28 JULY 1990, Page 13

THE KAISER AND THE MARCH HARES

Daniel Johnson recalls a historical precedent to the Ridley affair and its reverberations

`YOU English are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspi- cions quite unworthy of a great nation? . . . The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. I am, therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it is a minority of the best elements, just as it is in England with respect to Germany . . . I strive without ceasing to improve relations, and you retort that I am your arch-enemy, you make it very hard for me. Why is it?'

This is not Chancellor Kohl speaking. The words are more than 80 years old. Nicholas Ridley's Spectator interview has a famous historical precedent. It involved another paper from the Spectator's present stable, the Daily Telegraph, another Law- son, and Anglo-German relations. The man who played Mr Ridley's part in the Daily Telegraph affair of 1908, and whose words appear above, was the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.

The Kaiser was then nearly 50 and, in his own and many others' estimation, at the zenith of his reign. Yet the shadows had begun to fall on this 'flashy schoolboy of an

Emperor', as the Berlin correspondent of the Times, George Saunders, told his managing director in 1902. His Imperial Majesty's relations with the British govern- ment were not good: the British were menaced by the new German battle fleet in which the Kaiser took a personal interest, while many Germans already felt them-, selves 'encircled' by the new Triple En- tente of Britain, France and Russia.

In 1907 the Kaiser came to Windsor for a state visit, the equivalent of a modern political summit. Having been persuaded to eschew a private visit to one of his less respectable English friends, the 5th Earl of Lonsdale, the Kaiser spent over three weeks at Highcliffe Castle, the home of Colonel Stuart Wortley, a retired soldier and military attache in Paris, of the kind that might nowadays be at home in Chatham House. The Kaiser took advan- tage of the confidentiality which monarchs could then still presume to expect to indulge his taste for political monologues, which sometimes lasted far into the night.

According to his host, the Kaiser was above all determined to deny that he had sided with the Boers against the British during the recent South African war. He justifiably pointed to his refusal to receive President Kruger, but then went over the top by asserting that during the war both France and Russia had invited him to 'humiliate England to the dust'. 'Posterity will one day read', he declared, 'the exact terms of the telegram — now in the archives of Windsor Castle — in which I informed the Sovereign of England of the answer I had returned to the Powers which then sought to compass her fall.'

'Nor was that all,' he continued. 'Just at the time of your Black Week in the December of 1899, when disasters fol- lowecl one another in rapid succession, I received a letter from Queen Victoria, my revered grandmother, written in sorrow and affliction . . . I worked out what I considered to be the best plan of campaign under the circumstances, and submitted it to my General Staff for their criticism. Then I despatched it to England, and that document, likewise, is among the State papers at Windsor, awaiting the serenely impartial verdict of history.

'Look at the accomplished rise of Japan; think of the possible national awakening of China; and then judge of the vast problems of the Pacific . . . . It may even be that England herself will be glad that Germany has a fleet when they speak together on the same side in the great debates of the future.'

How do we know what the Kaiser said? Wortley., who believed the Kaiser's pro- testations that he was a much-maligned and misunderstood figure, later conceived the idea of concocting an 'interview' from notes of these conversations. It finally appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 28 October 1908, under the headline 'The German Emperor and England'. The anonymous author called himself a 'diplo- matist', and described the interview as a 'calculated indiscretion'. Historians have argued about whose calculation it was.

The text itself seems to have been drafted by John Alfred Spender, the editor of one of the Kaiser's favourite journals, the Westminster Gazette. Spender was wor- ried about the deterioration of Anglo- German relations; in 1907 he led a number of British editors on a goodwill mission to Germany. In August 1908 he accompanied Lloyd George on a visit to Berlin and dined with two senior German officials: the Secretary of the Interior and later Chancel- lor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Wilhelm von Stemrich.

