he did not believe in hell any more than she did’. She summed up the divide between herself and Asquith’s family that:

“Tennants believe in appealing to the hearts of men … firing their imagination and penetrating and vivifying their inmost lives … The Asquith’s--without mental flurry and with perfect self-mastery--believed in the free application of intellect to every human emotion”

The latter skill set certainly appears preferable for governing countries, though a certain failure to appreciate the need to do at least some kindling of the hearts of men did ultimately help bring Asquith’s downfall.

While Asquith spent his spare time chasing after the indecisive Margot, before finally locking her down in 1894, which was far from tragic as the Liberal government was increasingly moribund. Gladstone’s focus on home rule for Ireland was increasingly dividing the party, and his advanced age increasingly harmed his ability to govern, with him viewing all his fellow cabinet colleagues bar one as “mad and drunk”. By 1894 he was pushed out, but without a clear successor in place and an awkward interregnum arrived where leadership of the party was split between Lord Rosebery who became leader and prime minister - but importantly sat in the non-elected House of Lords - and Sir William Harcourt who led in the House of Commons. This was, it is fair to say, not an effective combination, with the two men often barely on speaking terms and communicating only in official dispatches and at cabinet meetings.

Asquith’s role was working to push through a Bill on Welsh Disestablishment, a major Liberal cause but a controversial one, with the effort ultimately doomed. The 1895 election, a disaster for the Liberals that brought the conservatives back into power, was therefore far from a personal crisis for Asquith. He had positioned himself well, ‘In a party rent by faction he was the only man of note of whom no-one spoke ill’, and he could have confidence that he would eventually rise to the leadership. Opposition brought time for him to expand his legal practice and finally begin making a solid income - essentially as Margot introduced a significantly more lavish lifestyle than austere domesticity in North London with Helen.

A larger house in London, more servants, and more socialising raised the bills, a key factor in the next succession of Liberal leadership. By 1898, Harcourt had won out over Rosebery, winning the right to govern the fractious and powerless party, and had enjoyed that privilege for a few years before himself calling it quits. The two candidates to succeed were Asquith and Henry Campbell-Bannerman (The annoyingly long name an inheritance from an uncle, he himself went by CB). While there were those pushing for Asquith to accept, he himself opted to swing in behind CB instead. This was a result of firstly age - CB was 62 at the time, Asquith only 46 - as well as that lavish lifestyle as being leader of the opposition carried no salary, but would have precluded Asquith’s legal work. It helped that CB was far from a healthy 62, one of the conditions of his accepting the leadership was that he run it by his personal doctor.

While at first relations between Asquith and CB were good, they became increasingly strained with the outbreak of the Boer war. Asquith had more imperialist inclinations, and a more positive view of the war than the more anti-war CB, or another figure we must introduce the more radically anti-war Welsh firebrand David Lloyd George. The party returned, as all good parties periodically must, to factional infighting, in the ‘war to the knife and fork’ as each side took their turns making speeches undermining the other at public banquets and dinners. The spectre of secession, that the liberal imperialists might perhaps break away and risk a similar disastrous split as that which had occurred over Irish home rule helped scare the two sides back together slightly. Though the real saving grace for the Liberals was events, as the Boer war came to a conclusion and the conservative government introduced a controversial education bill and brought back that archetypal liberal issue by proposing a duty on imported corn.

The push for tariff barriers traced itself principally to Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville (appeasement and waving his white paper and “peace in our time” etc.) and his campaign for imperial preference. The view that the empire needed material ties to bind it together, in the form of preferential trading relationships between the UK and imperial states, rather than a policy of free trade with anyone. Through his public profile and influence Chamberlain was one of the key figures within and often outside the government, with significant ability to make the political weather. In response to lacklustre enthusiasm from inside the government about the tariff issue, he resigned in 1903, and proceeded on a tour of the country to make his case.

