April 8th marks the centenary of the start of the Asquith government and one of the 20th century's longest premierships. That this has gone unremarked may reflect the reserved character of Herbert Henry Asquith himself. But the neglect is not solely the result of an unassuming prime minister, or the Attlee government would be the least remembered in history. It also reflects the ambivalence with which liberals look back on a government which, for all its success in launching the modern welfare state, was in much else a saga of missed chances and, in Irish and European policy, of catastrophic mismanagement that undermined the liberalism Asquith's Liberal party existed to advance.
Asquith's accession to the premiership followed the death of Henry Campbell-Bannerman, victor of the great 1906 Liberal landslide. Asquith's positive qualities were those of the avuncular, mildly progressive chairman, judge and advocate. In particular, having appointed Lloyd George as chancellor, he stood solidly behind his firebrand reformer as controversy raged over the "people's budget" of 1909 and its subsequent rejection by the House of Lords. Lloyd George was the force behind virtually the entire "new liberal" programme after 1908; Asquith's contribution was to keep his chancellor's schemes within achievable bounds, soothing the concerns of Edward VII and George V, while sustaining a parliamentary and electoral coalition behind progressive reform.
By 1910, the year of two narrowly successful election victories for the Liberals, Asquith's imperturbable solidity and measured but sonorous parliamentary oratory, in the face of a raucous Tory opposition, had established a hold on the political middle ground which was to continue until the government collapsed in December 1916 and Lloyd George ascended to the premiership. Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law said, in rueful admiration, "Asquith drunk can make a better speech than any of us sober." This was just as well, for abstinence was not an Asquithian virtue ("it would be impossible to imagine anyone who was more obviously enjoying life," wrote Lytton Strachey after one house-party encounter. "There was a look of a Roman emperor about him.") Yet as a No 10/11 partnership for reform, the Asquith/Lloyd George combination is comparable to Thatcher/Lawson in the 1980s and Blair/Brown after 1997, and its greatest achievements—the people's budget, with its old age pensions, and unemployment and sickness insurance—laid the foundations for the welfare state.
In some areas the resulting failures were of omission rather than commission—for example, Asquith's refusal to engage with the suffragettes, reflecting his own social conservatism. He allowed education to languish. The Balfour Act of 1902 (passed by the previous Conservative government) had made possible the development of secondary and technical schools, but there was no reform impetus under Asquith, whose insular Balliol classical superiority gave him little interest in the progress Germany was making in this field. The neglect of education was the Achilles's heel of 20th-century progressive politics. Asquith, like Attlee and Harold Wilson after him, had little idea of the capacity of education and training to lessen England's debilitating class barriers and enhance its prosperity.
An equally serious omission was the failure to reform the Lords. The Parliament Act of 1911 simply reduced its powers, making no changes to the composition of a chamber which remained a bastion of hereditary Tory aristocrats. The position of the Lords was in flux for months during the constitutional crisis of 1910-11, with wide support at the 1910 inter-party constitutional conference for a reformed—even elected—second chamber accompanied by a written constitution. The moment was not seized: the hereditary peers stayed until 1999, and a weak, unelected and unrepresentative second chamber remains in place today.
Of far more damaging consequence were Asquith's dual mismanagements of Ireland and of the events of July 1914 leading to the first world war.
There was no clearer opportunity to settle the Irish question than in the year after the 1911 Parliament Act, which removed the Anglo-Irish aristocratic veto over a "home rule" settlement within Britain. Yet Asquith invested neither the emotional sympathy nor the effort to frame a viable settlement. It is hard to judge which he handled worse: the Curragh mutiny and the events of early 1914 that led to an effective Ulster Orange veto over home rule; or the 1916 Easter rising, where he left Dublin to a military command whose repression created a gallery of martyrs, catapulting Sinn Féin into a national movement. By the time Asquith left office, home rule was dead and the forces of Irish liberalism were in retreat, with insurrection brewing in the south and the threat of civil war if Ulster were forced into a single independent state. It took nearly a century to overcome the bitter legacy.
Yet of far greater international consequence was the chain of events that led to the outbreak of war in August 1914—which quite apart from the loss of life eviscerated European liberalism for a generation, and longer in the east. Until recently it was almost taboo to question the inevitability of British engagement in the "great" war, so heart-rending for the living was any doubt over the necessity of their sacrifice. Even among those who believed that war might have been avoided, the conduct of British ministers was rarely impugned. Responsibility was cast on the kaiser and/or his ministers, in the grip of a military-expansionist complex which made a full-scale European war unavoidable; or if guilt was shared, it was the system of alliances which supposedly drove Britain into war once the dominoes started falling. Thus Roy Jenkins, Asquith's most acute biographer (and political imitator), and himself the most pacific of politicians, sidesteps the issue entirely in his 1964 Asquith. A mere seven uncritical pages are devoted to the events leading to war, compared to 50 pages on Ireland and 40 on the 1909-11 constitutional crisis. In those pages, Jenkins treats the "plunge to war" with an air of inevitability, belied by his opening comment: "From 1911 onwards the European scene was menacing… But there was no especial menace in the first half of 1914. There was no slow, inevitable edging towards war as in 1939. Even after the murders at Sarajevo, the mood did not change."
By contrast, Asquith himself was revealingly prolific in chronicling the run-up to war, frequently writing long and frank letters to his 27-year-old lover Venetia Stanley, some penned in the midst of cabinet meetings and Commons debates. Published over 20 years ago, the letters are among the most riveting ever written by a prime minister. They show Asquith barely engaged in the escalating European crisis until its final days; Ulster was his main concern until the very end of July. Diplomacy was left to a vacillating and uncertain Edward Grey at the foreign office.
As late as 24th July, at the end of a letter mostly about Ulster, Asquith simply notes: "Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators" in any forthcoming European conflict. Four days later he is still writing in this distant vein, even drawing comfort from the prospect that the European situation may have the effect "of throwing into the background the lurid pictures of civil war in Ulster." Later still, on 29th July, Asquith concluded a divided cabinet with the decision, as reported to the King, that even in the event of a German violation of Belgian neutrality—which was to become the casus belli less than a week later—"Sir E Grey should be authorised to inform the German and French ambassadors that at this stage we were unable to pledge ourselves in advance, either under all conditions to stand aside or in any conditions to join in." "It sounded a little pusillanimous," writes Jenkins laconically of this crucial decision, "but it was bound to be unless the cabinet was to be split." That one sentence contains the most damning indictment possible of Asquith's leadership.
From the Venetia letters it is clear that Asquith did not appreciate the magnitude of the European crisis until Saturday 1st August—three days before the German invasion of Belgium. Until the day before, he had been planning to attend a weekend house party with Venetia in Anglesey. The miscalculation of British intentions that played a decisive part in the outbreak of war was unsurprising: those intentions were unclear. As matters stood on 4th August, Britain would still have done best to stay out of the war. But if a firm, consistent declaration of British intentions had come earlier, war may not have arisen at all.
August 4th 1914 unleashed forces of destruction which scarred the 20th century. It was also the day when the Liberal party destroyed itself as the dominant vehicle for progressive politics in Britain. As for Asquith, on 3rd August he wrote to Venetia deploring the cheering crowds outside Buckingham Palace in favour of war: "You remember Sir R Walpole's remark: 'Now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they'll be wringing their hands.' How one loathes such levity." The war he sanctioned lasted not for a few weeks but for four years, and in direct consequence another followed shortly after. There is all too little to celebrate at Asquith's centenary.
