12

Chief

In February 1920, H. W. Wilson, leader-writer for the Daily Mail, and the ‘mental backbone of the paper’¹ – according to its proprietor – delivered this judgement: ‘As I write more and more clearly you appear as the force which won the war.’² He was not writing to President Wilson, nor to Lloyd George, nor to one of the Allied generals. He was writing to his proprietor Lord Northcliffe, one of the most energetic and colourful newspaper-owners who ever lived. The prime minister of Australia, W. M. (Billy) Hughes, spoke of Northcliffe as ‘one of the great forces for the making of victory during the war’.³

One of the reasons Northcliffe regarded Wilson as the ‘mental backbone’ of his most popular newspaper was, no doubt, his underling’s readiness to be His Master’s Voice. ‘I hear you are swanking about Fleet Street, being patted on the back for the excellent leaders which I write and don’t get paid for,’ the Chief once told Wilson.⁴ Innumerable sycophantic letters from Wilson to his proprietor are preserved in the British Library, and they provide a reflection of the press chief’s ascendancy. In October 1903, Wilson is writing to ‘Dear Mr Harmsworth’; in 1905, he wrote, ‘Dear Sir Alfred’; in 1906, ‘My dear Lord’. Having dinner with Harmsworth after he had acquired his Northcliffe title was ‘like translation to the Elsyian fields, where, according to the best authorities, the visitor banquets on the most superb comestibles, and is permitted to discourse with the wise and the great. The only trouble is that the return from such an existence to everyday life is like the descent into Purgatory of those who have tasted bliss complete.’ One of Wilson’s tasks was to supply Northcliffe with his expanding library of books about Napoleon. Soon ‘My dear Lord’ of the correspondence becomes simply ‘My dear Chief’. It was as ‘Chief’ that Northcliffe was generally known. He signed his telegrams ‘Chief’. When the Germans in February 1917 bombarded Broadstairs, Wilson wrote: ‘I do beg you not to risk your life there. It is an unnecessary risk, and Napoleon condemned that. The Germans know perfectly well that you are the soul and the heart of this war, and that if you were out of the way, the various puppets now in office would probably run and make peace.’⁵ In a later letter, thanking Chief for a cheque, Wilson grovellingly told Northcliffe that ‘like that other N’ he was ‘under posterity’s eye’.⁶

Many jokes were made about Northcliffe’s power and influence. ‘Have you heard? The Prime Minister has resigned and Northcliffe has sent for the King’ was a familiar one.7 There was no doubt in the politicians’ minds that there was truth in the joke. The correspondence between Northcliffe and his leader-writers and his editors, both at the Daily Mail and at The Times (which put up slightly more resistance to his diktats and whims), makes it quite clear that he believed himself to have the power to remove or to instate British leaders, and possibly other world leaders too. He unquestionably played a role in unseating Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916; he saw himself (and so did Lloyd George) as the man who had put in Lloyd George, and three years later he mulled over the possibility of replacing Lloyd George with Winston Churchill. ‘It is a question of whether Winston would not make a better Prime Minister than Lloyd George. He is untrustworthy but he knows more and has a clearer head; moreover in danger he has shown himself bold. His handling of the army question has certainly been a success. And slippery though he is, he is less slippery than Lloyd George whom no one trusts.’⁸

