Lord Beaverbrook (9 page)

Bonar Law said no, he could not be prime minister. For one thing it would mean a change in party colours at the helm of the wartime government. Second, Law was always a reluctant combatant. These were desperate times, and perhaps he was frightened of failure. They needed a sitting Liberal to take the reins of a coalition government, and that Liberal would be David Lloyd George. In every meeting that Aitken had had with Bonar Law and others, from mid-1915 forward, David Lloyd George had been present and had posed as Aitken’s friend. At that time their offices were two doors from one another. Lloyd George had made himself indispensable to the Tories, while pretending to be Asquith’s right-hand man.

“We cannot possibly do without Lloyd George,” Law supposedly said to Max Aitken early in 1916. So Lloyd George it was. This was Max Aitken’s greatest merger, yet he got someone he did not want.

Of course, what was at stake in this 1916 coalition was essentially the entire war effort, the fight against Germany.
If the government couldn’t command a united front, how could it direct troops in the field—which even in the bestcase scenario were being slaughtered at an unprecedented rate? (For instance, trench warfare caused so many men to be horrifically wounded in the face between 1914 and 1918 that it marked the beginning of plastic surgery.)

If we look closely at the British government crisis of 1916, we can see one of Max’s major flaws, one that could and would be seen with any perceived opportunity: his eagerness to do good for someone who perhaps had less talent than he did. He did it for people in Canada, like R.B. Bennett, and he did it for people in England, like Bonar Law. I believe it was in its own way a kind of rarified altruism, by which he hoped to gain the gratitude of older men. But there was another important reason. Max himself had no centre point, no true compass, no sense of moral equilibrium. Unless he was an influence behind the scenes, he would fail. He knew this, and I think Lloyd George did as well.

When Asquith resigned in December 1916, Max backed David Lloyd George, and was as instrumental as most in having him made prime minister.

Max Aitken sought one portfolio, minister of trade. And, Peter Howard states, he believed that Lloyd George had not
only promised him this, but owed him this much for his work behind the scenes.

David Lloyd George is a fascinating figure in British politics. A Welshman, born in 1863, he was a great speaker, and at twenty-seven he was the youngest man from Wales ever elected to the House. He learned radical politics on his uncle’s knee and was for land reform, the lessening or even obliteration of the hated and dithering House of Lords, women’s rights, union rights, and the rights of the “Little English,” the tradesmen and shop owners and factory workers who made up much of English society and had been frozen out of real policy-making for centuries. It was to them he owed much of his power.

He was handsome and sometimes hypocritical, but his brilliance cannot be underestimated. Perhaps the one person he feared, strangely enough, was the old curmudgeon Canadian Scotsman Bonar Law. But he seemed able to read Max Aitken, or at any rate knew how to use Max’s tremendous ambition against him.

When Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916, Max was convinced he would be made minister of trade.

He had not the slightest inkling that this would not be the case when he spoke to his wife Gladys in Cherkley by telephone from London. He told Gladys he would resign his seat, re-offer for his seat, and be re-elected (the standard
obligation in Britain when you are about to become a minister of trade). I believe this was perhaps the closest Max ever came to dividing twenty-five cents into three. Becoming trade minister was everything and it seemed the war was, to him, beside the point.

In a few short weeks he would be out of power, and finished forever as a true politico. For a man who understood human nature and was able to think three steps ahead, Max truly did not see it coming. In a way I am sure many other people did. Many were champing at the bit for revenge, and it was a set-up as deft as the attack on Caesar at the Senate. Certainly the Conservatives, led by Austin and Neville Chamberlain, as well as Mr. Long, were willing to stab. So were many of the Liberals, like former prime minister Asquith, who disliked Max intensely. Perhaps even Max’s budding friend Churchill knew, maybe even had a hand in it, and said nothing to warn him; nor could he do anything at that moment to help him. Worse, where was Bonar Law? Law was actually now the second-most-powerful man in the British wartime cabinet, and with his new power he could have insisted that Aitken be there. He did not.

Jenkins in his one-volume biography of Churchill states that what Lloyd George managed to do to Max Aitken he would never have attempted to do to Churchill. But this
doesn’t speak to Aiken’s flaw, so much as his solitude. (Jenkins does not understand this, and thinks the advantage lay in Churchill’s political expertise.) That is, there was a certain limit placed on what one might attempt to do to a Churchill, whose family roots, duty, and privilege went back four centuries.

As distrusted as Churchill was, by December 1916 Aitken was also. But no one could really touch Churchill. (In fact, disliked or not, he was brought back into cabinet late in 1917.) Also, Lloyd George was fighting his own public-relations battle at this time. Many were saying he had stabbed his own prime minister, Asquith, in the back and had made an alliance with the Conservatives to get Asquith’s job. So, to hand Conservative strategy-boy Sir Max Aitken a portfolio plum would be tantamount to admitting to something he himself was busy trying to deny in the papers. Asquith, in his last week at 10 Downing Street, said Lloyd George was loyal. So David Lloyd George had to at least appear to be. Max saw none of this coming.

But what is significant here is what he was offered instead by David Lloyd George.

Thinking he would be offered the minister of trade position, Sir Max Aitken resigned his seat on a cloudless day and sent his faithful wife, Gladys, to campaign on his behalf for re-election, in Ashton-under-Lyne. (She was prettier and had far more class.) Then he found out that newly elected Prime Minister Lloyd George would not back him for the trade portfolio. This was humiliating indeed, for why then did he resign? And, more significantly, why hadn’t anyone (including his friends) told him before he resigned that what he dreamed of was not to be?

If they had told him, he wouldn’t have resigned and could have still held his seat! But it was a gambit by Liberal prime minister Lloyd George, along with Tory men of high rank, to put him out of power for good. All of a sudden Aitken smelled a rat. He was in a terrible position and too late he realized it.

Aitken’s desperate humiliation was to be reinforced when a request came from the prime minister’s office later in the week that Aitken relinquish any claim on his recently vacated seat to Albert Stanley, whom the coalition wanted as trade minister.
This was an official request, coming from the coalition government, and therefore not only from the Liberals but from his own Conservative Party. The request was delivered by Bonar Law. And it was done with the callous intimation that Max had done little to deserve more, and would himself know this and be gracious. “They think you have flown too high,” was all Bonar Law could say. I think the worst of it is to be slain by the incompetence or indifference of your friends. And it must have hurt deeply.

So, what did they offer him, to make up for the loss of the trade portfolio? A place in the dithering, pompous House of Lords, the very institution that Prime Minister David Lloyd George hated and had tried to destroy! Any power it had once had wielded had been considerably reduced by 1911 by George’s Liberal Party. This was cynicism and disrespect at its highest level, adding insult to injury to a man, Max Aitken, who had helped him. It was done by Lloyd George in order to conceal that help and insinuate loyalty to Asquith, the former boss he had just gleefully replaced. (From this point until David Lloyd George’s defeat in 1922, the Liberal Party was split in two—and members were called either Asquithians or Georgians.)

As far as the public was concerned, Max seemed to have taken the lordship already, for his seat was up for re-offer.

No friend came with a solution. There was no way to save face, except to accept what was offered or fight for the seat on his own. If he considered fighting on his own, he understood his chances of losing his vacated seat were very large; the entire coalition would in fact be against him. If he became a lord, he could readily save face, not only in England, but in Canada, by saying he had resigned his seat to take the position.

Max had little alternative, and believed, taking the good with the bad, that he could make it up later in his career. This was never to be.

He wanted to take the name Lord Miramichi, but Rudyard Kipling convinced him no one would ever be able to pronounce it (this was borne out later by Queen Elizabeth, who couldn’t pronounce the name the one time she attempted it). So, it was Lord Beaverbrook. From here on out he would be known by a name he had never intended, because, up until the moment, it had not been foreseen, yet, the very name would become synonymous to many with a career that had been bought or politicked for.

So he would fight them all. He would isolate himself to do so. He would become the scapegoat. He would be vilified. Yet he would fight. If there was ever a moment when he turned into what the British pictured him to be, this was it.

Many of Max Aitken’s enemies present and future did not know just how high he might have gone in the world that spread out before him in 1917. Or perhaps they did know and were afraid.

He drank, but he was not what we call a falling-down drunk. He partied, and gambled, and lost himself in the arms of splendid women. He licked his wounds with sensual comfort and brandy. He had money to last ten lifetimes. He bought mechanical gadgets that were new, and that he had seen in the houses of the powerful. He moped about, pretending to be happy. But he needed a new weapon to fight them. And so he went back to his first love.

Newspapers.

Newspapers? Well that is the one place where the little bugger could “catch the conscience of the King,” to quote Hamlet. He had been writing off and on for papers since he was eleven, and at times the last thing he had been was discreet. He knew how to use newspapers, how to “write a lead,” as they say. And he was good at controversy. In fact,
whether he liked it or not, since the cement fiasco, “controversy” had become his middle name.

It has been said that he bought the
Daily Express
in 1916 to help bring down Asquith’s Liberal government and force the wartime coalition in order to help Bonar Law become prime minister. That may be far-fetched, but he probably did decide that his own world view needed some publicity.

Max was once asked by Lord Northcliffe, also a powerful press baron, how much money he had.

“I have five million,” Max said (by which he met £5 million, which was somewhat more than $20 million Canadian in those days).

“Then you will spend it all on that paper,” Northcliffe cautioned, and probably scoffed.

This wasn’t to be the case. The bold little fellow went forward with his newspaper, so that, by the end of the 1920s, the
Daily Express
(along with its sister papers, the London
Evening Standard
and the
Sunday Express
) would be the most read, most hated, most cherished paper in the realm. At its height it had a circulation of over three million, and for a long while was also the most read newspaper in the
world
. Beaverbrook had much to do with making it so. He never made it to the Admiralty, but he was called, even by detractors, “the First Lord of Fleet Street.” Most of the men he
worked with were outsiders like himself. Many were Canadian.

He was creating what would become an entirely new kind of paper, one which could be considered the start of the tabloid press. Like so many of these papers, it was hated by people who never read it. It was called “middle class” by his former colleagues, which was a snub synonymous with “trailer trash” today. Max wrote for it for many years, and became a real working editor.

What made it successful? He, more than his competitors, knew what people wanted. Max Aitken’s new newspaper featured, as Peter Howard tells us, a woman’s section (the first paper to do so), a crossword puzzle (the first paper to do so), Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear cartoons, and satirical cartoons by Carl Giles. He was generous to his employees and compensated his workers better than most of the leftwing papers whose owners hated him for his money.

He was, of course, an imperialist, a conservative, and a businessman—all of which seem tainted now. No one made more fun of him than novelist Evelyn Waugh, because, as far as Waugh was concerned, a colonial like Max did not have a right to have money. Yes, it was very bad form. So he was Lord Copper in Waugh’s novel
Scoop
. H.G. Wells based a character on him as well: Sir Bussy Woodcock. When Max
approached him about it, Wells said: “I needed a character who could think for himself and was able to earn his own money. You are the only person in London I know who can do both!”

Considering how Churchill handled money, and almost went bankrupt doing so, and how most of Max’s acquaintances inherited their money, it seemed true.

The famous novelist Rebecca West also created a character based on him. And Rebecca West loved him, had an affair with him, and wanted to marry him. It did not happen.

His paper was right wing of course, and would be viewed harshly by anyone addicted to the kind of status quo papers of the Canadian left today. Aitken was in a fight against rival papers and wasn’t beyond using titillation to sell, though I know he would blanch at what is allowed today—say, the bum shot of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. People might say he helped to cause this. But no more than others. Very few litmus tests for taste or decorum are done. Newspapermen are in many ways treacherous rascals, and the game is played on a daily basis. They are sometimes the last to consider personal ethics, and the first to howl in moral outrage if their noses are tweaked by censure. Not that novelists are any better. Novelists simply get you over
the long haul. Newspapermen and newspaperwomen have a different kind of venom. Max surely had it. He was also a tit-for-tat kind of guy, and why shouldn’t he be? He never had tenure. What he had he had by his own brains. Tit-for-tat was the only method he knew. And tit-for-tat is, in fact, what did him in eventually. It seems once the dust settled, and he realized what had happened, he could not rest as long as David Lloyd George was in power.