It was this issue, making the classic liberal case for free trade, that properly pulled Asquith back into politics. On reading in The Times a speech Chamberlain had made denouncing free speech he rushed into the bedroom and proclaimed to Margot that “it is only a question of time when we shall sweep this country”. He shadowed Chamberlain on his national tour, issuing a rebuttal of whatever speech Chamberlain might have made the night before, refuting each argument in turn. This successful campaign helped renew Asquith’s image within the party, and aided relations with CB, as a conservative government committed to petty infighting and unpopular causes proved the great unifier for the left.

Yes, I do very much see this period as the closest historical parallel to the current useless and enfeebled government of the UK.

Much as every lobbyist and their dog in London is currently seeking access to the Labour party, it was clear to the Liberals what the next general election would bring, a fact that necessitated some scheming. Asquith, together with Haldane and Edward Grey - the three leading liberal imperialists - made an agreement called “the Relugas Compact”. Its aim was to force CB to move himself to the House of Lords, thereby leaving the real leadership of the party to Asquith in the House of Commons, with Haldane and Grey to receive plum positions in the cabinet.

It was a moderately well-thought through scheme, though rather incompetently executed. It ultimately rested on the three all being willing to refuse to join a prospective Campbell-Bannerman government if he did not cave in to their demands. CB was in fact concerned about his own health taking on the burden of Prime Minister, and sharing this with Asquith would have been reasonable and perhaps acceptable. Yet once he caught wind of the scheme he saw that he could not possibly give in, and with only Grey willing to stay out of the prospective government, the plan fell apart. Though its failure was muted. When conservative disorder reached its climax and the Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned and the King called for CB, Asquith secured Chancellor of the Exchequer - effective no.2 and clear successor - while Haldane gained the War Office and Grey Foreign Secretary.

The new government didn’t get off to the greatest start, after they had all gone to the palace to receive official seals of office from the King, it was a day of exceptionally thick fog such that they had to abandon their cars and struggle blindly through the fog to actually get to their newly assigned departments. Though the first act for the government was simple in calling an election to bring in a new House of Commons.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

The 1906 election was a crushing defeat of the conservatives and landslide for the Liberals. Combined with the forces of the Labour party and the Irish they held a majority of 356 over the 132 Conservatives and their 25 Liberal Unionist allies. The utter dominance of the liberals in the Commons opened up the key issue that would define Asquith’s period of leadership, that the Conservatives still retained their huge majority in the unelected House of Lords.

As Chancellor Asquith was charged with introducing the budget, of which he introduced three during his time. In these he advanced progressive clauses but in a manner intended to be suitable to “a financier of a respectable and more or less conservative type”, avoiding the ire of the House of Lords and major conflict. His budgets brought the first distinction between earned and unearned income in tax, and brought about one of the major liberal achievements in the form of cautiously beginning old age pensions.

While these traditionally protected budget bills made it through, the wider set of liberal legislation was being aggressively shot down in the House of Lords. Reform of education, voting, trades unions, licensing were all scuppered by the conservative majority. Such a situation was clearly intolerable for a minority to use arcane parliamentary procedure to shut down the programme of the elected majority.

Yes I am obviously referring to abolishing the filibuster. Here the experience of this Liberal government is a very effective aid. Facing the challenge of the obstructionist House of Lords ideas were thrown around for joint sessions or referendums on proposals, but the ultimate scheme adopted was for a suspensory veto. That the Lords could block a piece of legislation, but if it was passed by three sessions of Parliament, then the Lords would be bypassed and it would become law. This blunted the power of the Lords, and ensured a path for a committed majority to have its way, but retained significant power for the minority. The government passed a resolution of this form in 1907, laying the foundations for their policy, without yet mounting the full attack, before sending more bills on Scottish land and Irish affairs to be slaughtered by the waiting Lords.