Important as the Fourth Estate became in Victorian England (and prime ministers from Gladstone to Salisbury saw nothing wrong with well-managed ‘leaks’, or favourable mentions in the influential newspapers), it is all but unimaginable that in any previous generation a British newspaper proprietor could have written in such terms, believing it to be within his power and his remit to appoint the government of the day. That he should be seen as having done so was partially a sign of the times and partially a tribute to the extraordinary personality of Sir Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, Bt., 1st Viscount Northcliffe and Baron Northcliffe of the Isle of Thanet (1865–1922). His appearance is electrifying, looking as he does like the most uncanny blend between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. His hyper-energy and his dynamism still have the power to agitate as one reads his letters, or the transcripts of his speeches. One sees why he was loved – the subeditors and compositors on his papers were in tears as they made up the memorial issues of the Daily Mail and The Times on the day of his death. One sees why he was loathed. He fed off power, needed it as a vampire needs blood, and he was prepared to destroy in order to get it. Having failed to be elected as the Unionist candidate for Portsmouth at the age of thirty in 1895, he had a consistent loathing of elected politicians, and when they came to displease him he had no compunction about using any methods he could to displace them. Bonar Law and Asquith both lost sons on the Western Front. After Alfred Northcliffe lost a son, however, and after the cataclysm of the battle of the Somme – 60,000 British casualties, 19,000 of them dead in one day – the Prime Minister, Asquith, was finished as far as Northcliffe was concerned. ASQUITH A NATIONAL DANGER was one ‘splash’.9 ‘Get a smiling picture of Lloyd George and underneath it put a caption “do it now” and get the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it “wait and see”. Rough methods are needed if we are not going to lose this war.’ Wilson, at the Chief’s dictation, wrote the leader – ‘A moment in our struggle for existence has now been reached when “Government” by some 23 men [that is, the cabinet] – who can never make up their minds has become a danger to the Empire.’ Across the top of this piece, the Chief scrawled the headline: ASQUITH A LIMPET.¹⁰

Alfred Harmsworth came from Protestant Irish stock. At school his nickname was the ‘Dodger’.¹¹ His parents were intelligent, genteel, but poor. His father was a sometime teacher and layabout, with an alcoholic weakness. Mrs Harmsworth, with a gesture which would acquire symbolic importance in Alfred’s memory, wrapped her children in newspaper to keep them warm in the winters. From an early age, Harmsworth was hyper-active, gadget-obsessed. As a boy travelling from Grantham to London, he talked his way into being allowed to travel with the driver and fireman of the train, bombarding them with questions about how the steam locomotive functioned. He did not make much of a showing at conventional schoolwork, but he edited the school magazine, making arrangements with a local Kilburn printer to set it up in decent type. (At about the same time, he was caught poaching by the gamekeeper at Ken Wood on the edge of Hampstead Heath.)

Harmsworth was truly one of the geniuses of his age in the sense that he tapped all its potential. Inspired by the success of the magazine Tit-Bits, edited by George Newnes, Harmsworth started his own version, called Answers, when he was only twenty-three. With his younger brother Harold (the future Lord Rothermere), Alfred was soon running a mass-circulation paper. He understood the importance of technology. He understood the fact that there was now a huge, largely untapped, middle- to lower-middle-class market, who had never bought the expensive newspapers such as The Times. Within a year he was making an annual profit of over £30,000.¹² In 1892 he was selling over a million copies of his magazines in a year. By 1896 he had started the Daily Mail. Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister could sneer that it was a paper written by office boys for office boys, but in 1896 there were a very great number of office boys. The huge ranks of the lower middle class to which these ‘office boys’ belonged were not politically aligned. Northcliffe understood them better than did Salisbury; though it was Salisbury who helped promote the ‘villa Conservatism’ which offered the office boys protection against syndicalism. They voted Tory in 1895, and 1900; but it was office boys who would vote in the Liberals in 1906, office boys who supported Lloyd George. Office boys cheered for war in 1914 and protested against it in 1916. Office boys, a little sheepishly but in the end determinedly, wanted Votes for Women, peace, old age pensions, modern household appliances, full employment. As the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury in his blackest moods knew only too clearly, there was but a handful of marquesses and the twentieth century was not very interested in their opinions. Ever since Harmsworth started the Daily Mail, British politicians have been obsessed by what the office boys wanted or thought they wanted, and they have been guided by such thoughts. He and his brother Harold reinvented the whole political landscape. In 1903 they started the Daily Mirror, a paper exclusively for women at first. By 1908, Alfred – now Lord Northcliffe – became the chief proprietor of The Times. There was a sense that the Harmsworths’ millions of readers were voting with their pennies as they bought all these newspapers; a sense, therefore, in which popular journalism of this kind was genuinely democratic in a way that party politics, dominated by a governing class, did not intend to be.

