Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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He seemed almost to want the party to change and then by acclamation

to welcome him back as leader on his own terms. As Colin Matthew put

it: ‘Rosebery was adept at the in-ﬁghting required in government inter-

departmental disputes, and he was skilful at making contact with the elec-

torate. He had, however, little facility for, or interest in, sustained political

management. But it was this quality which the Liberal party needed for

reconstruction.’

For a few years Rosebery busied himself with writing, travel and non-

or only quasi-political speeches. Rosebery’s future was the subject of consider-

able speculation. He was still relatively young, had experience of the highest

ofﬁces, and had real political star-quality. He sent out mixed and confusing

signals, however, and his political intentions and plans seemed changeable,

elusive and mysterious even to himself, and to his increasingly bewildered

supporters in the party and the public. He refused even to subscribe to Liberal

Party funds, said he had never been happier than since his ‘abdication’, and

shuddered at his ‘revolting experience of the higher positions in British gov-

ernment, … it will take some time to wash out of my mouth the taste of the

last administration’. But he played a prominent role in the 1898 London

County Council elections, supporting the progressives (earlier, in 1889–90

and 1892, he had been elected to the LCC and served as its chairman), and he

won plaudits and grabbed attention with deﬁantly imperialistic and raptur-

ously received speeches during the Fashoda crisis. The Liberals staggered on

under the joint leadership of Harcourt and Lord Spencer before, in December

1898, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was elected leader. Rosebery was by

now more popular than he had been as prime minister and many of his sup-

porters regarded Campbell-Bannerman as a second-rate ﬁgure, a stop-gap who

would just keep the seat warm until their hero was ready to reclaim his right-

ful place. But he remained maddeningly ambiguous and unknowable, being

variously described at the time as ‘the veiled prophet’ and ‘a dark horse in a

loose box’. ‘What he likes’, commented one insider, ‘is to ﬁgure largely in the

mind of the public and at the same time to be independent and thus not

over-weighted with responsibility.’

In 1899 Rosebery was elected at the top of the poll to Epsom District

Council (with his gracious house and racing stables, he was a leading ﬁgure

in the small town). He was unanimously voted chairman but character-

istically refused the post, though he was an active member of the council,

scrupulously attending meetings through the three years he served.

This

was worthy and indeed unique for a former prime minister, but not what

those who wanted to see him back in political ofﬁce had in mind.

The three or four years following the outbreak of the South African War

in 1899 were the crucial period in which Rosebery might have returned to

a position of national or party leadership. But he lost the chance, partly

through his own doubts, hesitations and mistakes and partly because of

the way the wider political situation developed and changed.

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Rosebery distrusted Milner and Chamberlain and thought that with

better diplomacy the Boer War might have been averted but once it started

he strongly supported it (though in 1901 he was involved in a secret approach

to see whether a negotiated peace was possible, which Lord Salisbury

rejected). With the Liberal Party in argumentative disarray over the war

Rosebery’s ultimate aims were not always clear or consistent. He appeared

at some times to be wanting to battle for the future of the party (the Liberal

League was formed with him as president to press the Liberal Imperialist

case against the anti-war ‘Little Englanders’ in the party). At other times he

apparently wanted to provoke a formal split in the party; his supporters

schemed to undermine or displace Campbell-Bannerman as leader. Rosebery

also appeared to hanker after a political realignment and a non-party or

above-party political and personal future. To add to the confusion he frus-

trated his supporters and allies because, after his dramatic interventions

and big public speeches, he tended to retreat into inscrutable silence, or he

disappeared to the Continent, rather than engage in political management,

organisation or follow-up. He was compared to a ‘revolving light, now

ﬂashing out brilliantly, now lost in complete darkness’. Even a fervent sup-

porter like Edward Grey was driven publicly to complain about his refusal

to lead, saying Rosebery was in danger of becoming ‘like some astral body

outside the planetary system of party politics’.

Cynics would argue that Rosebery’s commitment to the ‘country before

party’ politics of ‘national efﬁciency’ was only superﬁcial, tactical or rhetorical

(‘pure claptrap’, according to Campbell-Bannerman). In the process he came

out with some anti-political and anti-democratic pronouncements about the

need for strong ‘Cromwellian’ leadership and a ‘dictator’ with ‘iron will’ that

sounded odd coming from the mouth of a former Liberal prime minister. He

expressed the voguish ideas of administrative, institutional and educational

reform, criticisms of ‘amateurism’, and ideas of a ‘business Cabinet’, in the

process getting involved with groups like the Fabians. But the key point was

Rosebery’s ingrained distaste for conventional party politics and the party

system, and his interest in the possibilities of a centrist non-party coalition.