This point marked the effective end of Campbell-Bannerman’s political career, his wife died towards the end of 1906 and he soon after suffered the first of a number of heart attacks which led to his condition steadily deteriorating through 1907. By early 1908 he suffered another heart attack and was clearly near the end. This was mightily inconvenient for the King, who opted to not let it ruin his good time, leaving for a six-week holiday in Biarritz. While the government was floundering, and CB slowly dying in 10 Downing Street the King was insistent on not having his holiday spoiled. Eventually the doctors deemed that this impasse could go on no longer, and Asquith faced the unconventional task of being summoned to Biarritz to see the King and assume leadership, as the clear natural successor. Asquith’s hop to France was a compromise with the King, who had previously wanted the whole government to come across and receive their seals of office in Paris, which had been deemed clearly unacceptable.

A ferry, some trains and a breakfast later and Asquith was Prime Minister.

First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

The first order of business was for Asquith to reorder his government, with the most notable moves being his appointment of Lloyd George as his chancellor, and the young Winston Churchill, then a Liberal, to his first cabinet post. In personal terms it meant the move into Number 10 Downing Street, famously detested by its occupants Margot was no exception: “It is an inconvenient house with three poor staircases” with a “liver-coloured and squalid” exterior, with the further downside that no taxi-driver ever knew where it was.

Asquith settled easily into the role, with his first period being a calm one, though the underlying imperatives for the government remained the same, that it would have to face down the House of Lords. The battleground would be the budget.

By 1909 Britain was firmly into its naval arms race with Germany, and Asquith had deftly brokered a compromise between those in his cabinet that wanted as many ships as possible, and those wary of the large expenditures involved, with the ultimate outcome landing on there being a need for eight large ships. This was combined with the cost of old age pensions, and meant that the new budget would need to be a radical one, both to cover these costs and bring party support for naval spending that was not popular. The government had likely not intended the budget to be the battleground, expecting that the Lords would respect the long-standing tradition of respecting finance bills.

The budget was a controversial one however, introducing a range of new taxes, including the infamous land taxes. These were especially the project of Lloyd George, and were strongly inspired by Georgist ideas aiming to introduce a tax on the unearned increment in land values and a capital tax on undeveloped land. An interesting road not taken, they were introduced at very low levels, and had struggles around administration that limited the actual collection, with their fate ultimately being repeal by the conservative-dominated but Lloyd George led government after the war.

After a period of Parliamentary wrangling to get the budget through the Commons, it was rejected by the Lords, prompting the government to immediately dissolve Parliament and call and election. While victory in this election would secure the budget, it was far from winning the war with the King still opposed to any aggressive stacking of the House of Lords with new peers.

The election when it came in January 1910 was a step down from the landslide of 1906, but still kept Asquith in power, though now with a majority dependent on the votes of Irish MPs, far from the most dependable force. The core advantage that Asquith possessed, was that any face down over the powers of the Lords, he could expect the firm support of the Irish, as this was the only pathway they had to securing themselves home rule. Though this was also a burden, as the Irish could not settle for anything less than such a showdown.

Through 1910 Asquith faced the challenge of keeping his party together, managing the Irish, trying to find his way to a complicated constitutional settlement (of which a blizzard of different forms and plans were being bandied around) and to make things even more complicated with the death of the King. Edward dying, whom Asquith had gotten to know well and was significantly more deft in handling the tricky negotiations around the Lords, was a major loss with the new George V lacking many of these enviable traits. Asquith recorded his thoughts at the time:

“At a most anxious moment in the fortunes of the State, we had lost, without warning or preparation, the Sovereign whose ripe experience, trained sagacity, equitable judgement and unvarying consideration, counted for so much … His successor with all his fine and engaging qualities, was without political experience. We were nearing the verge of a crisis almost without example in our constitutional history. What was the right thing to do?”