Northcliffe’s attitude to the war, therefore, was of huge importance and was deemed to be crucial, not just by the leader-writer on the Daily Mail but by public and political opinion in Germany. In the German Cologne Gazette in the summer of 1916, it was said that when Asquith and Lloyd George came to stand before the Judgement Seat, Christ would say: ‘Father, forgive them, for they knew not what they did,’ but that when Northcliffe came, ‘Christ would look the other way’.13

Northcliffe was one of those who entered with enthusiasm into the arms race with Germany. Visiting German factories in 1909 he pointed at the chimneys and said, ‘Every one of those factory chimneys is a gun pointing at England.’¹⁴

The Daily Mail with unambiguous enthusiasm, and The Times with slightly more muted reasoning, had urged the British government to go to war with Germany. On 5 August 1914, as the Chief wanted, there was a ‘splash’ on the front of the Mail: ‘Great Britain declares war on Germany’. The streets of London were packed with people, and the crowds sang the National Anthem. The Mail editorial staff, and the compositors at Carmelite House, were denying themselves sleep as they planned the stories and decided who should join ‘our army of war correspondents’. To their astonishment, however, the Chief was not pleased. In fact, he was furious. ‘What is this I hear’, he cried, ‘about a British Expeditionary Force for France? It is nonsense. Not a single soldier shall leave this country. We have a superb Fleet, which shall give all the assistance in its power, but I will not support the sending out of this country of a single British soldier. What about invasion? What about our own country? Put that in the leader. Do you hear? Not a single soldier will go with my consent. Say so in the paper tomorrow.’15

Northcliffe, no doubt in common with most of the crowds who sang ‘God Save the King’ outside Buckingham Palace, thought – or ‘thought’ – you could have a war in which only foreigners got killed. Many of the minor wars in Queen Victoria’s reign had been a little like this; and even the Boer War had casualties which, by the standards of twentieth-century wars, were remarkably small.

When war had been a matter of armchair politics, Harmsworth had been content to wage it. As long ago as 1900, he had dictated a leader – ‘England must remember a fact with which Mr Churchill does not deal – that the Navy is a purely defensive force. We must be able to strike as well as to ward off blows, unless in the contests which the future may force upon us we are content to see hostilities languish on for an indefinite period.’¹⁶

As soon as it became clear, however, that the army was going to France, and that the war would be of long duration, Northcliffe seized the moment, and thought himself into a central position. Everything which happened from now onwards happened against a background of his whims and desires, and such was the strength of his solipsistic vision that not merely he and his newspaper employees but the wider political world came to believe it. He quickly arranged for the Daily Mail to be dispatched to the serving troops in the Western Front, so that it became their chief source of information about the war, their mirror on reality. As early as 18 August 1914 one of his staff was noting in his diary:

George Curnock, who, the Chief tells me, is the best reporter Fleet Street ever had, sent from France today his dispatch describing the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force. It came by courier from Boulogne. George made great play of the soldier’s marching song, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, and the Chief has given us orders to boom it, to print the music so that everyone shall know it. He says, thanks to Curnock’s genius, we shall soon have everybody singing it.¹⁷

Northcliffe, with his passion for detail, his bossiness, his obsession with military history and his close personal identification with Napoleon, was not alone in thinking that he would have made an ideal war leader. H. H. Asquith, by contrast, could scarcely have been a less suitable prime minister to lead an empire into the greatest conflict in history. When the war broke out, he was approaching his sixty-second birthday. He was the father of a large, clever, grown-up family which, thanks to his early snobbery and judicious marriages, belonged to a higher social notch than that of his middle-class parents in the North. He himself was languid, emotional, sexually obsessed and clever in a second-rate sort of way. He would have been fun as a dinner companion, unless, like some young women, you objected to his habit of seizing women’s hands and thrusting them inside his trousers. He could quote Latin poetry and he ‘knew everyone’, but he was indecisive, vain and fundamentally idle. When he broke the news to his socialite second wife Margot that the country was drifting towards war, he did so in her boudoir while she was dressing for dinner. Her reaction was ‘How thrilling! Oh! tell me you aren’t excited, darling!’ He was chiefly obsessed, that day, by his emotional need to talk about it to his young confidante Venetia Stanley, a friend of his daughter’s with whom he was madly in love. The outbreak of the war forced him to cancel a visit to Venetia, and he wrote: ‘I can honestly say that I have never had a more bitter disappointment. All these days … full of incident and for the most part anxious and worrying – I have been sustained by the thought that when to-day came I should once more see your darling face.’18

