HH Asquith, on the precipice of propriety

Precipice is the story of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who was prime minister of Britain from 1908 to 1916, and his infatuation for Venetia Stanley, an aristocratic socialite. He was 62, she 27. As the author states, “All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime Minister are — the reader may be astonished to learn — authentic … the letters from Venetia Stanley to the Prime Minister are entirely invented.”

He calls her “my darling”, “dearest love” and “dearly beloved”. He shared secret diplomatic cables with her, detailed accounts of cabinet discussions and frequently sought her advice on how to handle Winston Churchill or Lord Kitchener. It seems he wrote every single day, often two or three times in fact.

On Fridays, they took long leisurely afternoon drives. “They met often in between, of course, at lunches and dinners and country weekends, but always with other people around. The car was the one place where they could be sure of being alone.” The suggestion is they had sexual relations in the back of his chauffeur-driven 1908 Napier after she “drew the blinds” and 30 minutes later “straightened her skirt”.

I have little doubt that, like Harris’ other masterpieces, Precipice will sell in millions. But it has created quite a controversy for Asquith’s heirs. His great grandson, Raymond, the 3rd Earl, has said it’s “nonsense”. The suggestion they had sex is “totally ridiculous”. Perhaps, but Asquith’s obsession with Venetia makes it seem more than probable.

According to Harris, so intense and irresistible was his love that Asquith spent much of the cabinet meeting, where Churchill’s disastrous Gallipoli campaign was presented, writing a letter to Venetia. His attention was on his amour, not the Dardanelles. Perhaps that’s why it was such a failure.

This is how Harris’ delightful account of that meeting proceeds. “‘Prime Minister?’ He looked up. Winston was staring at him. ‘I wonder if I might now bring before the Council the matter of the Dardanelles?’ ‘Of course’. He quickly covered his letter with a few Foreign Office telegrams.”

But the letter soon returned to the top of Asquith’s mind. “(He) pulled the letter he had just begun from beneath his pile of documents. He shielded it with one arm from Balfour’s languid gaze as he wrote.” It was only when he finished that he “returned his full attention to Winston’s presentation”. By then “the First Lord of the Admiralty had made a tremendous impression”. As Harris writes, “nobody raised any objections” and Asquith declared “an operation to force the Dardanelles Straits is approved unanimously”. But it seems the prime minister hadn’t paid attention to its details! Thus, one of the worst disasters of World War I was set in motion.

Asquith’s was, of course, a different time, a part of a forgotten world. His style was unhurried, often casual and languid, never driven by emergency or crisis. Dinner parties were frequent and lasted till midnight. He took taxis, spent time browsing in bookshops, went for walks without security and drank uninhibitedly.

“At one o’clock in the morning”, writes Harris of an occasion just before the war, “the Prime Minister, with a quarter bottle of brandy inside him, climbed slightly unsteadily into the back of a taxi and was driven by an amazed cabbie to Buckingham Palace … where presently George V appeared, wearing a pair of slippers, a brown dressing gown over his night shirt, his eyes full of sleep.” Asquith wanted the king to telegraph the tsar for support against the kaiser.

Leave aside other prime ministers, even Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak would hesitate to emulate such behaviour. But that’s what makes Asquith’s story special.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story.The views expressed are personal

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