A couple of years ago Andrew Williams published The Prime Minister’s Affair, a novel centred on Ramsay Macdonald’s alleged dalliance with a Viennese socialite. Now Robert Harris presents us with his take on HH Asquith’s romance with an aristocratic beauty 35 years his junior while he was in office as Liberal PM. There is clearly something irresistibly piquant about a mild-mannered Prime Minister with a volcanic love life. Is it too soon for a novelist to tackle John Major and Edwina Currie? (Yes, and so it should remain.)
Although he seems positively virginal compared with his successor Lloyd George, Asquith – the son of a Yorkshire wool merchant – was well-known for his intimate friendships with young women from the upper classes. He fell especially hard for the Hon Venetia Stanley, a friend of his daughter, as is made clear by the real extracts in Harris’s novel from the hundreds of letters Asquith wrote to her (“Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands”). When he found himself leading Britain into the First World War, he came to regard her as an unofficial adviser, enclosing confidential documents with his billets-doux.
In his previous books Harris has often combined historical reconstruction with fictitious thriller elements – remember the business with the vital stolen documents going on while Chamberlain was meeting with Hitler in his 2017 novel Munich? – but here the narrative remains focused on real events: the relationship between Asquith and Venetia, the Asquith government’s conduct of the war, and the effect of both on each other.
Harris has, however, invented a Special Branch officer called Paul Deemer, who is tasked by the real-life spymaster Vernon Kell – an inevitable presence in a novel set during this period – with intercepting the correspondence between Asquith and Venetia to keep an eye on how many secrets are being spilled; drawn into the story of their strange relationship, he becomes the reader’s proxy.
Harris makes the claim in an afterword that Venetia was “one of the most consequential women in British political history”, but in his telling the consequences seem to have often been negative, with Asquith too love-struck to concentrate on the war. The author goes so far as to blame the relationship for the Dardanelles debacle, with Asquith’s mind wandering during the crucial meeting at which Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, strongarmed the rest of the War Cabinet into launching the campaign.
Asquith was by all accounts a brilliant political operator earlier in his career, but one sees little trace of it in Harris’s portrayal of him as a befuddled old goat. And although Harris maintains in his afterword that “it strains credulity to breaking point” to argue “that the affair was not, at least in some sense, physical”, he doesn’t manage to convey much in the way of chemistry between the pair. His Asquith is really rather unappealing. “If only neediness was attractive – how much happier the world would be!” Harris has him think at one point, although that suggests more self-awareness than is demonstrated by the many quotations from the letters with which he bombarded Venetia.
It would take more than a rather colourless male lead to make one of Harris’s novels anything less than compulsively readable, however. He has made a truly engaging heroine of the free-spirited Venetia, a puzzle to her family – “She has once kept a bear cub... in emulation of Lord Byron, until it got bigger and started chasing their house guests” – who abandoned her life of privilege once war broke out to become a nurse: the section dealing with her training is one of the best in the novel, and I wish it had been longer.
The minor characters are sketched in superbly: Asquith’s overbearing wife Margot (who liked to style herself “the Prime Ministeress”); larger-than-life figures such as Churchill, Lloyd George and Kitchener, but also quieter personalities like the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Harris also has the John le Carré gift for showing how meetings can become a form of blood sport: his dramatisations of the jaw-jaw going on in the War Cabinet sessions are as gripping as many another writer’s accounts of action at the Front.
Precipice is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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