All this is personally attractive, but it is hardly the behaviour of a war leader. He was more than vaguely appalled when, at the first meeting of the war cabinet, ‘Winston dashed into the room radiant, his face bright, his manner keen and he told us – one word pouring out on the other – how he was going to send telegrams to the Mediterranean, the North Sea and God knows where! You could see he was a really happy man. I wondered if this was the state of mind to be in at the opening of such a fearful war as this.’¹⁹

A year into the war, he admitted to himself that his preoccupation with Venetia had clouded his judgement, and not allowed him to think clearly enough about war strategy. And there are moments in his letters to her when the reader could be forgiven for thinking that her decision to get married and, horror or horrors, to marry a Jew, Edwin Montagu, weighed more on the Prime Minister’s mind than the calamities being enacted in the Dardanelles. Montagu, a cabinet colleague of Asquith’s, used to spend cabinet meetings writing love letters to Venetia, only half a dozen chairs away from Asquith who was doing the same thing.

Asquith formed a coalition government without consulting his Liberal backbenchers, on 26 May 1915. Nobody realized it at the time, but it brought to an end the political life of the Liberal party as the alternative party of government, which only eight years before had won so resounding a landslide victory in the General Election. There would never be a Liberal government again. Asquith’s decision to rule with a group of the political elite – his old clubland cronies, combined with the rising stars – was an admission that for the first year the war had been conducted with culpable lack of efficiency, and terrible loss of life. The professional army had suffered terrible reduction at Ypres. Churchill’s involvement with the Dardanelles venture had, it seemed, cost him his political fortune, as well as leading to the pointless death of tens of thousands of young men. No progress had been made towards the defeat of Germany. Asquith might have felt more politically safe with this government of national unity, surrounded by the Conservatives Lord Curzon as Lord Privy Seal and Arthur Balfour as First Lord of the Admiralty, but he had, as he half knew, begun his own walk down the plank.

Margot Asquith believed Churchill’s assessment of David Lloyd George as ‘the direct descendant of Judas Iscariot’, who had ‘blackmailed’ Asquith into a coalition by threatening to resign.20

Lloyd George held one of the key positions in the new cabinet: minister of Munitions. This job had been created very largely because of the agitations in the Northcliffe Press. At the beginning of the war in August 1914 the Mail had seen Lord Kitchener as an essential architect of victory. ‘The Nation’ – by which it meant Lord Northcliffe – ‘Calls for Lord Kitchener’. By the spring of 1915, it had changed its policy to ‘Kitchener Must Go’.²¹ A week before Asquith’s decision to create a coalition, The Times had carried the message from a military expert, Colonel Repington, that the British advance at Ypres had been stopped by the lack of a high-explosive shell. ‘The Tragedy of the Shells: Lord Kitchener’s Grave Error’ was the Mail’s splash on 20 May 1915. Kitchener had ordered tons of shrapnel, ‘when any expert could have told him it was no good for breaking down wire and trenches’. At this point, the government began to censor the Harmsworth papers, and the police turned up each night to read the proofs of The Times and the Daily Mail. But this was in itself an admission of Northcliffe’s power. He replied by sending uncensored proofs to Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions and to Curzon. ‘We can get things done,’ Northcliffe boasted. ‘What these people in Downing Street loathe is publicity.’²² When, inevitably, Asquith was ousted by a cabinet coup and Lloyd George became the Prime Minister on 7 December 1916, Lloyd George held a meeting with the national executive not of his own party, the Liberals, but of the Labour party, and told them: ‘Politicians make one fundamental mistake when they have been in office. They think that the people who are in office, or who have been in office, are absolutely essential to the Government of the country, and that no one else is in the least able to carry on affairs. Well, we are a nation of 45 millions, and, really, if we cannot produce at least two or three alternative cabinets, we must really be what Carlyle once called us – “a nation of fools”.’²³

