Really , Smith!

By BRIAN INGLIS AGIANT: the publishers predictably call F. E. Smith,* 'in an age of giants.' It is easy to think so : for Smith grew up into the Conservative Party of Salisbury, Balfour, and Joe Chamber- lain; established himself alongside the Cecils, Car- son, Curzon, Isaacs and Milner; ranged himself against Asquith, Lloyd George, Grey and Churchill—not to mention the Irish. Formidable competition; and yet . . . When in 1911 the Conservatives met to elect a successor to Balfour, the contest was between Walter Long, whose name is now recalled with difficulty, and Austen Chamberlain, a man of some qualities but few talents; and, after a deadlock, the party had to fall back on Bonar Law, who but for the assiduous efforts of his friend Beaverhrook would still be remembered only as the unknown prime minister.

The obvious implication--that FE and the others were men of ordinary stature among pygmics—would be unjust to FE. He .had a re- markable mind, using the term to mean a capacity to master a subject for a particular pur- pose—for an examination, say, or for a brief. To become Vinerian Law Scholar at Oxford he de- feated even the great Holdsworth; and there are many examples of his astonishing capacity to reduce massive and complex quantities of material to the precise needs of a client in court.

More : he was the greatest all-round advocate —on the platform, at Westminster and in the courts—of his day; perhaps of all time, in these islands. Dan 'O'Connell might contest that claim, but O'Connell, the more effective mob orator, never established the same ascendency at West- minster. To read about FE's maiden speech, with its calculated defiance of parliamentary conven- tion (it was a sarcastic onslaught, no indulgence craved, on the government and on Lloyd George) is to be reminded of exasperation with the present * RE By Frederick, 2nd Earl of Birkenhead. (Eyre and Sp miswoode. 63s.) stifling political atmosphere. Many of his con- temptuous outbursts could today be repeated almost verbatim. 'Conscious of having achieved success by his own unaided efforts,' his son recalls, 'the promotion of elder sons of high lineage in the Conservative Party filled him with a contempt which he was at no pains to conceal. "Subsidised politics," he said to me once about a man whose origins were no more patrician than his own, but who had taken the quicker route through personal charm and a judicious marriage.' The subsidised politics of 1960 could do with another FE.

These qualities were much needed by his party, and the mystery has been why he did not make more of a mark (as distinct from an impact, which he certainly made) on the politics, of his time. F.E. does not provide a wholly satisfactory answer. It bears a resemblance to the recent biography of Northcliffe—both are too long, too impeded by irrelevancies; both strive to be judi- ciously critical; but in both the understandable piety of the authors shows through. In F.E., too, there are strange omissions, No reference to Chesterton's Antichrist? Really, Smith! Yet in spite of the growing impression that we are not being given the whole story, less because the author is consciously engaged on suppression than because he is basically anxious to vindicate his father, there is ample . material from which to discover why FE failed.

. He was not, of course, a failure by ordinary standards. At the start of his career he decided that he would become either Prime Minister or Lord Chancellor; and Lord Chancellor he became —an outstanding one, at that. But on the day in 1919 that he allowed Lloyd George to boot him out of the Commons on to the Woolsack, his career collapsed (so, incidentally, does his bio- graphy, which is overloaded with the Twenties. There is always more--vastly 'more—material towards the end of a famous man's life than for the earlier years; biographers must cultivate a professional ruthlessness which the second Earl, unlike his father, does not possess). To rephrase the question, then : why had FE to be content with achieving his secondary ambition, when he had so many of the qualifications to go farther—to become the leader of his party?

Because he was so well hated? His son stresses FE's inability to suffer fools gladly—and admits that the fools included not merely people FE dis- liked or despised. 'For a man extremely sensitive to malicious comments about himself, he showed an astonishing insensitiveness as to the wounds he inflicted upon other people, often those he loved and respected . . . unable to repress the phrases which came all too readily into his mind, he left his path strewn with unnecessary enemies.' `I can well understand,' Austen Chamberlain (who greatly admired him) wrote on hearing of FE's death, 'anyone who had no more than a passing acquaintance with him detesting him cordially.' This was an understatement : FE had an aura of arrogance which aroused resentment among people who had not even a passing acquaintance with him. But this does not account for his failure. Winston Churchill was just as unpopular. and even more of an object of mistrust.

Because he was irresponsible? His family were disturbed by what his son calls his fecklessness : too polite a term. FE had a bucket-shop owner's view of credit; tradesmen, he appears to have believed, should consider themselves lucky to be in his debt; they would get their money back in due course when his. plans matured, and in the meantime they could console themselves that they were being bilked by a genius. His family were the chief sufferers; they saw fortunes being squandered—and FE, according to his son, was the kind of man who reacted to any protest by even more conspicUous extravagance. (At one time he had six cars, only three of which he used.) But such habits were not then peculiar to FE; no doubt people advised the freshman arriving at Oxford (perhaps they do still?) that no tradesman would respect him if he paid his bills promptly. He was merely being in the fashion : and though the fashion has caused much misery and not a few bankruptcies, it can hardly have damaged his reputation among his colleagues.

A better clue to his--relative—failure is pro- vided by that early ambition of his : to be either Prime Minister or Lord Chancellor. The possessor of as brilliant a mind as FE's is always tempted, if he has such ambitions, to use it to help him on his way by indicating short cuts. Believing himself to be a man of destiny he was able to persuade himself that whatever he did to improve his position or reputation was justified. His normal criterion for making any decision was simply: will this help my career?

At first the tricks this led him into were venial enough. C. B. Fry, who was at Wadham with him, recalled that FE managed to discard what he thought was the impediment of his Lancashire accent in a few weeks; and he indulged in that common undergraduate pretence of doing no work, when in fact he was working hard. But gradually, finding such ruses successful, FE began to lose contact with principle, and even with reality. He began to create myths about himself --moving himself and his audience to tears at his son's 'twenty-first' with a pathetic picture of his impoverished mother's hard-earned gift to him 818 on his I gem ow r mer suac mig stet wit rat SI ;nal was for row can doe! for r FE imp men Lev, bus beg the had B crea nee FE, son brut to s was by wha it; him! polii igno judg still whic tend coal way. toda sensi goo( for ing t One why MirI Ma r4 prod opini I wit! Grey with peop pricy whic

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his twenty-first--ten shillings—when in fact family had been quite well-off, and his mother !rolls. And in time FE began to believe his i lies : towards the end of his career he not ely allowed his books to be ghosted, but per- led himself that he had written them (disgrace ht have followed when one of his ghosts was ,cted in large-scale plagiarism, had not FE, the help of his old courtcraft, been able her shabbily to extricate himself).

haring this overriding ambition was his )ility to bear failure. FE, according to his son, not vindictive, but he nursed petty grievances years; his failure to get a scholarship to Har- or a Blue at Oxford rankled. A man who not bear failure tends to twist everything he ; to make it represent success—a dangerous n of mental self-abuse. And even in success would be meditating dubious expedients to rove his position still further; his son does not ition the episode, but FE's conduct during the er/Harmsworth action was not over-scrupu- -according to Northcliffe's biographers, he in to make up to Harmsworth even before action, in which he was appearing for Lever, ended.

ut such dealings, though they must have ted an atmosphere of suspicion, would not :ssarily ha(re damaged his political prospects: after all, was the soul of honour by compari- with Lloyd George. Nor did his calculated ality hurt him; it was, as his son is easily able how, largely a pose. j-, What was destructive that, because he allowed himself to be guided ambition for political power, he had no idea t to do when he came to the point of achieving he had gradually extirpated those instincts in self which guide a natural, relatively stupid tician—such as Baldwin, under whom FE had Iminiously to end his Cabinet career.

he nearer he was to the top, the more FE's ;ments failed him. Given a policy, he could expound it inimitably; but his instinct about :h policy to expound was feeble. Ambition led to edge him towards the centre; towards ition, in which he could try to have it either Consequently many of his proposals have y an air of surprising moderation and e. But almost invariably he destroyed his own work. His real genius, which he could not ong resist, lay in taking one side and hammer- he other, as he was accustomed to do in court. day he would be setting out weighty reasons there should be an end to party rancour; the Discussing the Casement Diaries (Spectator, :11 6, 1959) I wrote that a belief they might. be the uct of hallucination was 'the only charitable ion of F. E. Smith's recorded in the whole affair.'

s wrong: his son prints a letter from FE to Lord r objecting to the photographing of the diaries a view to showing them round to influential le, in order to damp down agitation for a re- .e, as 'ghoulish.' On the specific points about h my article was criticised at the time by Lord nham, though, the biography is less revealing. fact that in 1921 Collins and Duggan (not Duffy, wrote) 'saw the Casement Diary by arrangement Lord Birkenhead' does not necessarily prove it was their idea, nor would it justify FE s show- he diaries to them if it was.. And how can the that FE left the diaries around at home so that could be seen by his schoolboy son (what was Doing with them, anyway?) be justified? Never- ss. I get the feeling from this biography that FE, far as he did exploit the diaries, did not do so deliberate malice. I must apologise to his ory for implying that he did. next, stirring up passion and bitterness with a savage partisan speech.

He might have done better if he had had a better judgment of people. Lacking a firm sense of political direction himself, he craved it in others; but his choice was lamentable. As early as 1910 he could say, '1 am absolutely satisfied of Lloyd George's honesty and sincerity,' a mis- placed belief which LIG, though giving abun- dant proof to FE of his slipperiness, was able to exploit up to the time of the fall of his govern- ment in 1922. And the Conservative leader FE came most to admire was almost as disastrous a choice: Austen Chamberlain had little more poli- tical acumen than FE had himself. Beaverbrook's verdict, `FE Smith was a man of supreme intel- lectual ability with an amazing power of making mistakes in the minor affairs of life,' is just; .his ambition was too much for his mind, fine forensic instrument though it was, to controL It remains to consider whether as Lord Chan- cellor he did enough to justify himself. He was indeed exceptional in that office; but his son's belief that he was a 'jealous protector of the struc- ture of the law from political mutilation' simply will not hold. The episode his son cites itself dis- credits him. When, in 1921, Lloyd George sought to appoint a new Chief Justice with the under- standing that he should resign as soon as the Attorney-General, Hewart, felt ready to take his place, FE wrote a memorandum setting forth the reasons why he considered the matter 'of gravest importance in relation to the future of our judicial system,' and concluding that any such compact would 'inflict lasting harm on both the Courts and the Government.' The arguments advanced were admirable, and there can be no doubt that he was right. The fiddle over Hewart's appoint- ment was damaging, not merely because it meant inflicting an unsuitable Lord Chief Justice on the country—and not merely because it appeared to establish a spurious precedent, which has only just been broken, that the Chief-Justiceship is the Attorney-General's as of right—but because it confirmed the trend back to party political juggling with judicial appointments.

Had FE been a great, even a conscientious, Lord Chancellor, he could not but have resigned the day he heard of Hewart's appointment. (Hewart's pre- decessor only heard about it, and about his own 'resignation,' in The Times). But FE stayed on. And there were other, political, occasions when his behaviour was as discreditable; his son notes how he allowed himself to be persuaded to defend a purchased peerage, 'against every principle in which he believed.' The only explanation is that by these times his character had been rotted by casuistry; his early aspirations had created the defects that were to spoil his career and irrevoc-\ ably to tarnish his political memory.