Cold, dreary, foggy London in the war. The great monuments are shrouded; there are dirigibles in the sky. It must have been in the back of little Max’s mind when he looked out the window of his London hideaway—like a spectre in the fog itself: David Lloyd George’s handsome face with its drooping moustache, and his radical posturing. (That was it—the radical posture! As Churchill said of Gandhi, so Max Aitken must have thought of Lloyd George—another con man).
He must have also thought of his good wife, Gladys— perhaps a better wife than people like either Beaver or I deserve—preparing to campaign for him, and then him having to tell her to let it go and step aside, for he had been stabbed in the back by the crème de la crème of British society. No sir, you could never close the drapes on that!
So, after a time, Prime Minister Lloyd George was no longer pleased with our little Max Aitken from far-off Newcastle, New Brunswick, on the Miramichi. Soon enough Prime Minister David Lloyd George was complaining about him. Complaining about him taking his own view of things, independent of the government. And there was something else. That damned paper, the Daily Express, and Max’s wish to rupture the cozy alliance between Liberal Lloyd George and Conservative Bonar Law, the one man Lloyd George feared. (He feared Law so much that he often asked Beaver to go to Law’s house to break bad news, such as the reinstating of the much-hated Winston Churchill into the wartime cabinet.)
Ah, but wasn’t that cozy alliance one that Max helped form?
Aitken stayed at his apartment in grimy old London and waited. And watched. And plotted. Now, he didn’t plot directly. No, like a street fighter, he was a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy. A bottle over the head at the right time.
Besides, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t try to bring down this coalition while there was a war.
But the war—as awful as it was, and as long as it did last, and as many empires as it did manage to destroy—did not last for ever. It was over in November 1918, and Max had his papers—and as anyone who ever read anything by him could tell you, one knew when he wrote something, or, even worse, had something written.
As early as August 1918, Max was allowing certain editorials to be printed in the Express that would cause the coalition government embarrassment and discomfort.
In one such incident, Lloyd George sent Churchill (now back in cabinet, and Beaverbrook’s one remaining Liberal friend) to ask for an explanation about an editorial that was as cutting as it was truthful. The editorial stated that the tottering Liberals were saved from defeat only by the outbreak of world war in 1914 and certain people’s (i.e., Lord Beaverbrook’s) gracious help. And this in an editorial in a paper owned by a man who was still minister of information for the sitting coalition government.
Beaverbrook would not retract or condemn the editorial, nor would he disclaim credit for it. This is how tough the little bastard was—staring down both Churchill and David Lloyd George at the same time.
As far as Churchill was concerned, as is suggested by Peter Howard and others, this was “a blatant form of political rebellion,” and he cautioned Max that he would be sorry to have to deliver this news to the prime minister. Still Max would not draw back. And any Miramicher can understand why. A year and a half before, he had been in a better position in politics than Winston, and had in fact advised him on how to save his career. Now Churchill was once again in power. No, Max could not draw back!
When the news was delivered, it was reported that Lloyd George decided to let it go. He had enough fights on his hands without taking on Aitken, and he knew he needed the paper’s support—or at least its indifference to his political aims. Max knew, in his petulant way, that he had ruffled the feathers of the bird he wanted to bring down. But it would take more than one shot.
MAX AITKEN RESIGNED from office as minister of information in October 1918, due to ill health. Everyone thought he was faking, but he was very ill and, through to the end of the war in November, was in serious jeopardy of losing his life to an abscessed tooth. His resignation, though, also meant that he could turn his full attention to the flaws of a government of which he, up until that time, had been a member.
“Beaverbrook now seemed not merely independent of the Government, but hostile to it, and it was hard to believe that he had once been the intimate friends of Cabinet Ministers,” A.J.P. Taylor writes about this period. But men in both parties—those “intimate friends” had dealt him a terrible blow, had kept him on the outside, ridiculed his Empire Free Trade platform and his paper, and for almost ten years had besmirched his name and his faroff Canada. Now they blamed him for having the audacity to fight back.
Max used his paper as a weapon. In fact, why publish a paper that disagreed with your own opinions? No newspaper baron in his right mind would do so. Simply put, he felt an intrusive wartime coalition government was one thing—but a government should not be interfering with an average citizenry after the war, nor should it send more British and Canadian troops in to fight alongside the White Russians in their war against the Bolsheviks. (They were sent.) It was bad for business and bad for everything else, and his was not the only newspaper that wrote this. His was simply the loudest.