One of those who watched most carefully as Lloyd George triumphantly seized the controls was a Canadian backbench MP named Max Aitken (1879–1964), with a face like a very amused monkey, and a bank account larger than anyone else’s in the House of Commons. In those days, Canadians enjoyed full British citizenship. Aitken was the son of a Presbyterian minister of Scottish origin from Newcastle, New Brunswick. He made a fortune – with scrupulous Presbyterian honesty – by trading in bonds and was a multi-millionaire by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Apart from making money in prodigious quantities, his other genius was for political fixing, and he became the close confidant of another Canadian in British political life, Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923). Aitken helped Law make a lot of money by his judicious financial advice. Law helped Aitken become the Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyme, a suburb of Manchester. Aitken had very light political baggage. He supported the Empire, and he believed in tariffs to protect imperial trade, but beyond that, it was largely a matter of chance that he was a Unionist rather than a Liberal. He quickly became Bonar Law’s most intimate friend in the House of Commons,24 at the time when Law became leader of his party.

While followers of Northcliffe attribute the collapse of Asquith and the advancement of Lloyd George to their hero’s public trumpeting, the worshippers of Aitken see the coalition as the creation of the quiet Canadian.²⁵ At his country house in Surrey, Cherkley, Aitken brokered three secret meetings between Law and Asquith during the autumn of 1914, in which the Conservative leader promised his support for the government on condition that Asquith backed down from imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Certainly, by the time he had got his peerage, in 1917, and had become Lord Beaverbrook, Aitken saw himself as the sole architect of the new prime minister’s career. ‘It was not Mr Asquith’s judgement that I distrusted; it was that of the kind of barnacles, especially in the general staff, which had affixed themselves to his administration. I believed with good reason as the event showed, that Mr Lloyd George’s military opinions were better than those of Sir William Robertson and the War Office, and that the united command and all else was impossible unless the generals could be put under proper control by the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister.’ That was what he told Mrs Asquith when the war was over.²⁶

But Max Aitken had not been slow to see, during the first year of the war, that real power – as far as the politicians were concerned, terrifying power – was being exercised by Lord Northcliffe. In the autumn of 1916, as Asquith’s career came to a close, and as Law began to look as if he might lose control of the Unionist party, Aitken bought controlling shares in the ailing Daily Express. His life as the greatest newspaper proprietor after Northcliffe belongs to a later period, but he could see clearly enough the way in which the wind was blowing. Fireside chats with political leaders would, for many a decade to come, and perhaps for ever, be one way in which political deals were brokered, and power wielded. But the days in which the political class met in clubs and country houses, and could conduct their nation’s affairs without popular will or consultation, were over.

The fruitless slaughter of 1916 was leading to political upheaval all over Europe. In France agitation became so extreme that Clemenceau took all but dictatorial powers to himself. In Russia, in 1917, they went through two political revolutions. In Germany Bethmann-Hollweg, that gentle pessimist who played Beethoven on the piano each day, fell as Chancellor in July 1917. The collapse of Asquith’s power must be seen against this background.27 But the power of the Press in Britain was undoubtedly a key element in the story. It was the Age of the Journalist. George V could protest against the rise of Harmsworth and Aitken²⁸ but the creation of popular journalism was one of capitalism’s most extraordinary developments. The hatefulness of the Press to aesthetes, aristocrats, dictators, poseurs, kings, poets, would grow and with reason. Its power without responsibility was to be likened to that of the harlot, in a phrase written for Stanley Baldwin, when Prime Minister, by his journalist cousin Rudyard Kipling. The very phrase has such a journalistic ring to it. The truth is that the countries where such appalling vulgarians as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook flourished were, mysteriously, freer and better places to live than those where the Press was successfully bridled and stamped upon. Shortly before he became Prime Minister, Lloyd George received a visit from Monty Smith, one of Northcliffe’s underlings, ‘To present Lord Northcliffe’s compliments and to say that he (L.G.) was too much in the company of Winston’.²⁹ There is something undoubtedly unpleasant about a bullying businessman writing in this way to an elected and royally appointed cabinet minister. But the twentieth century would witness countries where the bullies did not own newspapers – they suppressed them.