The Lords crisis ultimately played to Asquith’s strengths. His patient decision making, ability to handle difficult personalities, and ability to calmly and decisively commit to a course of action and carry it through were essential. After much negotiation, fretting private secretaries and fierce letter writing he came to an agreement with the King that after another election he would guarantee Asquith the prerogative to pack the Lords with friendly peers if they continued to block the Parliament Bill. This further election in December saw the tired voters return almost exactly the same split, and opened the way for Asquith to coerce the Lords into finally accepting the Bill.

It took until August, with Asquith fully deploying his threat of packing the Lords, and the conservative party going through its own internal crisis of strategy, before the Bill eventually became law. The process had been costly, taking “the best part of two years of parliamentary time”, two elections and sacrificing the great majority of 1906. It is Asquith’s greatest achievement, and Jenkins highlights that he at times erred “But on the whole Asquith’s slow moulding of events had amounted to a masterly display of political nerve and patient determination”. It was a very Asquithian achievement:

‘The battle had been fought on ground particularly suitable to a display of Asquith’s skill. It had almost all taken place on the parliamentary stage and according to the classic rules of nineteenth century politics. Important new ground had been broken, but in a direction that would have been perfectly familiar to Lord Grey or Russel or Gladstone’

Asquith was very much an old school politician, but this cannot detract from the scale of his achievement. The Parliament Act is still the foundation for British politics, and is one of those cases of long-term institution building that often play the largest roles in shaping our present world. That the crises of 1909-1911 would have ended in such a way was far from guaranteed, moulding an outdated system to align with changing social and political dynamics is far from easy, and it is a task at which Asquith excelled. This act of building a new compromise to rejuvenate old democratic institutions is one for which he deserves great credit.

Unfortunately for Asquith, few other issues during his premiership would be on such friendly terrain. The success over the Lords was rapidly followed by a spate of major industrial action, and the crisis between Germany and France over Agadir. Facing a railway strike Asquith clumsily informed union leaders of his intent to “employ all the forces of the Crown” to keeping the railways open, inflaming the situation. Lloyd George was deployed to do the cajoling and appeals to patriotism necessary, a skill set that Asquith lacked, bringing both sides together to a compromise. While Asquith had also lectured the employers ‘it did not occur to him that is was important to let the unions know this’.

Agadir meanwhile was worrying in showing the in hindsight crippling lack of importance being assigned to European affairs. Edward Grey as foreign secretary had been given significant latitude, with his agreeing to military discussions between Britain and France in 1906 about possible defence. The logic was that to deny such talks would effectively pre-judge the issue, removing British ability to intervene, and after consultations with Cambell-Bannerman and Haldane this was the agreed line, though Cabinet was left entirely unaware until these issues resurfaced in 1911. Asquith himself was unaware seemingly until Agadir. While Grey saw a minor rebuke from the Cabinet afterwards, the substance of the policy remained unchanged.

The other issue that dogged Asquith was the suffragettes, who pursued Asquith as a very natural target as he was a significant opponent of women’s suffrage, a position that Jenkins rightly terms ‘pivotal and bizarre’. Asquith was the man best positioned to bring suffrage about, and in opposing it was also opposing the majority of his own Cabinet, Party and even the leader of the conservatives:

‘In part Asquith’s attitude to the suffrage question was due to a failure of imagination. He simply could not understand why anyone man or woman, should get so excited about the matter. It should be settled, not on the basis of abstract right, but by the practical test of whether or not a change would be likely to improve the system of government.’

This is perhaps where we can truly term Asquith as a rationalist, as membership surely must require one weird, edgy contrarian view.

Though perhaps the most odd aspect of Asquith’s character was his love of correspondence. Asquith really loved writing letters, and writing a lot of them, and very frequently. Over time through the 1890s he increasingly dropped any social correspondence with men and began writing voraciously to women, alongside generally seeking the social company of women more than men. He usually had a number of correspondents, and the key focus changed over time, with the most notable of all being Venetia Stanley. A friend of his daughter, they first spent significant time together on a holiday in 1912, and their correspondence then began to increase in volume to 50 in 1913, and during the war to often more than one a day, including one infamous occasion where he was penning her a letter during a meeting of the Cabinet. This was his chosen hobby and source of relaxation, alongside a penchant for going on long drives, on which he would often take Miss Stanley or others.