He had resigned as president of the Scottish Liberal Association and refused in

1901, when Kimberley wished to retire, to become Liberal leader in the House

of Lords because he did not want to commit himself but instead to establish

a cross-bench or neutral position that could one day see him heading a coal-

ition ‘formed of the best men of both parties who might perhaps unite under

him’. He would become ‘the “patriotic statesman” prepared to serve his coun-

try at a time of national crisis’, as Searle puts it. Journalists speculated that

if Lord Salisbury’s successor could be appointed directly by plebiscite or refer-

endum, then Rosebery would emerge the winner; others envisaged him as the

leader of ‘a great National Party’.

During the inﬁghting in the Liberal Party Rosebery and his acolytes

like Grey and Haldane (but probably not Asquith who was a stronger party

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man) underestimated Campbell-Bannerman (a tougher and shrewder ﬁgure

than his detractors thought) and overestimated their own strength and

support. Campbell-Bannerman carried with him the centre and the bulk

of the party. Three-quarters or more of MPs were mainstream loyalists.

Rosebery showed his mastery of publicity and ability to command atten-

tion with provocative speeches and declarations about the need for a ‘clean

slate’, ‘plough[ing] my furrow alone’, ‘irreconcilable divisions of opinion’,

being ‘outside the tabernacle’ and moments of ‘deﬁnite separation’. But

there was, as a contemporary insider noted, ‘no great ﬂocking of persons

to the Rosebery standard’. Unlike ‘C-B’, Rosebery either did not understand

he was ﬁghting for his political life or was not sure he wanted to win.

Others thought so too. ‘Rosebery is no good in a real ﬁght’, concluded one

Conservative politician; Balfour, the Tory leader, came to believe ‘Rosebery

was hopeless’. He was a poseur with ‘no grip of anything except appear-

ances’, was Beatrice Webb’s view. Even fellow Liberal Imperialists became

disillusioned: ‘he is not an easy or altogether reliable Chief’, admitted

Haldane, while Asquith felt he was a man who ‘does nothing for the party

and everything for himself’ and eventually, according to his wife Margot,

gave up on Rosebery ‘as a hopeless coward’.

The uncertain prospects for either a Rosebery-led ‘national’ coalition or a

Roseberyite take-over of the Liberal Party faded as two-party partisanship

revived with the ending of the Boer War and controversies over the 1902

Education Act, and were ﬁnally ended with Joe Chamberlain’s launch of

his protectionist crusade in 1903, when the Liberals united in defence

of free trade. Rosebery was left stranded, his position weakened, looking

increasingly marginalised. ‘It is humanly speaking impossible that I should

ever hold ofﬁce again’, he said in August 1902. It would be ‘impossible’

for him to form a future Liberal government, he noted privately in 1903,

and he would ‘unhesitatingly’ refuse to join such a government. Behind

the scenes the King had apparently tried to persuade him in 1901 to come

back and resume the Liberal leadership and in 1905 again appealed to him

unsuccessfully to take ofﬁce. By 1904 it was becoming widely understood

the King would send for Campbell-Bannerman when the time came to

change the government.

Rosebery’s political eclipse and redundancy was conﬁrmed in 1905. The

leading Liberal Imperialists in the Commons – Asquith, Grey and Haldane

– now ceased to involve Rosebery or inform him about their plans and

manoeuvres, keeping secret from him the so-called ‘Relugas Pact’ they

made about taking ofﬁce – with conditions – under Campbell-Bannerman,

for fear ‘his interest would be to wreck it’. He was kept in the dark about

the understanding they came to with Campbell-Bannerman about a ‘step-

by-step’ approach to the Irish question. Rosebery’s dramatic speech at

Bodmin in November 1905, denouncing Home Rule and insisting he could

not ‘serve under that banner’, was an act of political self-destruction, ﬁnally

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cutting him off from his erstwhile supporters and ensuring there would be

no place for him in the Liberal government that Campbell-Bannerman

– who thought he was ‘off his head’ – would soon form. Once he realised

what had been going on, Rosebery felt betrayed and angry. Campbell-

Bannerman – who had come out on top – was relieved he had been ‘deliv-

ered … from the difﬁculty of having to ask R[osebery] to join’. There are

even suggestions that the wily ‘C-B’ had given a pledge to Redmond, leader

of the Irish Nationalists, that Rosebery would not be asked to join the gov-

ernment and – some believed at the time and later – laid a cunning trap

to dispose of a rival and enemy, into which Rosebery threw himself. Once

Campbell-Bannerman became prime minister, appointed the leading

Roseberyites to senior positions and won a landslide majority, Rosebery was

effectively politically ﬁnished and a political ‘ex-’.

He stayed on the political stage a few years longer, increasingly isolated

and irrelevant with virtually no personal followers, sitting on the cross-

benches in the Lords, a purely negative critic of the Liberal Government.

It might have been better for his reputation had he taken himself out of

the way by accepting the post of ambassador to the United States pressed

on him in November 1906 by Sir Edward Grey and the King, but he refused.

Balfour once remarked Rosebery’s great political misfortune was he had

‘joined the wrong side’ and, at the end of his life, Rosebery himself mused

he had made a ‘very big’ mistake in following Gladstone rather than Dis-

raeli when he entered politics.

His alienation from the Liberals now became

even more pronounced and his attitudes and views markedly Conservative.

But those Conservatives who thought he might be a powerful recruit to

their cause discovered what the Liberals had long learned: that you always

knew where you were with Rosebery: he would always let you down.

Having opposed the introduction of old-age pensions, Rosebery attacked

Lloyd George’s 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ as ‘tyrannical and socialistic’ and

heralding a ‘social and political revolution’, and he defended his fellow

aristocratic landowners as a ‘poor but honest class’. When the crunch

came, he declared he would not vote against it, fearing the Lords’ actions

in defeating the budget could imperil the existence of the second chamber.

As McKinstry says, Rosebery was now despised on both sides of the political

divide. Liberals viewed him as a reactionary, Tories as a coward (a ‘highly

gifted political eunuch’ who, ‘as always, fails at the moment of crisis’, said

one). From early in his career Rosebery had been a proponent of House of

Lords reform and in 1907 had chaired a Lords select committee on the issue

(he had been a poor chairman and the committee’s report disappeared

without trace and made no impact). As the constitutional crisis over the

Lords developed, he introduced resolutions in 1910 calling for reform

and setting out his own proposals for changing its composition. He then

denounced the government’s legislation to remove the Lords’ veto powers as

‘ill-judged, revolutionary, and partisan’, which would leave the upper house a

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‘useless sham’. But rather than dying in the last ditch with the Unionist peers,

he announced at the last moment in the crucial debate on 10 August 1911 he

would vote with the government. He justiﬁed what Rhodes James calls his

‘inept and theatrical performance’ by arguing he had been able to sway by his

action sufﬁcient votes to help ensure the government got its narrow majority

and thus stave off the ‘swamping’ of the Lords by the mass creation of peers.

But whatever inﬂuence he had left was now destroyed. It was his last speech

there, and Rosebery never again entered the House of Lords.

At the age of 64 Rosebery’s political career was over. In 1909 he had been

called ‘an unused asset in the national locker’ and some had speculated

about him re-emerging as an ‘above party’ leader to help the country

through the constitutional crisis. In 1913, Balfour and Lord Esher suggested

to the Palace that Rosebery might be sent for to form a caretaker govern-

ment while a general election was held, as a way out of the deadlock and

mounting crisis over Irish Home Rule. Such ideas were non-starters, as

Rosebery himself insisted, as well as constitutionally dubious given they

would have involved the dismissal of the incumbent prime minister and

government. Rosebery no longer had the necessary standing, the inﬂuence,

the following or the appetite for ofﬁce. ‘If I were to join the battle’, he told

one conﬁdant, ‘I should ﬁnd myself back again where I will not be.’ He had

come to hate and detest politics – ‘this evil-smelling bog’, as he called it,

from which ‘I was always trying to extricate myself’.

Back in 1904 Rosebery had been an isolated critic of the Anglo-French

Entente, predicting that in the end it would mean war with Germany.

When war came, his house Dalmeny was requisitioned as a hospital and he

undertook some low-key public duties: patriotic speeches at recruitment

rallies, appeals for funds and visits to hospitals. When Lloyd George

became prime minister in 1916, in an effort to bolster his administration

he offered Rosebery the post of Lord Privy Seal – he would not have depart-

mental duties but serve in a ‘consultative capacity’ – but he refused. It is

not clear what Rosebery at this stage would have brought to the govern-

ment other than the public appeal of his name.

In November 1917 tragedy struck when his younger son, Neil Primrose

– who had been an MP and promising junior minister – was killed in action

while serving with the army in the Middle East. His death was a devastating

blow to Rosebery. A year later in November 1918 Rosebery was felled by

a massive stroke that left him partially paralysed for the rest of his life. Dur-

ing his last ten years he was a largely forgotten ﬁgure, living a lonely and

melancholy invalid existence, becoming virtually blind and dogged again by

insomnia. He died at his house in Epsom on 21 May 1929 aged 82, and was

buried at Dalmeny in Scotland. For all his glamour, gifts and brilliant early

promise, it is difﬁcult to avoid the conclusion he had been a political failure:

an unhappy and unsuccessful prime minister and then an unhappy and

unsuccessful ex-prime minister.

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Salisbury to Asquith

Lord Salisbury (resigned 11 July 1902)

When Lord Salisbury stood down as Conservative prime minister, on

11 July 1902, he had held that ofﬁce three times for a total of 13 years and

eight months (1885–86, 1886–92, 1895–1902), the fourth-longest cumu-

lative tenure and a record not equalled since then. He was 72, depressed,

weary, feeling his age and in poor health. He had ﬁrst served as a Cabinet

minister 36 years earlier and had been at the top of his party for 20 years.

Imperturbable and remote, he had come to seem a ﬁxed part of the polit-

ical landscape, what Curzon called ‘that strange, powerful, inscrutable and

brilliant obstructive deadweight at the top’.

Salisbury’s grip on affairs had been weakening for some time. In most of

his governments he was his own Foreign Secretary as well as prime minis-

ter, and the combined burden was too much for him by the late 1890s. His

family and his doctors were concerned about the overwork and his increas-

ingly frequent attacks of inﬂuenza and bronchitis. He took little exercise

except for tricycle rides (accompanied by a footman to push him uphill),

and his quirks – such as his failure to recognise even close colleagues and

his need for solitude – were becoming more pronounced. Discreet political

pressure from senior colleagues and the Queen was needed to prise him out

of the Foreign Ofﬁce, which he reluctantly gave up only in November

1900. His wife’s long illness and her death in November 1899 had been a

massive blow from which he never fully recovered. He felt deeply the loss

of Queen Victoria in January 1901 – it symbolised that the world he had

known was coming to an end; subsequently, politics had ‘lost their zest’ for

him, he later admitted. ‘His heart’, says Andrew Roberts, ‘was no longer

really in the job.’

On the surface Salisbury’s political position was secure until his decision

to retire. He had won another landslide general election victory as recently

as October 1900. But the foundations of his authority had started to

crumble. His politics were reactive and defensive, and he was unable to

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meet ‘the need for a creative response to the problems of a maturing indus-

trial society and an increasingly challenged empire’.

Colonial Secretary Joe

Chamberlain, the great ‘political weather-maker’ of the time, was becoming

harder to keep in check. The disasters in South Africa had shown that

Salisbury was not in the mould of a successful war leader. His cautious,

non-aligned foreign policy seemed to be leaving Britain dangerously isol-

ated and was increasingly challenged inside the Cabinet. No sooner had he

ﬁnally quit the Foreign Ofﬁce than an alliance with Japan was negotiated

and agreed, about which the prime minister was deeply sceptical. The higher

military spending and increased taxes brought about by the Boer War were

a ticking time-bomb under the government.

Salisbury had once mocked old prime ministers clinging onto ofﬁce regard-

less of failing powers. ‘Disinclined to sow any new harvest of future fame’,

they would neglect big, long-term problems. Elderly PMs like Russell and

Palmerston, he wrote, would reveal as soon as they opened their mouths to

speak that ‘their intellects have evaporated in very harmless but very atten-

uated twaddle’. He did not want that fate but, like many long-serving

leaders, he did hang onto ofﬁce too long and it might have been better

for his reputation had he retired two or three years earlier. His senior col-

leagues thought it was time for him to go, but they did not force him out.

He might well have gone 18 months sooner than he did but for the war,

and he decided privately to leave ofﬁce as soon as it ended, and did so with

obvious relief six weeks after the peace treaty was signed in May 1902.

The many relatives found berths in his government had provoked taunts

about the ‘Hotel Cecil’ and ‘Bob’s your uncle’ but Arthur Balfour, Salis-

bury’s nephew and effectively his deputy, was pretty much the inevit-

able successor and the handover went smoothly. Rich (his income was

around £60,000 a year and at death he left £310,000 – equivalent to about

£20 million today) and possessor of a large estate and an ancient title, Salis-

bury could afford to be indifferent to honours and wealth. He had been

made a Knight of the Garter in 1878 but had twice refused Queen Victoria’s

offers of a dukedom. From King Edward he took a GCVO (a Grand Cross of

the Royal Victoria Order), which he plainly regarded as a mere bauble.

Salisbury dropped out of active politics when he retired. He talked about

the need to ‘get out of the way’. He did not speak again in the Lords. He

kept up with the political news, and Balfour is said to have ‘frequently con-

sulted him’,

but he was less skilful and more unlucky than his uncle, and

everything soon started to fall apart for the government. ‘Things will be in

a very ﬂuid state after my disappearance’ Salisbury had gloomily forecast in

an after-me-the-deluge mood before he resigned. He was right. He strongly

opposed Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform, regarding taxes on food

as politically impossible and as unlikely to bind the empire closer together.

It led to a damaging party split and bitter inﬁghting which Balfour was

unable to control or stop, and Salisbury fumed about his nephew’s weak-

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ness in allowing a ‘dual leadership’ to develop, predicting ‘political disaster’

unless his successor asserted himself more as prime minister. Sure enough

in 1906 the Conservatives were to experience an electoral meltdown. Salis-

bury had managed to keep the dynamic and thrusting ‘Radical Joe’ inside

the ministerial tent, which was beyond Gladstone before him and Balfour

afterwards, who both had their administrations wrecked by him.

A deeply-religious person and always keen to defend the interests of the

established church, Salisbury was unhappy about the way in which Balfour

failed to oppose an amendment to his controversial Education Bill that

made the school manager rather than the parish priest responsible for chil-

dren’s religious education, fuming that had he known that Balfour ‘meant

to take power from the clergyman, he would have put off his resignation

for a year to prevent it’. He refused to go down to London to vote for

the Bill.

Following the death of the Queen, Salisbury’s departure seemed to

many to mark the end of an era. He felt so himself. Looking ahead in

August 1902, he thought ‘we are near some great change in public affairs,

in which the forces that contend for the mastery among us will be dif-

ferently ranged and balanced’. The situation facing the country and the

empire was ‘menacing and dangerous’. ‘The times’, he predicted, ‘will be

very difﬁcult.’ Events at home and abroad over the years ahead proved him

prescient.

‘All work has become a burden for him, and he longs for rest’, Salisbury’s

private secretary had said when he left ofﬁce. He enjoyed his grandchildren

and motoring around in a new car. But his health went rapidly downhill,

and he lived for just 13 months in retirement, dying, aged 73, on 22 August

1903 at Hatﬁeld, his ancestral house. His obesity caused problems and there

was trouble with an ulcerated leg; he nearly died of congestion of the

kidneys, and then he had a fall and a heart attack. In the end ‘the machine

was worn out’, as his doctor put it.

Arthur Balfour (resigned 4 December 1905)

One of the ﬁrst things Arthur Balfour did after losing the premiership and

going down to election defeat was to buy one of the new-fangled gramo-

phones, complete with huge shiny brass sound-trumpet. He took it back

to his house at Whittingehame in East Lothian, Scotland, to the delight of

the swarm of nieces and nephews who met him as his car drove up on a

wintery evening in January 1906. The next day was spent excitedly buying

records at a music shop in Edinburgh. For a while as the music blared out,

nothing else seemed of the slightest importance to the ex-prime minister

and his relations. ‘Life goes on, no matter what the disaster of the moment’,

is how Balfour’s latest biographer sums up his philosophical outlook and

his ability to shrug off his political worries.

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Balfour stands out as one of Britain’s least successful prime ministers but

one of her most successful former prime ministers. He left Number 10 on

4 December 1905, having served three years and 145 days as prime min-

ister. He was then 57 years old and was to live more than 24 years more, in

which time he was a Cabinet minister, under three other prime ministers,

for a total of 11 years. Some of his most important achievements came in,

and much of his historical reputation rests upon, these post-premiership

years. Coming at the tail end of a long period of Conservative dominance,

his short premiership had ended ignominiously, with a bitterly divided

party (split on the tariff reform issue) suffering a catastrophic defeat after

Balfour resigned as PM and the incoming Liberal premier, Campbell-

Bannerman, then called an immediate general election. The Conservatives

lost more than half their MPs in the January 1906 election, and included

in the wipe-out was Balfour himself, defeated in the Manchester East seat

he had held for 20 years. After a loyalist was persuaded to retire, a safe seat

was soon found for the defeated party leader and Balfour was returned for

the City of London in a by-election in February 1906. On his return to par-

liament the old master of parliamentary jousts found that his polished and

subtle dialectics cut no ice with the new prime minister, backed up with his

enormous majority: ‘enough of this foolery!’, barked Campbell-Bannerman

as Liberal MPs roared their delight.

