Suburban
Ian Bradley
Asquith Stephen Koss (Allen Lane
£6.95) ‘\ Mqved by one or two near-disasters on a car journey from the Kent coast to London in 1916 to reflect on the likely consequences of his death, Asquith predicted that 'the world would go on as though nothing had happened'. It was a fair assessment of his own minimal impact on contemporary affairs. For someone who was Prime Minister for eight and a half years and leader of his party for eighteen, Asquith accomplished remarkably little. He managed only twO achievements of some significance--the introduction of old age pensions in 1907 as Chancellor, for which Stephen Koss gives him greater personal credit than most previous biographers have done, and the entry of Britain into the First World War without political schism or social dislOcation.
Beside these successes. ASquith's failures seem considerable. He was a bad war leader, lacking any overall strategy and content to hide behind the impressive but unreliable figure of Kitchener. He persistently refused to patch up the split with Lloyd George which brought a boult the final collapse of the Liberal Party. He failed to give any direction ' to the Liberals whom he led after the war. The picture of Asquith given in this book is of a man almost totally bereft of original. ' ideas. This may be due to the author's sell proclaimed aim, perhaps forced on him hY the nature of the series of which the book is part, to construct a narrowly political biography and exclude the more personal and intellectual aspects of his subject's life. This is a mistake in the case of Asquith whose extra-curricular activities, whether taking tea at Garsington or chasing young ladles around Sicily, were a good deal more interesting than' his political dealings.
Stephen Koss studiously avoids making any assessment of Asquith either as man or politician. This, together with a tendency to pepper his narrative with rather jarring quotations from irrelevant sources, is an tating aspect of an otherwise competent, if slightly dull, Study. Asquith remains as unexciting as ever. Perhaps Stephen Koss gets nearest to summing up his essential quality when he describes him as our first middle-class premier. Coming from godd Yorkshire Nonconformist stock, liking nothing more than an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan, solid and worthy without vision or sparkle, Asquith represents the good and bad points of the bourgeois ethic. LadY Salisbury put it nicely when she commented on his choice of Oxford as the title for his peerage: 'It is like a suburban villa calling itself yersailles'.
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