His gift as Prime Minister was his ‘capacity for the swift and almost effortless transaction of business’ which ‘was always such that he never worked excessively long hours’. Which meant outside of crises, significant time for reading and travel, with his preference being for spending weekends outside of London in the country. The other great pastime was golf. A lot of golf. It is astounding for the leader of one of the most powerful countries of the world quite how many luncheons, rounds and holidays that Asquith was able to fit in (with a round of bridge in the evening ideally, otherwise he found himself increasingly bored). Especially that all this seemingly had little effect on the effectiveness of the machinery of government around him. There really is no starker contrast to the modern day position, where Rishi Sunak is rarely allowed to indulge in his dream of being a Californian spin class aficionado, instead waking up at early hours to face one of the ever present cycle of crises.

Asquith faced two large and very real crises. The first being the situation in Ireland where the passing of the Parliament Act had finally opened the way to home rule. This entailed the creation of a Home Rule Bill and all the messy compromises and negotiations involved, and then the passing of this three times through Parliament, as any compromise with the Lords was essentially unimaginable. Not least because the situation in Ireland was ever more unstable as the Ulster Unionists began to take matters into their own hands, organising para-militaries and pushing against home rule. Asquith had to broker between the Irish Nationalists key to the support of his government, committed to home rule for all of Ireland, and the Unionists that sought to avoid home rule entirely, or at least force a compromise where Ulster, and often an expansive definition of Ulster including many Catholic areas, was retained in the UK.

The playbook for Asquith was very similar to that of the Parliament Act, as he sought to navigate between difficult personalities and work towards an acceptable settlement. Here in far more difficult circumstances as gun running, army mutinies and tensions being stoked to near civil war meant that action merely in the parliamentary domain would likely prove insufficient. Ultimately after years of painstaking parliamentary work Asquith did get a home rule for Ireland bill passed into law. Though the intervention of the first world war meant that it was never in fact enforced, essentially avoiding much of the harder compromises that would have needed to take place.

If the war had not intervened could Asquith have brokered a peaceful settlement? The basis of the final compromise was certainly set in place by Asquith, but it was far from anything real, and the eventual violence that would define the creation of an independent Ireland both during the war and after would likely have been a factor outside of Asquith’s patrician skills.

Commander in chief

Asquith is certainly not regarded as one of Britain’s great wartime leaders. On one level this is very understandable. He led Britain into the horrific destruction of the First World War and oversaw two years of stalemate and crisis, before finally being ousted by a figure of much greater charisma. There is certainly no way to spin it that he would ever be top rank.

That certainly was my understanding of Asquith going into this book, the classic view that he was spending his time having tea and the gardens and nosing a good book while shells pummeled the fields of Flanders. Jenkins certainly rebuts the most hostile version of that - Asquith never slacked off the work that needed to be done, and worked deeply and intensely when he needed to. But what really raised my estimation of Asquith was lowering my view of the other candidates.

Let us take Churchill, the classic war prime minister, so much so that you can go see his hagiography in the dedicated network of dim corridors under London in the form of the War Rooms. Churchill got certain key decisions correct: Hitler was always the ultimate threat, Britain could not surrender, involving the US and Soviet Union were key. Those three core decision underlie most of Britain’s success in the war. Outside of those core three however we get into a whole host of smaller strategic and tactical decisions where Churchill was likely wrong about as much as he was right - though many of these are tied up in the effectiveness of military institutions and the advice and information he was receiving. He misjudged Stalin many a time, plenty of British operations were fumbled in the war, not least the Norway campaign before he even became Prime Minister. Then of course he bears significant responsibility for one of the largest failures to lay at Asquith’s feet in the form of the Gallipoli disaster in the First World War.

