A tribute of regret TABLE TALK
DENIS BROGAN
In the same week in which we lost Kingsley Martin, we lost Lady Asquith. (I was glad to learn that she disliked, very much, being called 'Lady Vi' and, writing in protest to Lord Rothermere [which?], she asked 'How would you like to be called Lord Rot?') Did these deaths mark the end of an era or still remind us of an era that had passed some time ago— and remind us that the two representdfive figures had not outlived their usefulness, but had outlived the world into which they had been born and which, in various ways, they had adorned?
The same world? Yes. Kingsley was a son of the manse. To borrow (a little illegitimately) from Henry Adams, Kingsley 'could scarcely have been more distinctly branded.' Violet Asquith was not branded in quite the same way but she was by birth a Yorkshire Liberal (like Mr Harold Wilson) and many, or most, of her biases had been formed in what seems, in retrospect, the Golden Aftermath of the Vic- torian Age, the years when `Matchings Easy' was at ease. I suppose that the political up- bringing that Violet Asquith got was Liberal with a difference. Not born into the Grand Whiggery, yet she knew it from the inside when it was dying; and one of the reasons for the decline of the Liberals was the decline of the Whigs. But the little girl who had been taken by her father, then senior Secretary of State (when Secretaries of State were somebodies), to be presented to Mr Gladstone in 10 Doivning Street lived to see the days when the only teal Whig left was the Earl Russell, om, FRS, Nobel Prizeman. Even more than her father, Violet Asquith was not a Whig in that sense. Nor did she (I am told) want to be a Whig.
It is, in truth, impossible to become a Whig, you are born a Whig as you are born a Howard. (There is one well-known case of a Howard who was both a Whig and, for a brief moment, a Communist.) The 'public spirit of the Whigs' was often a reality and I have not seen its virtuous side as obviously admired as its faults, its self-righteousness, its self-admiration and perhaps its excessive gratitude to itself, for being so open-minded and so devoted to the general good of the commonwealth. But, as Thackeray wrote: you can wish in vain to be a Whig; you must be born one. The secession of the Whigs, in mass if not in detail, was inevitable and Home Rule was only an excuse. But what destroyed Violet Asquith's political career, just as it was becoming possible for women to have serious political careers, was the 'strange death of Liberal England.' But for that, if the hypothesis be permitted, Violet Asquith would have been probably the most effective woman politician and minister since the emancipation which has flooded our political backwaters of masculine complacency with fresh, refreshing tides of energy, new ideas, with the wisdom and energy of half the human race, hitherto dammed up as long as women were enslaved and as long as they were kept in their seraglio. No one was less like even a semi- enslaved seraglio prisoner than Violet Asquith. She would not have been content to look; in a most forbidding and superior manner, at her fellow captives as the captured Newnham girl does in Le Bain Turc. (I have always assumed she was from Newnham and, of course, not from Girton.) But what imprisoned or frus- trated Violet Asquith was what ruined or at any rate thwarted the political careers of so many bright young male Liberal MPS just after the First War or drove them into the Labour party or the possibly less welcoming arms of the Tories.
I have never accepted the theory that this was bound to happen. That there might have been an organised pressure group on the left, like the former Pamellites, I can well believe. At most, that was all that the nascent Labour party was between 1906 and 1914. And the Labour pressure group was not making any dramatic advances in that period. The Lib-Lab deal made by the Liberal Chief Whip and Ramsay MacDonald showed how prudent politicians on the left assessed their chances. What wrecked the alliance and then the Liberal party was less the coming of the war than its duration. And, of course, the Liberal govern- ment of 1914 prepared far more intelligently than the Conservatives did in 1939 or any Labour government would today.
As I have repeated almost to excess, Socialists can't prepare for war because they don't be- lieve it will come or are not sure it is right to win and Tories because they believe not in war or well-planned defence, but in horses. Haldane did not believe in horses and Winston (who believed in horses) also believed in oil fuel, tanks, etc, etc. But the mass of the Liberal party believed in 'the war that will end war' but were uneasy as the war didn't seem to be ending and as the strains of a more total war than Britain had ever fought began to eat into the Liberal dogmas; free trade, no conscription, no jingoism, etc.
But nothing compared with the Guelf and Ghibelline ferocity of the Asquith-Lloyd George quarrel. That feud was never dead as long as Lady Asquith survived; even the earlier death of Lady Megan Lloyd George did not totally heal the wounds of the plot that over- threw Asquith in 1916 or the deeper humilia- tions of the defeat of Asquith at East Fife. The sight of what really lush spoils falling to such victors! Brought up in the straitest sect, I could not, for a long time, admit how much there was to be said for Lloyd George as an organiser of victory, how much Asquith was a natural son of Balliol and the Bar and the Higher Civil Service. Whitehall was not enough. Garden suburbs were not enough.
It was not unimportant that Violet Asquith married her father's private secretary. It was not unimportant that Asquith trusted too much to Reginald McKenna and Walter Runciman. It was not unimportant that the old-fashioned Liberals detested 'George' as much as many Clydeside workers did. And as the emptiness of the reconciliation of 1923 became evident, the bitterness grew. Many, if not all, of Lloyd George's followers were cheerful knaves. If there were knaves in the Asquith entourage, they weren't cheerful and hadn't much to be knavish about. Even Winston (about whom Violet Asquith wrote so admirably and pene- tratingly) moved off with David and, odder still, with Stanley Baldwin. Yet as he once said to me, 'I'm a liberal still. And when I think of the,, people I served with under Campbell- Bannerman and Asquith and contemplate my present cabinet, I can't have a very robust faith in progress.'
But the faithful who followed the 'good old cause' remembered the treachery (as they saw it) of Lloyd George, not so much of what he did in December 1916, as what Mr Asquith had done for Lloyd George in the Marconi crisis. I can remember a story E. S. P. Haynes, that eminent Asquithian solicitor, used to tell of himself. He was walking into one of the Inns of Court when he ran into an old acquaintance, another good Asquithian, who asked him, 'Are you still head of the Rationalist Press Association? Or do you now believe in hell?' Of course not. Why should I?"Even when you think of Lloyd George?' I confess I was shaken.'
But there was a great deal more to the faith- ful remnant than mere hatred of that great and corrupting natural force, the first Earl Lloyd George. A lot of us thought, and think, that the sudden appearance of a Labour party as an alternative to a Tory government (and we most certainly need one) was neither inevitable nor desirable. We are now in our fourth spell of forward-looking, internationally-minded, ab- rasive government. I am not sure that we are not in for more of the same under a slightly different label. Like Violet Asquith I think we could have done better. And (what she would not have admitted) we might have done better if our great party of government had not been split by the rivalry of two great and comple- mentary men—and by the more than filial devotion of their daughters.
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