Churchill himself, who was one of Northcliffe’s bêtes noires, was himself a keen popular journalist who was not ashamed to earn his crust from Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere, and indeed his many acts of populism show him, as well as being an aristocratic hero, to be a tabloid journalist with an eye to a good story. Churchill, however, had a divided attitude to popular journalism, as to so much else. He had risen to fame as a war correspondent in the Boer War; in his years of political exile during the 1930s he would use his friendship with Beaverbrook and Rothermere to propound his views. In power, he had an anti-libertarian attitude, however. As Prime Minister, in the Second World War he frequently tried to censor the BBC’s news coverage, and in the First World War at the height of Northcliffe’s anti-Asquith campaign, Churchill was urging his Prime Minister to close down The Times, or nationalize it and make it the official organ of public opinion.30 Needless to say, Churchill’s ‘impudent desire to muzzle the press’ – the phrase was that of a Times leader writer – came to nothing.

Clearly, if the war was to be won it needed new leadership and new initiative – and Lloyd George abetted by the Northcliffe Press could supply it. Common sense is obliged to say, however, that this begs a very big question. The great powers were locked in stalemate. Domestically they were on the edge of, or actually suffering, starvation, anarchy and revolution. If any demonstration was needed that the battles of Ypres, Mons, Verdun, the Somme had been lunatic, it was provided in summer 1917 at Passchendaele, when Sir Douglas Haig launched an attack against the Messines Ridge south of Ypres. It was a repeat performance of the other acts of mass-slaughter: 240,000 British casualties, 70,000 dead, with German losses around 200,000. By a second attack, in November 1917, on Cambrai, Haig took the Germans by surprise and gained about four miles of mud. Ten days later the German counter-attack regained all their lost ground. If ever there was an object lesson in the folly of war, the sheer pointlessness, here it was shown in all its bloodiness. This was how it began to seem to many Germans, including those in high command, who had tried to sue for peace in December 1916. It was, crucially, how it had seemed throughout 1916 to the President of the United States, the gentlemanly Princeton professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924).

Ramrod-straight, bespectacled, Woodrow Wilson was an old-fashioned Virginian, a child of the Enlightenment, but with a prim, even slightly puritanical manner. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke and W. E. Gladstone. For his Independent rival, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson was ‘as insincere and cold-blooded an opportunist as we have ever had in the Presidency’, whereas admirers such as Ray Stannard Baker, his press aide, saw him as ‘one of those rare idealists like Calvin or Cromwell, who from time to time have appeared upon the earth & for a moment, in a burst of strange power, have temporarily lifted erring mankind to a higher pitch of contentment than it was quite equal to’. He had his more genial aspects. He was good at imitating voices and accents. He liked women. When his first wife died he married a beautiful Washington widow seventeen years his junior. ‘What did the new Mrs Wilson do when the President proposed?’ was the joke circulating in Washington at the time. Answer: ‘She fell out of bed with surprise.’³¹

To Wilson, as to any sensible outside observer, the best solution to the European situation would surely be a negotiated peace. When he was re-elected president on 7 November 1916, Wilson had seen it as an opportunity for peace. On 18 November the eighty-five-year-old Emperor Franz Josef had died, to be succeeded by his twenty-nine-year-old great-nephew the Grand Duke Karl. On 12 December Bethmann-Hollweg made a speech in the Reichstag offering peace negotiations to the Entente, to be conducted in a neutral country. Wilson’s letter to all warring powers suggesting that the United States were ‘too proud to fight’ caused profound offence. ‘Did the President realize’, asked a British diplomat, Lord Hardinge, ‘that to support peace at that moment was to support militarism with all the horrors that it entailed?’32 The Entente preferred to press on to Passchendaele, to mayhem and to slaughter.

For the governments of Britain and France, and for the political classes and groups which sustained them, a negotiated peace was too great a risk to take. They needed outright victory. Wilson did all he could to keep America out of the war. Had the German military, naval and diplomatic powers had their wits about them they would have moved and conciliated American opinion. Instead, they continued to threaten and torpedo passenger liners – the Cunard liner Laconia was sunk on 25 February 1917 without warning – and to make offers to Mexico to return their ‘lost’ territories in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona in the event of a German victory.³³ On 4 April the United States Senate voted in favour of war by 82 votes to 6. Two days later the House of Representatives also voted overwhelmingly for war (375 votes to 50). That day, 6 April, the United States declared war on Germany.³⁴

Lloyd George sent Arthur Balfour to Washington that month. They could dress up the aim of the visit, but the real reason was basic: Britain had bankrupted itself and needed American money. America had very little military hardware, no modern aircraft, no hand grenades, no mortars, no poison gas. The US army remained ‘a nineteenth century force and a very small one at that’.³⁵ Since the beginning of the war, however, the British had relied upon American money, and by 1917 the debt stood at $400 million. This was the material reality behind Lloyd George’s marvellous rhetoric on America’s entry into the war.

He said that America had at one bound become a world power in a sense she never was before. She had waited until she found a cause worthy of her traditions. The American people had held back until they were fully convinced the fight was not a sordid scrimmage for power and possessions, but an unselfish struggle to overthrow a sinister conspiracy against liberty and human rights. Once that conviction was reached, the great Republic of the West had leaped into the arena, and she stood now side by side with the European democracies who, bruised and bleeding after three years of grim conflict, were still fighting the most savage foe that ever menaced the freedom of the world.

The extent of British debt was actually difficult to assess, as Balfour discovered when he reached the American capital. He set up a British War Mission, with the aim of focusing the American mind and the American purse on British war needs. It was not in his area of skill – dreamy, aging philosopher as he was – to coordinate the different agencies. Balfour was not a money-and-propaganda man. Lloyd George had the Napoleonic brilliance to send Northcliffe in Balfour’s place to become head of the British War Mission. The new Prime Minister had been Northcliffe’s choice, but Lloyd George knew that it would only take a few setbacks in the European war for the Daily Mail to be clamouring: WELSH WIZARD MUST GO. L-G’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Major David Davies, said it was ‘a damn bad appointment’,36 and called it ‘a gratuitous insult to the Americans’, but it removed from the British scene a potential troublemaker, and it had the effect of silencing the Northcliffe Press’s instinctive anti-Americanism. Notice-boards in all Daily Mail departments soon fluttered with an urgent piece of information: ‘I am leaving to take over Mr Balfour’s American mission and it is essential that not one line of criticism of the United States, men, books, or anything else should appear in the Daily Mail, the Continental Daily Mail, the Overseas Mail, or any other publication associated with the Daily Mail.’

The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, was utterly dismayed. This frock-coated Victorian, author of the hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, asked: ‘Whatever induced the Government to send Northcliffe here?’ ‘To Spring-Rice, Northcliffe was the incarnation of all that he disliked in the twentieth century.’ The Washington political class and the president’s entourage in the White House looked forward to Northcliffe running ‘amok’, but he was much too astute for that. With his unconventional approach, his genuine understanding of money, the war situation, and America, he went down very well. He had been obsessed by America all his life and wanted to be the British Joseph Pulitzer. He generally wore a blue serge suit, soft white collar, red checked tie and soft grey hat. The American public liked him. He emphasized his Irish origins wherever he went. He was impatient of America. He was surrounded by detectives. They read his mail. He cabled:

NOT ONLY AM I WATCHED BUT EVERY PERSON CONNECTED WITH MISSION WATCHED GOVERNMENT THINK IT NECESSARY THAT I SHOULD NEVER MOVE UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WHO ARE WITH ME DAY AND NIGHT THAT WILL GIVE YOU SOME IDEA OF THE DIFFERENCE OF LIVING IN LONDON AND NEW YORK – NORTHCLIFFE.

He missed his mother terribly. Northcliffe’s marriage, and love life, were tempestuous, but his love for Mrs Harmsworth was undying. He wrote to her constantly. ‘Most sweet and adored … I miss my cool room at Poynters which I can see vividly as I write and I miss my darling, darling Mother. Six o’clock is of course twelve o’clock with you. I keep a clock and English time before me always. I cable every day, dear, and I hope they arrive the same day.’ Uncomfortable as Washington was during a hot summer, however, he knew that he was doing good. In New York he addressed a crowd of 14,000 and received a five-minute standing ovation. The American papers proclaimed him ‘the most powerful man in Britain’. ‘The American Govt’, he told his mother, ‘is very nice to me. They are a mighty people, these Americans, and will end the war.’