What Churchill provided was a sense of charisma and morale, that fire in the heart of men that was so alien to the Asquithian mind. Churchill was able to command over his wartime cabinet, not merely to be first among equals but to drive and push the whole body onwards. Lloyd George was much the same, he possessed no greater capacity for the business of literally running a war than did Asquith, his strengths were in his ability to wrangle the cabinet and military leadership and present a coherent vision.

That is the real tragedy of Asquith, that someone so capable met this challenge simply utterly alien to their sense of leadership and administration. He failed to fundamentally change his style of governance going into the war, as he could scarcely conceive of any other. Asquith governed with his cabinet, adjudicating disputes and waiting for debate to turn to compromise. When facing a challenge such as whether to introduce conscription, where his cabinet and his instincts were both divided he was lost. What was needed was for him to govern through and over his cabinet, executing a decision whatever it might be. Instead he focused on finding the right solution, this war cabinet or that war cabinet, 3 members or 5, consulting cabinet or informing cabinet when the challenge was that the situation simply needed the single figure to take control.

Another of the most infamous lines about Asquith’s war leadership was a question that a Lady Tree asked him on a drive: “Mr. Asquith, do you take an interest in the war?”. Asquith passed the comment on as an amusing remark:

‘To Asquith it was a joke, and not even a dangerous one .Of course his life was dominated by the fighting and his letters were full of the sweep of events and of the personal tragedies which they brought in their train. The battles had to be fought and the suffering had to be endured, but he was too eclectic to fill his mind with any single subject and too fastidious to pretend to an enthusiasm which he did not feel’

One of those personal tragedies was the death of his son Raymond on the front, belying the cruel idea in the common view that he was somehow disconnected from the world. Asquith was simply the wrong leader at the wrong time, and seemed to understand that as the war ground him down. One of the most fascinating cases being when in a fit of ennui he wrote a play about an infernal tribunal judging his shade in the afterlife that is the closest to an odd self-flagellating EA forum post as any Prime Minister has likely gone, and which he followed up with the worst sentence he could imagine:

“The sentence of the Court upon you is that you go back to the World whence you came … There you are to be born again in a new body, with the bare average of faculties and brains, and are to live up to the allotted span a toilsome monotonous existence - an inconsidered item in the dim millions of mankind. You will not even be a madman or a criminal. You will have no big moments, no exceptional chances, no “roses & raptures.” You and your environment will be equally homespun and humdrum.

Poetry, art, politics, the living interests and ideals of your country and your age, will be to you a sealed book. You will not even have the curiosity to try & break the seal. From birth to death you will be surrounded by, imprisoned in, contented with the commonplace.”

It certainly doesn’t sound appealing, and reflects the fascinating blend of eclecticism and ambition within Asquith’s mind. He needed some form of escape from the horror that he had brought the country into, and so he channelled this into especially the letters to Miss Stanley. These became intensely regular, and often bizarre in content, such as when he wrote to her with a numeric ranking of every member of his cabinet of “...what I think (if it were an examination & you had to classify the candidates - like a Tripos at Cambridge) is the order in which I would put them”

That Asquith had come to rely so heavily on a much younger woman as a key pillar of emotional support proved a significant mistake. After his government had come under serious pressure during the first period of the war over military failures and shell shortages, Asquith was forced to move from governing with a Liberal government to a coalition government, entailing far more wrangling of much more difficult personalities. During mid-1915, as Asquith was struggling holding this coalition together, he received the shock news that Miss Stanley was going to marry one of his closest aides, and was devastated. That Stanley had begun to find the correspondence ‘a crushing and frightening emotional burden’ as Jenkins puts it seems quite likely. Yet the loss led into the final year of Asquith’s leadership, as his authority slowly bled away under the weight of coalition disagreements, military crises and a deeply hostile press.