Soon afterwards, Spender offered the interview to the Daily Mail, which turned it down. The Daily Telegraph paid the hand-

some sum of £250 for it. Since 1908 under the control of Harry Lawson, son of the paper's founder Lord Burnham, the Tele- graph's long-standing position as the

world's largest-circulation newspaper was threatened, both by the recently launched and unashamedly populist Mail, and by Northcliffe's purchase and revitalisation of the Times. Spender knew he was offering the young Lawson a scoop, but he fondly supposed that he was placing the Kaiser in a good light. He evidently had no idea that the interview would have precisely the opposite effect to that intended. Lawson no doubt knew exactly what he had bought.

Eager as always to make a splash, the Kaiser sent the interview to his Chancellor for final approval. The Chancellor, Ber- nard von Billow, was on holiday in Norder- ney. He later claimed, in a memorandum to the Kaiser, before the Reichstag and many years later in his notoriously menda- cious memoirs, that he neither read the interview, which was in English and illegi- ble, nor was aware of its contents; he merely sent it to the Foreign Office with instructions that it be checked and that any objections be reported back to him.

Billow, known as 'the Eel', tried to put the blame on his officials. One recent historian of the affair, Terence Cole, be- lieves in his innocence. Yet the suspicion quickly grew that the Chancellor had de- liberately allowed the interview to appear: had given the Kaiser enough rope to hang himself. According to the Under- Secretary, Stemrich, whose account was reported at the time by the shrewd diarist Baroness Spitzemberg, Billow had been warned that the interview was dynamite; the Kaiser had ordered him to read it personally; Billow had then received two typed copies back from the Foreign Office. If he had not read it before, he must have done so then. While she accepted Stem- rich's account, the Baroness thought, 'One could well credit such deviousness to a Richelieu or a Bismarck, but not to a Billow. And if he did mean it thus, he has fearfully miscalculated.' Michael Balfour, the Kaiser's biographer, argued that Billow had been well aware of its contents. 'But an attempt to prevent their publication would only have made him even more unpopular with his master than he was already.'

Once the interview appeared, reaction was swift on both sides of the North Sea. In the Commons, laughter greeted Sir Ed- ward Grey's laconic denial that any of the documents mentioned by the Kaiser could be found at Windsor. The Kaiser's naïve attempt to stir up trouble among Britain and her three allies — France, Russia and Japan — while also taking credit for winning the Boer War merely confirmed the bad impression which the British gov- ernment and the public already had of him. The Times pointed out that the German fleet was not designed for the Pacific.

In Germany, however, the Daily Tele- graph affair led to a constitutional crisis, dubbed 'the November revolution' and foreshadowing the real revolution of November 1918. Once the Kaiser was made aware that the nation was united in its contempt and Billow failed to defend him in the Reichstag, insisting instead that the Kaiser promise to respect government policy in public statements, Wilhelm suf- fered a nervous breakdown. He even offered to abdicate, though his son would have made an even less capable autocrat. Once recovered, he decided that Billow had betrayed him. When an opportunity presented itself the following year to accept the Chancellor's resignation, the Kaiser seized it with alacrity.

The monarch's own credibility, howev- er, was irreparably damaged by that inter- view. When war came in 1914, the General Staff moved into the vacuum left by the Kaiser's loss of authority. Wilhelm was excluded from decision-making and fre- quently left in the dark. He remained under a succession of military thumbs until Field-Marshal Hindenburg reluctantly obliged him to abdicate in November 1918. Those who warn politicians to let their civil servants vet their interviews should remember how they let down the Kaiser.

Journalists who accuse their peers of damaging Anglo-German relations would do better to leave diplomacy to profession- al 'diplomatists'. The well-meaning Wort- ley and Spender allowed themselves to become the instruments of court intrigues. Harry Lawson, like his namesake, merely did his duty as an editor. And those who chide journalists for exploiting leaks and indiscretions should consider that without such 'unstatesmanlike, tactless and incau- tious chatter', as Baroness Spitzemberg called the Kaiser's interview, will continue to flourish undetected at the top.