More than most British politicians, however, Northcliffe knew the price which was being paid for the peace which was on its way. Having an instinctual, journalistic intelligence, a feel (strong, though by no means infallible) for the way the world was going, this newspaper man could sense that debt lay at the heart of the story. What was not allowed in a Northcliffe newspaper often speaks more eloquently than the headlines. Northcliffe’s months in America were devoted to begging – for tractors ‘to keep starvation out’ of Britain, for oil to fuel the Royal Navy, for cheap food and clothes, for motor-cars, and motor parts. Although he was received with personal adulation, he and his journalists saw enough of American life to know that the American mood was not ecstatically pro-British. Louis Tracy, formerly the manager of the Evening News, was his correspondent in New York. There are some bright moments in Tracy’s picture, as when he tells the Chief that ‘the American Army has suggested that all the German-American Societies shall henceforth be grouped together as one big organization, which shall be known as the Sons of Botches’.42 But Tracy was aware that the Great American Public resented the deaths of American troops in an obscure French war. American soldiers who returned home after being billeted in England were not happy. When the war was over, Tracy told Northcliffe: ‘There is a curious anti-British propaganda going on among the troops returning from abroad, especially those who have been stationed in England. It got to such a pitch in the Garden City Camp that twenty men were placed under arrest and may be court-martialled for sedition. These men could not say anything bad enough about the treatment meted out to them while in England, and it is a singular thing that they nearly all wore metal rings made by German prisoners.’43

There was nothing surprising about this. Just as many Americans are descended from German as from British stock, and the Irish-Americans in particular had every reason to loathe the British. ‘There can be no question,’ said Tracy, ‘that some underground agency is spreading far and wide the United States, the belief that the next war is to be between England and in the United States.’⁴⁴

When Northcliffe came back to England, however, no such talk was aired. He was offered the post of Minister of Aviation by the prime minister. He turned it down – not privately, but in an open letter in The Times: ‘I feel that in present circumstances I can do better work if I maintain my independence and am not gagged by a loyalty that I do not feel towards the whole of your Administration.’⁴⁵

There was something mad, as well as magnificent, about this. (In the event, Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere became the Air Minister.) Lloyd George did not ask Northcliffe to be an official part of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference when the war ended, and this put the seal on the enmity which Northcliffe felt for him. ‘The break had to come’, LG recalled, ‘when he wanted to dictate to me. As Prime Minister I could not have it. Northcliffe thought he could run the country. I could not allow that.’⁴⁶

Lloyd George said these words after Northcliffe’s death in 1922, aged fifty-seven.

It was a terrible death, not less terrible for being, like his life, partially comic. The year before he died, he had made a world tour. It disconcerted him. He sensed that the Empire he loved was coming to an end, and he feared that newspapers would be supplanted by wireless. His tendency, when back in London, to send abusive and megalomaniac telegrams to underlings and government ministers became so uncontrollable that they had to be stopped, and his telephones disconnected – the equivalent in Northcliffe’s case of disconnecting the valves of a lesser mortal’s heart. He was suffering, not as his enemies averred from syphilis, but from endocarditis. Before they removed his telephone connection, he was heard whispering down the line to someone at the Daily Mail: ‘I hear they are saying I am mad … Send down the best reporter for the story.’⁴⁷

One of his last barked instructions was: ‘Tell Mother she was the only one!’⁴⁸ Other scoops which he had vouchsafed to his staff included the intelligence that God was a homosexual.⁴⁹

By then he had retreated to a hut on the roof of his house in 1 Carlton House Gardens. The doctors believed that the cooling breezes would soothe his troubled mind. The roof was too weak to support the revolving shelter, and his neighbour the Duke of Devonshire gave permission for the roof of the adjoining house to be used. There, raving and sad, the father of modern British journalism died lonely beneath the modern sky of a London summer.