Andrew Bonar Law and the fall of the Asquith coalition: The December 1916 Cabinet crisis

Had Bonar Law engaged in sharp practice? His amending of his memorandum to say that he had forgotten to hand the resolution to Asquith may have resulted from confusion, it may have been a clumsy justification of his actions, or it may simply have been a lie to shade his conduct. Perhaps Beaverbrook invented for his history the conversation in which Bonar Law brushed aside his friend's concerns about the mention of the damaging press campaign and, in reality, the Unionist leader suppressed the text of the resolution to save Beaverbrook or Lloyd George from the embarrassment of being accused of trafficking with the newspapers.

Lord Jenkins and certain other critics, and in his own way Beaverbrook, suggest that Bonar Law suppressed the true meaning of the resolution either through incompetence or artifice. A.G. Gardiner, the Liberal journalist, said as late as 1932 that Bonar Law had placed "one of the darkest blots on the page of history" and in effect toppled Asquith.81 There is little evidence to uphold such grandiloquence: the Tory ministers wanted the situation stabilised, with either Asquith or Lloyd George in the top-most place. "Accordingly," Austen Chamberlain wrote only a few days after these events, "we drew up a statement expressing our concurrence with the views expressed by Bonar Law about a fortnight previously, that reconstruction was inevitable." Chamberlain and his friends, when they found out, thought their leader ought to have left the paper with Asquith, but none of them "then or afterwards charged Bonar Law with bad faith or suspected him of it. We thought he had blundered."82

Far from blundering, he very nearly achieved his initial goal: critics miss the point that Bonar Law had always wanted the two Liberals yoked together in a revamped war administration. Asquith, his survival instincts piqued, within two hours struck a deal with Lloyd George to remain as premier while the war secretary chaired a small war council - a plan that suited Bonar Law thoroughly. Did the failure to hand over the paper distract some observers from the more important question of what Bonar Law said to Asquith? Certainly he stated the conditions for the Unionist resignations; equally certainly he explained, contra Beaverbrook, that the Unionists had not gone over to Lloyd George; doubtless he again plumped for the compromise solution that both he and probably Lloyd George at this point wanted.83 Bonar Law wrote later - after Asquith had called him back to No. 10 to witness his reborn (if temporary) cooperation with Lloyd George: "This was a great relief to me, for I had throughout worked with the one object of securing greater efficiency in the conduct of the war whilst retaining Mr. Asquith as prime minister."84

Sunday night was inevitably followed by Monday morning. The compromise collapsed as Asquith became angered by withering attacks upon him in the press he thought, quite wrongly, instigated by Lloyd George. By Tuesday, the premier - his formerly unequalled survival skills damaged by his hatred of his Liberal rival - insisted on resignation rather than compromise. Badly advised and seeking to avoid the humiliation of being "bounced," he would soon learn the lesson of all those who suffer from the disease of believing themselves irreplaceable. Thus, on Wednesday Lloyd George began his remarkable tenure as Prime Minister.