A fall viewed from below
Michael Bentley
The Fall of Lloyd George: The Political Crisis of 1922 Michael Kinnear (Macmillan £5.95) Sympathy goes out at once to an author Whose conclusions, through the accidents of time, are largely pre-empted by someone else; and had not Maurice Cowling's The Impact of Labour appeared two years ago, Dr Kinnear's book might now have arrived with more of a Splash. As it is, the book which Dr Kinnear diplomatically ignores (except tor an entry in the bibliography under 'Other Books ') throws something of a shadow over this latest attempt to make sense of the troubled coalition politics which were to culminate in the famous Carlton Club meeting of October 19, 1922, Lloyd George's subsequent resignation and his departure forever from Downing Street. That this book is an unhappy one, however, is not attributable solely to the vagaries of time: the reasons lie more fundamentally within considerations concerning the nature of source material in twentiethcentury political history and in the character of historical explanation that they can be Made to yield.
The courses which Dr Kinnear has used in his study are predominantly of a ' public ' nature — newspapers and memoirs — and this apparently because "the crisis of 1922 was fought in the open. Lloyd George was overthrown by a meeting attended by several hundred Conservative MPs, and those MPs outlined their views of the Government, of Lloyd George and of the general subject of coalition, to their constituents." Better than that, "the political nature of this crisis makes it possible to reconstruct a representative sample of Conservative MPs to determine what their opinions were." The naiveté of these assumptions is scarcely credible. The politics of 1922 present a morass of private manoeuvre and dealing across party lines between politicians at the top; of hectic meetings, arguments and calculations among the middling sort, a group crucial in bringing about the Carlton Club meeting; and of rhetorical camouflage, changes of heart and burst of spleen at the bottom. To assume that the ' opinions ' of politicians can be deduced from speeches to their constituents, or to anyone else, simply will not do.
Not that Dr. Kinnear relies solely on such evidence; he has also consulted some collections of manuscripts, but only three of them appear with any regularity. Rather, the book concentrates on the bottom of the political structure, the constituencies, which Dr Kinnear has examined through the lens of 250 local newspapers. When, therefore, the political manoeuvre at Cabinet level is examined, the reader tends to feel that he is on the outside looking in, or at the bottom looking up, and never ('as contemporary politicians might be said to have been) at the top looking down, Partly as a consequence of his choice of sources, Dr Kinnear's portraits of individual politicians are not entirely convincing. Lloyd George himself appears in the mould currently fashionable, as the aspiring statesman vilified by Asquithian tradition, the misunderstood man who never bore grudges (a statement to set Reginald McKenna and Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice spinning ill their graves). Asquith, on the other hand, is seen to be motivated after 1916 purely by personal vengeance in his dealings with Lloyd George; Dr. Kinnear is impatient of any more subtle interpretation. Bonar Law's stature among politicians of his day is revealed by quoting half a dozen of their literary genuflections printed in memoirs published years after Law's death. Austen Chamberlain fares better. The portrayal here is more than skin-deep — and the reason is precisely because Dr Kinnear makes far more use of the Chamberlain papers than of any other single collection, which makes the moral sufficiently plain.
But it is incumbent upon the historian not only to portray historical figures but also to ' weigh ' them, to evaluate the influence of one against that of another; and this activity is affected, deleteriously, by Dr Kinnear's bent for psephological mechanics. Peppering pages with percentages and tables may be a necessary part of writing about the general election of 1922, or about movements, of opinion within particular constituencies between elections. An unhealthy situation arises, however; when contemporary mountains are converted into retrospective molehills out of a devotion to tidy numbers — as when Lord Salisbury is relegated by Dr Kinnear to the status of a mere Diehard peer rather than the Diehard peer around whom lesser men cluster. Such relegation does not suggest inaccuracy of scholarship (of which Dr Kinnear's volume contains a great deal) but a want of sensitivity and ' touch.'
It will be clear that this book is not of even quality. There are parts in which Dr Kinnear cannot be authoritative because his material is not equal to the task he demands of it. There are other parts, as in a worthwhile chapter about Lloyd George and Wales and in that part of the book where Dr Kinnear turns to the general election and its aftermath, where painstaking doctoral research bears fruit. There are areas of political history, that is to say, upon which the Hexham Herald, Chortey Guardian and Bristol Adventurer are able to throw light. And if interested persons ,do not go to The Fall of Lloyd George to find out why Lloyd George fell, they will do so to learn what the masses thought about it all.
Previous page