That the palace coup eventually came, with Lloyd George scheming with the conservatives to unseat Asquith, seems unsurprising in retrospect. Political intrigue had never been a strength of Asquith’s, and his foes close alliance with the press proved a consistent thorn he could not handle, that brought the drumbeat of discontent to an overpowering pace, and brought Lloyd George into office.

Leader of the opposition

The fall from power brought about another tragic phase of Asquith’s political career. The nature of Lloyd George’s intrigue - using the conservatives as the primary force of his coalition - meant that Asquith remained the leader of the Liberal party, and was now leader of the opposition. Of course leading the opposition to a unity government fighting a war was not an enviable position to be in, and one that Asquith wore awkwardly.

The end of the war brought no respite, as while Asquith had assumed the Liberal Party would retain its role in post-war politics, Lloyd George had other plans as in the 1918 election he introduced the ‘Coalition ticket’ where he allied not with Asquith’s Liberals but with the conservatives, with those endorsed with “the coupon” by Lloyd George and the conservatives for that coalition. The result was a landslide for the coalition, with the conservatives taking the lions share, and Lloyd George’s coalition liberals taking 127 seats, and Asquith’s reduced to just 36.

To make matters worse the voters of East Fife finally let Asquith down, with his tallying 6,994 votes against his opponents 8,996 (it really was a tiny constituency). While by 1920 he had managed to return to Parliament through a by-election to a seat in Glasgow he never regained the political momentum. Even after the end of the coalition there was no easy union with the Lloyd George Liberals, with Asquith’s fall from power marking the last time a majority Liberal government ruled in Britain. The Labour Party was the up and coming force, with the Labour candidate beating Asquith in 1924, marking his last time as an MP, though he was elevated to his longtime enemy the Lords as Earl of Oxford.

The Author

The best way to begin this section is I believe with Jenkins final tribute to Asquith:

“He had always been faithful to liberal, humane ideas, and to civilised, even fastidious, standards of political behaviour. He never trimmed for office. Yet he was essentially a man of Government, a great servant of the State, rather than a tribune of the people. And with him there died the best part of the classical tradition in English politics”

Roy Jenkins was born in Wales to a coal miner and Labour MP, before going off to Balliol Oxford, serving as an intelligence officer in the war, and being elected to Parliament. Soon after finishing this book he assumed his first Cabinet role as Home Secretary, before going on to be Chancellor. Unfortunately both for Jenkins and the idea that we live in an AI simulation designed to make us uneasy with subtle patterns he did not then go on to be Prime Minister. Instead going back to Home Secretary before veering rather of course to be President of the European Commission.

Luckily we get back on track however, with his breaking away from the Labour party to form the Social Democratic Party in alliance with the Liberals, trying to build a resurgent liberal force, on the back of a by-election victory in Glasgow. Though he had no more success than Asquith in this endeavour sadly.

It is an odd situation to be able to so directly match up a biographer to their subject. Yet Jenkins very much fits the description he gave to Asquith, as one of the most liberal, humane and civilised British politicians of the 20th century. He sought “a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society” and undertook criminal justice reform, supported the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and oversaw the outlawing of discrimination on race and sex. Much as Asquith built a constitutional framework, Jenkins was crucial in moulding a social one, cementing these values into institutions.

Thankfully for the purposes of reading and reviewing this book Jenkins is also a wonderful historian. He is significantly more famous for biographies of Churchill and Gladstone that he wrote much later in life than that of the rather more obscure Asquith, but it is highly readable. Jenkins has the skill of matching a deep knowledge of the period and the subject with a sense that biography ought to capture the character. You get the sense that Jenkins ends quite charmed by Asquith, a sentiment that I found for both author and subject.

While only Asquith has been termed “Last of the Romans”, it seems a fair description of Jenkins too. From the present he appears a figure from an equally ancient world. Enlightened, akin to some ancient precursor species of politicians, so far from our current debased form.

Though both were ultimately anachronisms in their own times. The exception rather than the rule. I do hope we will find more exceptions.