A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE exact date when the statue of Lord Oxford and Asquith will be placed in the Members' Lobby of the new House of Commons has not been fixed, but to know that it will at any rate be some time this year is highly satisfactory. There has, I suppose, been no greater Parliamentary figure in our time than Mr. Asquith—to give him the name by which every House of Commons man of his generation will remember him. He was Prime Minister for eight years fertile in social reform and critical in the inter- national field. To him fell the task of initiating a new King, George V, in his constitutional duties, and of bringing him to the hard decision to create peers if necessary to secure the Parliament Act of 1911. Was he, or is Mr. Churchill, the last great master of the old-style Parliamentary oratory (there was nothing old-style about Mr. Lloyd George)? I think Mr. Asquith, with his massive,. though never ponderous, periods, and that occasional classical quotation which no Minister is bold enough to venture on today in a House hostile to the least trace of pedantry, even when the trace is only imaginary. Lord Oxford and Asquith—no doubt it had to be. But it is as Mr. Asquith (Mr. A. to his colleagues) that the great Liberal Prime Minister will be remembered. Mr. Asquith died in 1928, his successor in 1945. Under the ten-years rule no question of a Parlia- mentary memorial to Mr. Lloyd George arises for five years yet.
* * * *
Previous page