There is an aside here: Max and Russia. Max was secretly fascinated with Bolshevism, and even at times applauded it. Perhaps he was not as enthusiastic as Bernard Shaw or other artists (who did not seem to realize that, if they lived in Soviet Russia, they would be the first to disappear), but it seems he did look upon it as a legitimate ideology. He was always hesitant to oppose it. There is, however, the great quip he made in Glasgow, while stumping for Free Trade a few years later. When a Communist shouted him down, saying, “Beaver, have you been to Russia? There is no unemployment in Russia,” Max said, “Yes, I have, and you are right—there is no unemployment in Russia.” He paused, and then added, “I’ve been to the Glasgow jail, and there is no unemployment there either.”
I think this was part of his general perversity—to argue any side that rankled those he was arguing with at the time.
Unfortunately for Max, in 1922, just when it seemed that Bonar Law, who had now led the Conservative Party since 1912, might be able to break free of the coalition and lead the Conservative Party to victory, poor health made Law step aside. That left in the running those whom Max distrusted.
Austin Chamberlain, Max’s enemy from the party leadership race of 1912, became leader of the Conservative Party within the House of Commons in 1922, and Chamberlain was inclined, as Peter Howard said, to support the coalition. And of course he hated Max Aitken for keeping him from the leadership. But as Max upped his editorial displeasure with the coalition, Chamberlain, in order to embarrass the press baron, suggested that the government was unsuitable to Beaverbrook only because he had businesses and oil interests in the East of which England disapproved. Max had no Eastern oil interests. This was a lie, and one that seriously discredited Max Aitken’s motives.
The slander angered Max enough so that, as Peter Howard states, he went to visit Bonar Law. Citing the disrespect he had for Chamberlain, “a yes man” for Lloyd George, he convinced Bonar Law to come out of retirement to be the saviour of the Conservative Party.
Ill and elderly, Bonar Law came back in June 1922 and opposed Chamberlain in a leadership runoff over the very fact of the coalition. The coalition finally fell. In the next general election, the Liberals went down to defeat.
It was a horrendous election. William Manchester writes that Churchill’s wife, Clementine, campaigning for her Liberal husband in Ireland, was spit upon. The noble local Irish paper made a point of mentioning that she carried “her un-baptized baby in her arms.” Churchill himself was under threat of death, and had armed guards at his door. Beaverbrook of course did not wish this. But he spent money to help the Tory candidates wherever he could. So, in the election of 1922, Bonar Law became what Max had wanted him to be since 1912, prime minister of Great Britain.
Winston’s son, Randolph Churchill, stated in his book Lord Derby, “King of Lancashire” that “the prime mover and principal agent in the plan to bring down the coalition Government” was Lord Beaverbrook.
Max would become known forever as what Jenkins liked to call, in his biography of Churchill, “a bounder” and a deeply distrusted press baron. And this is much how he is perceived today, even by many in our hometown.
Well, Churchill did not distrust our Max, nor did Bonar Law.
WITH BONAR LAW as prime minister, Max Aitken was perhaps at the height of his power as a back-room strategist. He wanted to use the new power of Bonar Law to support, among other things, his vision of Free Trade. Again, this was the main thing on his mind. Commonwealth Free Trade was to him the balm to keep Britain great, to keep it Imperial, without the need to meddle in Europe, and to safeguard against the great power of the United States, in financial, not military, forums. He wrote about this continually in his papers’ editorials.
Max was of his day. He believed in his own supremacy—as a white Englishman. He did not consider that the world had changed and many who had benefited most from Empire no longer claimed they wanted it. Max was old-fashioned and, in his own way, naive—as men from the colonies are at times, who believe in Empire more than those who are more privy to its blessings. In some ways Max believed he was a godsend to the people of England. If not, why would he be there? And it was in some part not only Empire Free Trade but Empire consolidation—a kind of unity, almost like amalgamation—that he was working toward.
But psychologically any talk of Empire after such a terrible war was in bad taste. I don’t think Beaverbrook understood this. His time, if he had it (and he did have it), was gone over yonder.
And then, Bonar Law, prime minister for only seven months, died in 1923.
With a vacancy at the top of government, the king had to choose to replace the deceased Bonar Law. It was said the Conservatives wanted to turn toward the common man. So Law’s former clerk, and second-term MP, Stanley Baldwin, suddenly found himself “The Man.” Truly a quixotic choice.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin! From 1923 to 1937 it was to be the age of Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin in Tired Great Britain.
Since they hated each other, it was a stroke of fate that would put Max Aitken into the wilderness for years.
Max was much like Tolstoy’s unfortunate dice player. At first, everything he threw worked to his call. From Saint John to London, he could not seem to roll bad dice. Then, after a time, try as he might, the dice no longer went his way.