Rarely can a former prime minister

have been cut down to size so effectively.

Had the dynamic ﬁgure of Joseph Chamberlain not been removed

from the scene by a disabling stroke in July 1906, it is possible Balfour

would not have lasted long as Leader of the Opposition since the momen-

tum was with the committed ‘whole hog’ tariff reformers, who were now in

a majority in the Conservative Party. Against his own judgement the weak-

ened Balfour had had little choice but to give ground and move more in

the Chamberlainite direction in a compromise deal worked out in February

1906, accepting that ﬁscal reform must be the ‘ﬁrst constructive work’ of

the party.

Balfour did not believe that producing detailed policies was the

role of the Opposition; rather, its job was to oppose the government – crit-

icising it, making its life difﬁcult, obstructing it where possible (as he had

done as a young MP, as part of the ‘Fourth Party’, engaged in parliamentary

guerrilla warfare against Gladstone in the 1880s). But the strategy that

Balfour developed to do this and to energise, unify and distract his party

was risky and controversial, and in the end backﬁred, damaging and then

destroying his own leadership.

Intellectual, lofty and remote, Balfour did not believe in campaigning to

boost his popularity: ‘I am certainly not going to condescend to go about

the country explaining that I am “honest and industrious” like a second

coachman out of place!’ He did little to reform outdated and creaking party

organisation. But he helped make Edwardian Britain’s party politics bitter

and adversarial. Immediately after his defeat he declared the Conservative

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(Unionist) Party would, whatever the outcome of the election, ‘still control

… the destinies of this great empire’. What this statement meant in prac-

tice was that the huge in-built Conservative majority in the unelected

House of Lords would be mobilised to wreck the Liberals’ programme by

amending or blocking those measures passed by the House of Commons

but objected to by the opposition. Some popular social policy and trade

union legislation was allowed through but other bills close to the heart of

the Liberal base were stymied. Rather than being a watchdog of the consti-

tution, argued Lloyd George, the Lords had become ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’.

Balfour’s championing of increased naval spending and dreadnought

building revived his party’s spirits and increased pressure on the govern-

ment. But the Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s 1909 budget triggered

a major political and constitutional crisis and turned out to be a serious

blunder. In the ensuing general elections in January and December 1910

the Conservatives advanced enough to deny the Liberals an overall majority,

but with the government now dependent on the Irish nationalists (and

Labour), moves to curb the Lords’ veto powers and then introduce Home

Rule became inevitable. Balfour’s strong unionism and his refusal to become

‘another Robert Peel’ were insuperable obstacles in the way of Lloyd George’s

secret plan for a coalition government, ﬂoated in inter-party talks in

the summer of 1910. By the end of that year Balfour had fought his third

general election as party leader, and that he had won none of them showed

the limits to his electoral appeal. Furthermore he had antagonised impor-

tant elements in his own party. The tariff reformers felt betrayed and angry

because of his offer, during the December 1910 election campaign, of a

referendum on the issue. Then the die-hard Right of the party revolted

when in 1911 he ordered Tory peers to abstain and let through the Liberals’

Parliament Bill. Earlier, in 1910, he had told Palace advisers he would be

willing to form a government had the King wanted to reject Asquith’s

request for guarantees if a mass creation of peers became necessary and the

prime minister resigned – a move that would have been risky for the Con-

servatives and for the monarchy. But he then came to see last-ditch oppos-

ition to Lords’ reform as pointless. His enemies in the party increasingly

saw him as vacillating, indecisive and weak, and a ‘Balfour Must Go’ cam-

paign developed. He needed little persuading, with the endless struggles

leaving him feeling that sections of his party had gone ‘temporarily crazy’

and that politics had become ‘odious’, and he quit the Tory leadership

in November 1911, commenting waspishly a ‘slower brain’ might be more

welcome to the party.

Leaving the party leadership gave Balfour more time for his non-political

interests. He was a serious ‘intellectual statesman’, serving at various times

on the council of the Royal Society, as president of the British Academy,

and as chancellor of Edinburgh and (from 1919) Cambridge universities.

He produced a number of heavyweight philosophical essays, lectures and

Salisbury to Asquith 111

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston