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

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books in his post-premiership years, on subjects such as ‘Decadence’,

‘Beauty and the Criticism of Beauty’, and ‘Theism and Humanism’. He had

wide-ranging interests in music, art, science and technology, and psychical

research (occasionally attending séances). He was fanatical about golf and

tennis, and enjoyed his extended family and the country-house social

round. Balfour never married though he had a close and romantic long-

term relationship with Lady Mary Elcho (wife of a Scottish aristocrat).

Intelligent, rich, deceptively languid and charming, he was, however, at

heart a bleak, solitary, detached and impenetrable character, and a hard-

working, ambitious and ruthless professional politician.

Balfour was 63 when he resigned as Tory leader and had no intention of

retiring from active politics. He played no part in the selection of his suc-

cessor but expected and favoured Austen Chamberlain who in the event

lost to Bonar Law. Although different in character and style Balfour and

Bonar Law grew to like, trust and appreciate one another. They worked well

together: Bonar Law consulted him, and Balfour gave ungrudging support,

advice and loyalty to the new leader. Balfour played a unique ‘double role’

between 1911 and 1914: in some ways a highly committed partisan and in

others an elder statesman above politics. He seems to have been amused by

the rapid switches sometimes required between ‘abusing the government’

on the platform or in the Commons and then ‘solving their difﬁculties’ in

Whitehall committee-rooms.

The ‘abuse’ ﬂowed freely on the Irish question, where the politics of

Home Rule became highly charged and confrontational. Balfour strongly

supported Bonar Law’s line, which came dangerously close to counten-

ancing unconstitutional (and even armed) resistance by Ulstermen to the

government. At one point, in 1913, Balfour suggested to the Palace a con-

stitutionally dubious scheme in which the King should consider dismissing

the Asquith ministry and installing a caretaker prime minister who would

hold the reins while an election was held on Home Rule; he proposed

Rosebery or himself (or both jointly) for this emergency role, saying that if

Rosebery refused he would not himself hesitate to become ‘sole minister’.

Later, in 1914, he seems to have had a moderating inﬂuence when the

Tories toyed with the hazardous idea of trying to amend the annual Army

Act to prevent the government from using the army in Ulster until after an

election. In the last resort he was prepared to support independence rather

than Home Rule for Ireland, provided that Ulster was excluded. But when

all-party talks were held in July 1914 to try (unsuccessfully) to broker a

compromise, Asquith was adamant that Balfour be excluded as ‘a real wrecker’

on the issue.

On defence and foreign policy, however, Balfour operated independently

of the Tory frontbench, and ministers were happy to consult him, draw

on his experience and knowledge, and treat him as a sort of ‘cross-bench

guru’.

While still Leader of the Opposition he had given impressive

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evidence to a Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) review of the German

invasion threat, received classiﬁed War Ofﬁce information, and discreetly

supported Haldane’s army reforms. In 1912 he turned down a government

offer to make him a member of the CID (which his own government had

created in 1902), but he served on another invasion inquiry sub-committee

in 1913. Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Hankey, the secre-

tary of the CID, sent him copies of conﬁdential papers and kept him

briefed on developments. Grey, the Liberal Foreign Secretary, consulted

him from time to time; in 1912 Balfour sent him a long memorandum on

the need to strengthen the Anglo-French alliance. Piers Brendon has called

this the process by which ‘having been dispensed with by his party, Balfour

apparently became indispensable to the nation’, or ‘play[ing] on both sides

from the middle’.

Once war came in 1914 Balfour was drawn even further into policy-

making in an unprecedented and rather anomalous way, becoming a full

member of the CID and a member of Asquith’s War Council even though

the Tories remained in opposition. He soon proved his worth, showing

qualities of imagination and foresight in war planning and on strategic

issues. Balfour’s strengths were as an adviser, thinker, committeeman and

policymaker under others rather than as a government or party leader

in his own right.

Recognising that the war would be long, he argued

strongly for the need to maintain the country’s economic strength and

pointed out the dangers of the excessive recruiting into the army of

key industrial workers. He opposed conscription and was a critic of the

futile mass slaughter on the western front, supporting instead the ill-fated

Dardanelles campaign and serving on the committee that planned it. He

worked alongside Lloyd George on the War Munitions Committee.

In May 1915 Churchill suggested that Balfour should replace Kitchener as

War Secretary while Bonar Law proposed to Lloyd George there should be a

new prime minister: either Balfour, Grey or Lloyd George himself. Instead,

Asquith stayed put in Number 10 but formed a coalition. Balfour gained

the most senior of the posts given to the Conservatives and became First

Lord of the Admiralty. He was second in status in the new Cabinet, ahead

of his party leader, Bonar Law, and behind only Asquith. The admirals liked

working for him (perhaps because his regime was more calm and orderly

than Churchill’s) but he did not provide the drive, direction and inspir-

ation the department needed in wartime. Lloyd George had opposed his

appointment, arguing to Asquith the post needed a younger and more

energetic ﬁgure. Although he had presciently warned before the war about

the submarine threat he did not come up with any effective solution or

response (complaining the increasing U-boat sinkings of shipping were

‘very tiresome’).

However, he ensured the work Churchill had started

on ‘land ships’ was continued, insisting on taking a ride in one of the

prototype tanks. He handled the aftermath of the Battle of Jutland ineptly,

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dismaying the public and his colleagues by issuing a communiqué with a

bare list of losses without putting a positive spin on the overall outcome.

After the Easter Rebellion in 1916 he supported the plan developed

by Lloyd George to give the south of Ireland immediate Home Rule with

Ulster excluded for the duration – fearing the alternative would mean more

bloodshed in Ireland and arguing that winning the war was more impor-

tant than preserving the union – but Unionist opposition scuppered it.

His decision to jump ship in December 1916 helped bring down Asquith

and swing Unionist support behind Lloyd George. Balfour was not a prime

mover or a plotter, and was willing to see Asquith continue as PM (under-

taking the ‘ordinary duties’ of the ofﬁce and leading the Commons) while

being convinced Lloyd George should be given a free hand to run the war

as chairman of a powerful new War Committee.

This arrangement was

unacceptable to Asquith, who also would not serve under any other premier.

At one point Asquith refused a compromise suggestion from Bonar Law

that Balfour rather than the Tory leader himself become PM. (A year earlier,

however, in December 1915, Balfour had privately ruled himself out as

Asquith’s successor, saying he felt he could not carry parliament and

the country with him.) Even though he knew that Lloyd George wanted to

remove him from the Admiralty while Asquith wanted to keep him there,

Balfour believed Lloyd George was indispensable and he was willing to

break the logjam by pressing his resignation as First Lord on Asquith. With

Bonar Law backing him, and Balfour agreeing to become Foreign Secretary

and lend his prestige and weight to the new government, the pieces then

started to fall into place for a Lloyd George premiership.

Churchill later memorably described Balfour passing from serving one

prime minister to another, and from one coalition government to another,

‘like a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather

muddy street’.

The implication was that, intent on political survival

and motivated by love of ofﬁce, he had no ﬁxed loyalties or principles.

Asquith felt Balfour had betrayed him. But a good case can be made that

his conduct was more selﬂess than Asquith’s and was motivated by the

conviction that more dynamic and decisive leadership was needed to win

the war.

Balfour had said in 1912 he would never be prime minister again but

would like to be Foreign Secretary. He served three years in that post,

1916–19. Although Lloyd George once maliciously remarked that Balfour’s

place in history would be little more than ‘like the scent on a pocket hand-

kerchief’, he rated him highly, considering him the ‘ideal man for the

Foreign Ofﬁce and to assist the Cabinet on big issues’, praising his courage

even in the darkest moments, and saying his contributions during the war

and afterwards in making the peace were ‘of the highest order’. They were

close collaborators over the six years of Lloyd George’s premiership. Balfour

supported the continuation of the coalition in 1918 and in 1922, coming

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to view it as the best political counter to socialism. Balfour might have

detested Lloyd George and what he stood for before the war, but after 1914

came to respect his organising and executive genius. He was fully prepared

to play second ﬁddle to ‘the Little Man’, as he liked to call the prime min-

ister. Lloyd George dominated foreign policy but, despite his irregular

methods and reliance on his ‘Garden Suburb’ advisers, Balfour maintained

good relations, ensured his views were heard and avoided clashes. He was

not formally a member of the small War Cabinet but attended when for-

eign affairs were discussed (being present at over 300 of the more than

500 meetings held).

In April–May 1917 he led a successful mission to Washington, estab-

lishing good relations with President Wilson, addressing the US Congress,

and preparing the ground for full cooperation between the new allies. In

November 1917 came the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’, stating the British

government favoured a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.

Idealism, diplomatic opportunism and strategic calculation all fed into this

announcement. Balfour (like Lloyd George) was a Zionist, had long been

interested in Jewish culture and religion, and had met and been impressed

by Chaim Weizmann. The government was convinced of the importance of

winning over Jewish opinion in Germany, the USA and Russia to the allies’

side. Balfour told the Cabinet the declaration implied a British or US pro-

tectorate rather than the early creation of a Jewish state, though he person-

ally hoped it would emerge in the long-term. Crucially the declaration

contained a provision there should be nothing done ‘which may prejudice

the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Pales-

tine’. Towards the end of his life Balfour reﬂected that ‘what he had been

able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most

worth his doing’.

Perhaps if the Middle East had been populated with

millions of Balfours they might have been able to live peacefully with

the ambiguities and internal tensions in the 1917 declaration. Balfour and

others did not anticipate the future strength of Arab nationalism. Few

actions by former prime ministers have cast so long a shadow.

Lloyd George took the lead for Britain during the 1919 Paris Peace

Conference, with Balfour playing a supportive role as his deputy, though

after the main treaty with Germany had been signed and the prime min-

ister returned to London, Balfour stayed to negotiate the treaties with

Austria, Turkey, Hungary and Bulgaria. Clemenceau, in a shrewd comment

on Balfour’s character, once remarked, after listening to a typically lucid

summary of an issue, ‘very well – but are you for or against?’ On ano-

ther occasion he called him ‘a catty old maid’. Balfour was less vindictive

towards Germany than many others; he accepted the need for reparations

but did not want to ‘trample her in the mud’. An adviser to President Wilson

thought he was ‘the arch conspirator’ against the president’s idealism, rep-

resenting ‘the philosophy of doubt’ as opposed to the ‘philosophy of faith’.

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Despite the heavy and grinding work, Balfour enjoyed Paris and the social

side of the conference; after an American socialite took him off to a night-

club for the ﬁrst time in his life, he courteously thanked her for ‘the most

delightful and degrading evening I have ever spent’.

In October 1919 Balfour – now 71, and exhausted after ﬁve years of

major departmental ofﬁce – swapped posts with Curzon and became Lord

President of the Council. He refused a peerage and the suggestion he also

become Leader of the House of Lords. He was a ‘natural’ for the non-

departmental minister/elder statesman/eminence grise role. In the Cabinet

he ‘rarely spoke’ but when he intervened, noted one minister, his words

‘carried immense weight’.

He was busy on Cabinet committees, going

back onto the Committee of Imperial Defence when it was reconstituted

and chairing its important Standing Sub-Committee; he was a member of

the Irish Situation Committee and involved in the secret talks in 1921 with

de Valera (Balfour realistically accepted that the union was ﬁnished and

acquiesced in the deal made with the separatists); and he chaired a new

Committee on the Coordination of Scientiﬁc Research. Representing Britain

on the Council of the League of Nations, he led the British delegation to

Geneva and the League Assembly each autumn 1920–22. He had few illu-

sions about the potential of the League without American involvement and

did not share internationalists’ idealism about the ‘new diplomacy’, but he

did his best to make it a useful and workable body and was a dominant

ﬁgure at the Assembly.

From November 1921 to February 1922 he put on a brilliant performance

leading the British delegation to the Washington Naval Conference, nego-

tiating a naval limitation agreement with the US, Japan (a major bene-

ﬁciary in the Paciﬁc, with ultimately deadly consequences), France and

Italy, recognising that the era of British naval supremacy was over but

achieving parity between the British and US ﬂeets. He was hailed as a

national hero on his return to Britain, and was met at Waterloo station by

the prime minister and the Cabinet and by cheering crowds. Apart from

the Order of Merit (in 1916) he had always refused all offers of honours,

but now became a Knight of the Garter and (with some reluctance) accepted

an Earldom in May 1922. He recognised it was a way of extending his polit-

ical life but it took him a while to get used to his new environment: ‘It’s

like talking to a lot of tombstones’, he complained, but he soon considered

being out of the Commons a ‘blessing’.

With the coalition coming under

increasing strain his success at Washington had led to some speculation

in Conservative political circles as to whether he would form a govern-

ment and Lloyd George himself mused that if Balfour did want to become

PM he might support him. But a return to Number 10 was the last thing

on Balfour’s mind: he no longer considered himself ‘a political combat-

ant in the ﬁring line’ and continued to stick to Lloyd George and to the

coalition.

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Standing in for the sick Curzon at the Foreign Ofﬁce in the summer of

1922, he issued the famous ‘Balfour Note’ advocating the cancellation of all

war debts, but stating, failing that, Britain would collect from its own

debtors only the amount she needed to pay its debts to the United States.

Germany welcomed this proposal, but it nose-dived after meeting with

hostile responses in the USA, France and the City.

Balfour left ofﬁce with Lloyd George when the Conservative Party pulled

out of the coalition in October 1922. ‘I say, ﬁght them, ﬁght them, ﬁght

them! This thing is wrong’, he shouted, pounding the table at a meeting of

Lloyd George’s supporters. ‘This is a revolt and it should be crushed.’ As in

the years of his own leadership he seemed both ignorant of party feeling

and condescending towards the party: ‘it was an advantage to have a leader

who was not intellectually much superior to the rest of the party he led’, he

remarked about Bonar Law, who now became Tory leader and prime min-

ister.

For the next two and a half years Balfour was out of government,

though he remained British representative at the League of Nations until

quitting that post in February 1923, citing age, deafness, fatigue and the

need for the job to be done by a Cabinet minister. If this statement was a

hint he would be prepared to return to the fold, Bonar Law did not (or did

not yet feel able to) take it. He continued to take part in the work of the

Committee of Imperial Defence, chairing a special sub-committee in 1923

on relations between the navy and the air force, though a bout of illness

(phlebitis) somewhat limited his role. A year later, in July 1924, Balfour was

one of four ex-prime ministers – the others being Asquith, Lloyd George

and Baldwin – consulted by Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald at a

special CID meeting on a Channel Tunnel; Balfour opposed the idea. When

Bonar Law was forced to resign through illness, Balfour was one of those

consulted by George V, recommending Baldwin (whom he did not know

well) over Curzon (whom he knew only too well), using the argument

it was now impossible to have a prime minister in the Lords. ‘Will dear

George [Curzon] be chosen?’ he was asked when he got back from the

Palace. ‘No’, he replied, ‘dear George will not.’

In April 1925 Balfour joined Baldwin’s government, returning to his old

role of Lord President. He had thought Baldwin’s decision to call a snap

election in December 1923 – which resulted in a hung parliament and

a minority Labour government – was idiotic, and was on the edges of

Tory plotting to unseat him, before deciding that in the end it was best

for Baldwin to continue as party leader. Balfour would have preferred

some sort of Conservative/Liberal joint arrangement, or even a Liberal gov-

ernment put in with Tory support, to the ‘national disaster’ of a socialist

government. He joined the Shadow Cabinet but when Baldwin returned

to power in November 1924 the prime minister did not at ﬁrst include

him in the Cabinet (but he did put him back on the CID). Hankey, the

Cabinet Secretary, thought it was because he felt a sense of ‘gaucherie and

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inferiority’ in Balfour’s presence. (Balfour having that effect on many

people, Roy Jenkins once noted.) Baldwin had been a Cambridge under-

graduate when Balfour had achieved his ﬁrst Cabinet appointment in 1886.

Balfour had had a good innings and probably did not expect a return to

ofﬁce. But when Curzon (11 years younger than Balfour) died, Baldwin felt

secure enough to recall him to ﬁll the Cabinet vacancy. Balfour was always

rather ‘mystiﬁed’ by Baldwin, as Blanche Dugdale noted. But he came to

feel he was a political ‘genius’ who always ‘managed to say and do the right

thing at the right moment’.

Balfour was selective in his interventions. He was active on the Commit-

tee of Imperial Defence, supporting the Admiralty against the Treasury over

cuts in naval spending, arguing successfully against Churchill’s proposal in

1926 for a Ministry of Defence to coordinate the armed services, but losing

out in 1928 when he condemned as ‘dangerous’ and ‘wholly impracticable’

Churchill’s move (as an economy-seeking Chancellor) to put the ‘Ten Year

Rule’ (under which defence planning operated on the assumption there

would be no major war within the next decade) on a rolling self-renewing

basis.

He continued to take a great interest in government encouragement of

science, technology and research. As Lord President he was responsible for

the Department of Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research and the Medical

Research Council (he wore two hats here, as he had become chairman of

the MRC in 1924 and retained that post). Although the idea was not ori-

ginal, he pressed strongly for the creation in 1925 of the Committee of

Civil Research to investigate, research and advise upon economic and

industrial questions, in much the same way as the CID advised the Cabinet

on defence matters. Balfour chaired some meetings of the CCR, and

Baldwin was sometimes in the chair. It was an imaginative idea but within

a couple of years the committee’s presence and impact had faded and its

last meeting was held in April 1928.

Balfour’s last main achievement came at the 1926 Imperial Conference,

where he chaired the Committee on Inter-Imperial Relations and, through

some deft negotiation and wordsmanship, came up with a new formula

to express and govern relations between the Dominions and Britain, later

embodied in the 1931 Statue of Westminster. A.J.P. Taylor called this

Balfour’s ‘last and most successful jugglery with high-sounding words’. But

while recognising realities and the need to acknowledge the equal status of

the self-governing (and white) Dominions of the Commonwealth, Balfour

hoped that on defence and foreign policy issues they would still follow

Britain’s lead.

Balfour had aged well. In 1922 he saw a doctor who had examined him

during his premiership and was told he was healthier now than 20 years

earlier. Increasing deafness was a problem, but he was otherwise vigorous,

still playing tennis into his late-seventies, still writing and lecturing on

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philosophical and other subjects. Although Balfour never really faced up to

it, money was starting to become a big problem. Heading a large extended

family, he had always spent generously. But careless management and

bungled speculative investments had drained away his substantial inherited

fortune (he had been one of the richest young men in the country when he

came of age in 1869, worth over £1 million). He and his brother lost

massive amounts (the equivalent of millions of pounds in today’s money)

investing in various companies trying to produce cheap fuel from processed

peat. Balfour’s last years were ‘be-devilled by worries about money’.

the 1920s he was having overdraft problems and he started his memoirs in

1928 with an eye on much-needed royalties. When he died he left little

more than his title and a pile of debts.

Towards the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928, Balfour’s health

started to break down. His circulatory system began to fail, not because of

disease but simply from ‘wear’, according to his doctor,

and in March

1928 he had a mild stroke. He began writing his autobiography, the work

largely pulled together by his niece Blanche Dugdale who noticed he did

not seem particularly interested in the past,

but illness prevented him

completing more than the brief and bland fragment published after his

death. In July 1928 both Houses of Parliament presented Balfour with a

Rolls-Royce motorcar as an eightieth birthday present (funds raised by a

collection). By the autumn of 1928 his deteriorating condition led his

doctors to forbid him from attending further meetings of the Cabinet or

the Lords. He offered his resignation but Baldwin refused. Balfour’s long

ofﬁcial life came formally to an end in June 1929 when the Conservative

government was defeated and left ofﬁce.

He spent the last 15 months of his life at his brother Gerald’s home,

Fisher’s Hill in Surrey, dying there (aged 81) on 19 March 1930. A West-

minster Abbey funeral and burial were offered but in accordance with his

own wishes Balfour was buried in the family plot at Whittingehame.

Balfour held Cabinet rank for 27 years – longer than Churchill, Lord

Liverpool, Gladstone, Palmerston and William Pitt. Their premierships had

been longer and more successful than his, and they were more effective

leaders. But his achievement lay more in coming back ‘from the political

dead’ after leaving Number 10, and in his durability, prestige and construc-

tive record as a former prime minister.

Balfour was better as an ex-prime

minister than as prime minister.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (resigned 5 April 1908)

Campbell-Bannerman had the shortest post-premiership of any former prime

minister, one of only 17 days, before he died aged 71, on 22 April 1908. He

is sometimes described as ‘the last prime minister “to die on the premises”’,

but he is in fact the only prime minister (or, more strictly, former prime

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minister) to die in Number 10 itself. None of the PMs who died while still

holding that post died in Downing Street, but at other locations. It was

simply out of the question for the dying C.B., as he was universally known,

to be moved from Number 10 after Asquith took over.

Campbell-Bannerman’s premiership lasted only 28 months (December

1905–April 1908). He was in many ways an unlikely and under-estimated

prime minister: laid-back, if not actually lazy, genial, unﬂashy, and a poor

debater, but also canny, emollient, sensible, determined, and surprisingly

radical. He held together a ﬁssiparous party and, if signiﬁcant reforms

were few, at least the foundations for the Liberal government’s later

achievements were laid during his term.

C.B. was 69 and in pretty poor health when he became prime minister.

(Only Palmerston, aged 71 in 1855, was an older ﬁrst-time prime minister.)

In the 1890s he had wanted to become Speaker, thinking his health was no

longer up to the demands of senior government ofﬁce. When he became

PM, his doctor wanted him to go to the Lords because of the dangers of

overwork and excessive strain as a PM in the Commons, but C.B. refused.

His wife, Charlotte, was an invalid who suffered from chronic ill-health

(diabetes, for which there was then no treatment). When she fell danger-

ously ill in 1906, dying at the end of August, she would not be nursed by

anyone except her husband, which brought C.B. to the point of complete

physical and emotional collapse. He never really recovered from this

blow.

In October 1906 he had the ﬁrst in a series of heart attacks that progres-

sively weakened him over the next year or so (there were further heart

attacks in June and November 1907, and February 1908). Only in November

1907 did the press and public learn about his collapsing health, though

‘insiders’ and close aides had been increasingly worried about it for some

time. After six weeks convalescence in Biarritz (from late-November 1907

to mid-January 1908), C.B. returned to the fray in seemingly reasonable

shape. His political position and authority in the Cabinet, in parliament

and in his party were as strong as ever. But after another serious heart

attack on 12 February 1908 he never again left his room in Number 10.

For a while it seemed possible C.B. might again pull round and the

idea of him going to the Lords was again raised, only to be dismissed – it

would be a ‘humiliation’, he declared.

Asquith, the Chancellor of the

Exchequer and the crown prince, chaired the Cabinet and ﬁlled in for

the absent and ailing PM. But it soon became obvious C.B. was dying.

He may have wanted to die still ‘in harness’, and King Edward VII

ungenerously did not want to have his holiday in Biarritz interrupted by

a prime-ministerial resignation and a handover of power. It became

clear by late-March that the uncertainty could not continue and in early

April C.B. wrote to the King to resign. He was fading rapidly and barely

three weeks later died.

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Herbert Henry Asquith (resigned 5 December 1916)

Asquith’s fall from power in 1916 was sudden, dramatic and ﬁnal. He had

been Liberal leader and prime minister for over eight and a half years and

Chancellor for over two years before that. Although he had grumbled

about feeling ‘like a rat in a trap’ and being ‘heartily sick of it … eleven

years with no spell off was too much’,

he did not want to give up ofﬁce

and resented being forced out in a ‘palace revolution’. He had not seen the

coup coming, was outmanoeuvred during the leadership crisis and played

his cards badly. Asquith had long been ‘the indispensable man’ and a suc-

cessful peace-time prime minister, but it had become increasingly obvious

he could not meet the need for more resolute and determined leadership in

conditions of total war. Faced with a choice between continuing as a mere

ﬁgurehead prime minister while Lloyd George effectively dominated and

ran the war through a powerful new War Committee, or serving in a ‘sec-

ondary position’ under another PM (Balfour or Bonar Law were mooted as

potential new leaders of the coalition, as well as Lloyd George), Asquith

preferred to resign.

He never forgave Lloyd George, his supplanter,

for undermining him and for what he saw as a stab in the back. In the

years ahead he often seemed to be dressing up personal pique as political

principle.

When the economist J.M. Keynes had dinner with the Asquiths a

few days after the resignation, he found the former prime minister cool,

detached and apparently unmoved, but his wife, the volatile Margot

Asquith, was crying into her soup in rage and grief. They had some prob-

lems in adjusting to life out of Number 10: they had nowhere to live

as their old house had been let out and a friend had to put them up for

a while until they could move back into it; money was tight with the loss

of the prime-ministerial salary as they had no savings but still maintained a

substantial domestic staff and a free-spending life-style; and Asquith

himself, 64 when he left ofﬁce, sometimes just stagnated and slumped into

an easy life with his books, his family and the social round. (‘We mean to

live very quietly’, Margot had explained, ‘only seeing the King and a few

friends.’) There was the worry of having family members on active service:

one of his sons had been killed in September 1916, another was seriously

wounded in December 1917.

Asquith struggled to ﬁnd a political role. He did not take a peerage and

declined the Garter, thus signalling he did not intend to retire but to stay

in frontline politics. He remained leader of the Liberal Party but found being

the leading opposition ﬁgure in wartime awkward, unwelcome and con-

straining. ‘He did not’, noted Jenkins, ‘cause Lloyd George a tenth of the

trouble that Lloyd George, outside, would have caused him.’ Many of the

senior Liberals had followed him rather than serve under Lloyd George, but

he did not want to widen the rift in the party ranks, and temperamentally

Salisbury to Asquith 121

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston