The Rape Of Russia 5: Alternative Diplomacy Cements Wall Street Take-Over

Having successfully established Lenin and Trotsky, Wall Street’s chosen men, to lead the Bolshevik Revolution, William Thompson returned to the United States before Christmas 1917, leaving behind as head of the Red Cross mission, his second-in-command, Raymond Robins. Robins became the direct intermediary between the Bolsheviks and the American government, and was the only man whom Lenin was always willing to see. [1] He was an agent of the Secret Elite, a protégé of Edward Mandell House, and could list President Wilson as an enthusiastic friend. Woodrow Wilson had intervened to provide Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to ‘carry forward’ the revolution and withheld American support for the crumbling provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky. Wilson had expressed his personal enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution and on 28 November 1917, ordered no interference from America. By that he meant no other interference than that which had Secret Elite approval. Woodrow Wilson’s administration sent 700,000 tons of food to Russia which not only saved the nascent Bolshevik regime from certain collapse, ‘but gave Lenin the power to consolidate his control’. [2]

The United States could have exerted its influence to help bring about a free Russia, but its decisions were controlled by the international bankers who would have accepted a centralised Czarist Russia or a centralised Marxist Russia, but not a decentralised free Russia. A corrupt system under the Czars was replaced by a corrupt system under the Bolsheviks. [3] Plus ca change. The political hue of government, any government, was irrelevant to the bankers, provided they controlled the politicians. And that control was considerably more straightforward when dictated through a centralised government in a highly organised state.

The British wing of the Anglo-American elites gave similar support. Lloyd George’s government nurtured unofficial relations with the Bolshevik regime, and concurrently close relations with the American Red Cross Mission, through Bruce Lockhart, a young Russian-speaking Scottish diplomat. Lockhart was chosen for the post, not by the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office, but personally by Secret Elite supremo, Alfred Milner. Bruce Lockhart later recounted that before his departure for Russia, the great man (Milner) talked to him almost every day and dined with him at Brooks’s gentlemen’s club in Westminster. Utterly devoted to Lord Milner, Lockhart noted that he (Milner) ‘believed in the highly organised state.’ [4] Milner’s young agent quickly became closely linked with Raymond Robins and the Wall Street/Red Cross mission in Petrograd.

Lockhart realised that Raymond Robins was already established as the intermediary between the Bolsheviks and the American Government. Although Robins knew no Russian and very little about Russia, he had set himself the task of persuading President Wilson to formally recognise the Soviet regime. His assistant, Michael Gumberg, supplied him with the necessary background information to justify this action. [5] Michael Gruzenberg, from Yanovich in Belarus, a man of many aliases, was the chief Bolshevik agent in Scandinavia. He worked closely with Parvus and Furstenberg, and was a ‘confidential adviser to the Chase National Bank in New York.’ This dual role was known to and accepted by both the Soviet and his American employers’. [6] When the Bolsheviks began to loot Russia in earnest, Gumberg took diamonds stitched into his brief-case for sale in the United States. [7] He was an international agent who ‘worked for Wall Street and the Bolsheviks’. [8] This joint role may appear a confusing impossibility today, but in 1917 that was exactly what he represented. Wall Street and Bolshevism.

Michael Gumberg was close to both highly privileged Secret Elite agents, Lockhart and Robins. Bruce Lockhart boasted that: ‘We had no difficulty in seeing the various Commissars. We were even allowed to be present at certain meetings of the Central Executive Committee.’ [9] Lockhart met Trotsky on a daily basis, was trusted with his private telephone number and could speak to him personally at any time. [10] Professor Antony Sutton stated that Alfred Milner had primed Lockhart for the Bolshevik takeover, which begged the question as to how Milner knew in advance that there was going to be such an upheaval, given that he had denied any knowledge when he returned to London from his earlier mission in St. Petersburg. [11] Milner briefed the young Scot on a person-to-person basis and sent him on his way with instructions to work ‘informally’ with the Soviets. [12]

Two agents, Robins from America and Lockhart from Britain, had been sent into Russia by the Secret Elite and operated close to Lenin and Trotsky, both of whom had also been sent to Russia by the Secret Elite, and were consequently admitted into the heart of the Bolshevik government. The Bolsheviks knew exactly who they were and whom they represented, and vice versa. Lockhart recounted a party he gave for embassy staff and other prominent officials in St Petersburg: ‘My chief guest was Robins. He arrived late having just come from Lenin. …During luncheon Robins spoke little, but afterwards … he made a moving appeal for Allied support of the Bolsheviks’. [13]

By this means, the official diplomatic representatives of the British and American governments were neutralised and effectively replaced by unofficial agents of the bankers sent to support the Bolsheviks. The reports from these unofficial ambassadors were in direct contrast to pleas for help addressed to the West from inside Russia. Protests about Lenin and Trotsky who had imposed the iron grip of a police state in Russia were ignored. [14] Many Russians had experienced hunger and hardship under Czarist rule, but many millions more would die after the revolution from hunger, by the bullet, or from exposure in the frozen hell of the Siberian arctic wastes. A starving, withering wasteland loomed on the horizon as Lenin and Trotsky allowed the gold and treasures of Russia to fill the vaults of the western bankers who had financed, promoted and protected them.

Whatever money flowed into Russia by way of payments from Wall Street, was used to crush dissent and finance the ‘Red Terror’. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, likened it to an experiment conducted on the tormented, half-starved Russian people. ‘They are cold-bloodedly sacrificing Russia in the name of their dream of worldwide and European revolution. And just as long as I can, I shall impress this upon the Russian proletarian: ‘Thou art being led to destruction! Thou art being used as material for an inhuman experiment!’ [15] How right Gorky was. The corrupt, autocratic system of the Czars had been replaced by a totalitarianism that was even more corrupt and evil. Having seized control from the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the votes in the first elections for the Constituent Assembly. Lacking popular support, they knew that the only means by which they could retain power was through a reign of terror. They made no attempt to justify their savagery, claiming that ‘the revolutionary class should attain its end by all methods at its disposal if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by terrorism.’  [16]

And their dictatorship surpassed the worst nightmares of Czarism. Grigory Zinoviev, chillingly expressed what was to be done: ‘To overcome our enemies… we must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated’. [17] Ten million Russians were to be ‘annihilated’ to achieve that purpose. The Bolsheviks created the much feared police force, the Cheka, to conduct an utterly ruthless campaign of terror against all political dissent.

With Trotsky at the head of the Red Army, and his old friend Moisei Uritskii in charge of the Cheka, the voice of reason was choked into compliance. The Cheka crushed peasant revolts in various parts of the country after the Red Army emptied their grain stores without payment. Strikes by the proletariat were mercilessly suppressed. [18] Ironically, hundreds of striking workers at the Putilov factory from where the revolution originated, were executed without trial. In a nutshell, the Bolsheviks were utterly obsessed with ‘violence, dictatorship and coercion.’ [19] But the blood that was spilled in Russia meant nothing to the money-power in Wall Street. Profits flourished.

1. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, pp. 222-223.
2. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, p. 180.
3. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 19.
4. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 206.
5. Ibid., pp. 222-223.
6. Sutton, Wall Street p. 36.
7. Ibid., p. 115.
8. Ibid., p. 171.
9. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 256.
10. Ibid., pp. 228-229.
11. See Blog: Russia in Revolution 5, Sealing the Czar’s Fate, posted on 10 October 2017.
12. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 94.
13. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 224.
14. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 103.
15. Maxim Gorky, The New Life, April 1918.
16. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch04.htm
17. George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, p. 114.
18. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 101.
19. Dimitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 394.

Russia In Revolution 4: Leaders-In-Waiting

Russia’s hopes for victory over Germany were dashed early. At Tannenberg and the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, in 1914, the Czar lost two entire armies of over 250,000 troops. Although the Russian advance into East Prussia disrupted the German plan of attack and impacted on, or indeed prevented the fall of Paris on the Western Front, it also signalled the beginning of an unrelenting Russian retreat on the Eastern Front. By the middle of 1915 all of Russian Poland and Lithuania, and most of Latvia, were overrun by the German army. Fortunately for the Russians, their performance on the field of battle improved in 1916. The supply of rifles and artillery shells to the Eastern Front had been markedly improved, and in June 1916, Russia achieved significant victories over the Austrians and the Turks. However, the country’s political and economic problems were greatly exacerbated by the war. Many factors – including the militarisation of industry and crises in food supply – threatened disaster on the home front. [1] But where were the leaders of the revolution?

After war had been declared, all opposition was clamped down. In the early months of fighting, five Soviet Deputies and other members of the Duma who condemned the war, were arrested and exiled in Siberia. Pravda was suppressed and the central Bolshevik organisation in Russia was virtually broken by the authorities. Local bolshevik groups inside Russia continued surreptitious propaganda, but communications with Lenin and the central committee in Switzerland were intermittent and dangerous. Lenin was resident in Vienna when the war began, but moved to the comfort and safety of neutral Switzerland where he wrote, watched and waited. The Bolshevik movement was relatively quiescent because so many leading members were either exiled abroad or had been sent to Siberia.

Lenin’s small émigré cabal held a conference in Berne and called on all armies to turn their weapons ‘not against brothers and the hired slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and Bourgeois governments of all countries’. [2] Communication with Russia was slow, but Lenin gained a growing impression that ‘an earthquake’ was approaching because of the hardships imposed by war and the strain of constant defeats.

Lenin resided in Switzerland for the first two years of war while Trotsky spent 1915-1916 across the border in France, repeatedly irritating the French authorities. He attended the international socialist conference in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September 2015 which called for an end to the war and wrote inflammatory articles for a small anti-militarist Menshevik journal Nashe Slovo (Our Word). In September 1916 a group of Russian soldiers from a transport ship at Marseilles rioted and stoned their colonel to death. When the riot was put down and the soldiers arrested, some were found to be in possession of Nashe Slovo which contained anti-war articles written by Trotsky. He claimed that the newspapers had been planted by French police to provide a reason to expel him from the country. On 30 October 1916, two gendarmes escorted him to the Spanish border from where Trotsky made his way to Madrid. On 9 November, after ten days of unrestricted freedom in that expansive city, Spanish detectives apparently tracked him down and arrested him as a ‘known anarchist’ and undesirable alien. [3]

Here begins a remarkable story, largely drawn from Leon Trotsky’s autobiography. [4] A mysterious benefactor arranged Trotsky’s release from jail in Madrid and his transfer, under police supervision, to the southern port of Cadiz. There he waited for another six weeks. On 24 November, Trotsky wrote a long and revealing letter to his comrade Moisei Uritskii in Copenhagen in which he confessed that when he arrived in Cadiz he had roughly 40 francs in his pocket. Somehow, the Trotsky–Uritskii letter fell into the hands of the British Secret Service. British intelligence, under the control of the admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID), headed by Admiral William Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall [5] watched his every move. Hall played a central role for the Secret Elite inside the admiralty and amongst his dubious achievements he manoeuvred the Lusitania into the jaws of a German U-Boat off the south coast of Ireland in 1915 and monitored communications between the American embassy in London and Washington. [See Blog] But who was Moisei Uritskii?

A Russian lawyer, Uritskii was a member of the Jewish socialist party, the Labour Bund, and spent a period of time in exile. After the Bolsheviks seized power, Uritskii was installed as head of the Petrograd division of the feared Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, and directly responsible for the torture and death of many innocents. In Copenhagen, Moisei Uritskii was closely associated with another revolutionary plotter, Alexander Israel Helphand-Parvus,’ [6] yet another very important player in Secret Elite intrigues. These connections cannot be explained by chance.

After a relaxing stay in Cadiz, Trotsky was taken to Barcelona to be ‘deported’ to New York. Why Barcelona? Cadiz was an equally important seaport with closer connections to New York. According to Trotsky, ‘I managed to get permission to go there to meet my family.’ [7] Trotsky’s second wife, Natalia, and their two sons were brought by ‘special arrangement’ from Paris to join him in Barcelona where they were taken on tourist trips by the detectives. From whom did he obtain special ‘permission’? This was not the normal sequence of events; first class prison cell, hotels in Cadiz and Barcelona, sightseeing with his detectives? The man was not being treated as an ‘undesirable alien’. He and his family were being pampered. At Barcelona, on Christmas Day 1916, they boarded the Spanish passenger ship, Monserrat to New York. Immigration Service archives relating to foreign nationals arriving at Ellis Island in 1916 indicated that the Trotsky family travelled first class to New York. Moreover, information collected by American immigration showed that the fares had been purchased for him not by him. [8] But by whom?

A fellow passenger, one of the very few with whom Trotsky engaged, was the light-heavyweight prize fighter, Arthur Cravan who had been defeated in a world title fight in Barcelona in front of a crowd of 30,000. The purpose behind Cravan’s journey is unknown, but the intriguing possibility has been raised that he was a British agent sent to glean as much information as he could from Trotsky. On arrival in New York he would have reported to Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence in the United States. [9] There is the additional possibility that the tall, powerfully built, Cravan  served as Trotsky’s personal bodyguard. This is not as fanciful as it might first appear. He had clearly been exceptionally well protected by plain clothes police officers throughout his time in Spain. Trotsky’s expected arrival in the United States had been published in the American press at the very time anti-German propaganda and pro-war jingoism moved into overdrive. The international bankers who were to use him as one of their major pawns in their Russian intervention wanted no mishap to befall a key player before the game had even started.

Monserrat arrived in New York late at night on January 13, 1917. The passenger manifest prepared for the U.S. immigration authorities showed that Trotsky was carrying at least $500 (an equivalent of $10,000 today). His initial residence was given as the exclusive Astor Hotel, the favoured haunt of the banking and financial elites when in New York. The reservation had been made for him by persons as yet unknown. [10] Trotsky failed to record in his autobiography that he and his family stayed at the Astor, but related how he ‘rented’ an apartment in a ‘workers district’, paying three month’s rent in advance.

The apartment, on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx, had every convenience, including ‘a gas cooking range, bath, telephone, automatic service elevator and a chute for garbage.’ [11] There was even a concierge. Perhaps most astonishingly, the family used a chauffeured limousine. Trotsky, the ‘impoverished, undesirable’ revolutionary, had enjoyed a first-class cell in Madrid; stayed at upmarket hotels in Cadiz then Barcelona for six weeks; went on guided tours with his family; travelled first-class on a 13 day voyage to New York; stayed at a luxury hotel before renting an excellent apartment in New York and enjoyed stylish living standards and a chauffeur. How? In stark contrast to his immense good fortune, concurrent events in Russia precipitated disaster. While Trotsky luxuriated in New York, revolution exploded on the streets of St Petersburg. Odd that Trotsky and Lenin were comfortably moth-balled outwith the danger zone, leaders-in-waiting, supported and protected by un-named persons.

The Czar and military authorities recognised that civilian discontent was once again rampant throughout the country. They were likewise acutely aware ‘that gigantic forces were at work fomenting a revolutionary movement on an unprecedented scale.’ [12] In late December 1916 the highly controversial Russian faith healer, Grigori Rasputin, was brutally murdered. The Czarina had fallen completely under Rasputin’s influence in 1907 when she believed he had the power to save her haemophiliac son.

Other violent events presaged the ‘earthquake’ that Lenin had predicted but the Czar hoped to ward off revolution by victory in the field and the ultimate prize of Constantinople. Desperate to achieve this, Russia’s most able military leaders planned a great summer offensive in 1917 with upwards of 7,000,000 troops thrown onto the Eastern Front. They intended to breach the gates of Berlin, Vienna and Constantinople. Insufficient armaments, especially artillery, was a problem, but they were confident that Britain and America would supply these vital requirements. The Russians believed that ‘the very pressure of this colossal army, combined with a simultaneous offensive by the British and French on the Western Front, would beat Germany to her knees and lead to an overwhelming victory by September, 1917.’ [13]

Alarm bells rang in the hidden corridors of power. The secret cabal in London no longer had any need for a massive Russian offensive to win the war. They knew, from the earliest days of 1915, that victory was certain once supplies of food, oil, minerals, gun cotton and the wherewithal to produce munitions in Germany, were stopped. But the war had to be prolonged almost beyond endurance to crush Germany. That was at all times the primary objective. April 1917 saw America abandon her sham neutrality and enter the fray. Fresh blood from across the Atlantic would help replace the millions still being haemorrhaged on the Western Front. Russia had more or less served her purpose. The Americans were coming.

The Secret Elite had promised the Czar that Russia would be given Constantinople as a just reward for the Russian war effort, but were determined that it would never come to pass. Although the Allies had sacrificed a quarter of a million men on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, as explained earlier, these were deliberately set to fail in order to keep Russia involved in the war but out of Constantinople. In 1915 such action was critically important. Two years on, circumstances had radically changed. The Secret Elite would certainly not allow Russia to take possession of the Ottoman capital in 1917 through a major offensive that might end the war. They intended to carve up the Ottoman Empire for themselves, and Russia would not be permitted to interfere.

Further steps had to be taken to ensure Russian failure. If that caused a consequent regime change, so be it. There was no love for the Romanovs in the foreign office. The Secret Elite had to ensure that a possible future rival for key parts of the Turkish Empire, the oil-rich sands of Persia or the vital trading routes to India was removed. Permanently.

1. Dr Jonathan Smele, Warned the Revolution in Russia, 1914-1921 in BBC History http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/eastern_front_01.shtml
2. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 66.
3. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917. https://www.scribd.com/doc/124323217/HIDDEN-AGENDAS-SPIES-LIES-AND-INTRIGUE-SURROUNDING-TROTSKY-S-AMERICAN-VISIT-OF-JANUARY-APRIL-1917
4. Leon Trotsky, My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Trotsky, My Life, p. 267.
8. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Boris L. Brasol, The World at the Crossroads, p. 58.
13. Ibid., pp. 62-64.

The Balfour Declaration 10: Balfour Understood The Consequences

What we have clearly established about the Balfour Declaration is that it was the product of an Anglo-American collusion over which the political Zionist organisations exerted immense influence. You might be tempted to think that what developed from the Declaration in 1917 was an unexpected unstoppable enthusiasm for a new Jewish state which the British government had not foreseen. But the evidence clearly argues otherwise.

Arthur Balfour voiced the official foreign office view at the time. [1] The minutes of the War Cabinet meeting on Wednesday 31 October 1917, stated that it was their unanimous opinion that: ‘from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made. The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as indeed all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.’ [2] Was this so? He produced no evidence at all, and the Cabinet papers from Curzon and Montagu violently dismissed these very claims.

Balfour dressed the cabinet decision in the robes of diplomacy and politics. With Russia in the throes of revolution and the possibility that they might make a separate peace with Germany, every avenue of propaganda had to be activated. Chaim Weizmann had made his mark. Though there was ample evidence to the contrary, ridiculous claims which could never have been proven appeared to justify the War Cabinet’s decision. From whose lips did the phrase ‘the vast majority of Jews … all over the world’ take shape? In Britain, Jewish communities were clearly divided on the issue. Edwin Montagu provided ample proof. [3] Indeed the very notion that Zionism commanded such support was a fiction. It was the message from the Zealots. This was the assurance given to Balfour by Brandeis and Weizmann. It was a lie which was repeated so often within the exalted cabinet circle that it was accepted as ‘fact’. The evidence presented was to the contrary. In modern parlance the decision was the product of smoke and mirrors, spun to create the illusion that the British Cabinet cared about the future of impoverished Jews for whom they would take a moral stand. Impoverished Arabs did not matter.

Weizmann, like Lloyd George, wrote his memoirs through a rose-tinted, self-congratulatory prism dispensing multi-coloured favours on his chosen supporters. The omissions and misrepresentations falsified history. He wrote of ‘those British statesmen of the old school’ who were, ‘genuinely religious’ who bravely supported his cause. Inside their brand of Christian morality, he claimed they understood as a reality the concept of the ‘Return … of the Jewish peoples to the Holy Land. It appealed to their tradition and their faith.’ [4] What breath-taking nonsense. To describe the men who had approved massacres at Omdurman in Sudan, the slaughter of the Matabele tribes to create Rhodesia, [5] the men who caused the Boer War, [6] permitted the death of over 20,000 women and children in the vile concentration camps on the Veldt,[7] and planned and caused the world war that raged across the globe as ‘genuinely religious’, defied reason. Theirs was a very different religion of self-interest and control.

What is certain is that the Secret Elite’s innermost circle of influence knew the consequences of declaring its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. They had been explicitly warned by Curzon and Montagu of the impact that it would have on the Arabs. But the truth was, for as long as the Arabs could be cajoled through false promises to help throw the Turks out of Palestine and Syria, they would serve a short-term purpose. The Secret Elite aimed to control, manage and make profitable what they deemed to be a worthy civilisation built through the Empire on the foundations of English ruling-class values. [8] That the Arab world was to be fractured for that purpose did not bear heavily on their collective conscience.

Although some historians credit Chaim Weizmann for winning round the War Cabinet to his Zionist cause [9] the ‘diplomatic and political’ interests to which the Secret Elite steadfastly held course, were the imperial designs which underpinned their ultimate aim to dominate all other empires. It has been said that if Zionists hadn’t existed, Britain would have had to invent them. [10] Palestine was the final link in a chain which would stretch from India through Persia and the Middle East, protect the Suez Canal and give them unbridled access to the sea-routes to Persia, India and the Far East. French ambitions represented a serious and lasting concern. Whether or not the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov agreement would survive the final division of spoils remained unproven in 1917. Creating a Jewish-Palestinian buffer zone under some form of British control was eminently preferable to the risk of a French protectorate along the Suez. [11] Such thinking consumed their every decision.

Undeterred by warnings that it was inadequately resourced to accommodate a Jewish homeland, Balfour informed his cabinet colleagues that if Palestine was scientifically developed, a very much larger population could be sustained than had endured the Turkish misrule. (You can almost hear Brandeis’s and Weizmann’s voices.) His definition of a ‘national home’ remained significant. He understood it to mean ‘some form of British, American, or other protectorate under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture and industry, a real centre of national culture and focus of national life.’ [12] It was a generalised, almost throw-away interpretation which appeared to avoid any threat to other communities in Palestine. Had he ended his remarks at that, there may have been a sliver of doubt about his understanding of what might follow. But A.J. Balfour clarified his thinking, and in so doing acknowledged that the establishment of a Jewish State was in fact likely. The Cabinet minute reported his claim that ‘it did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.’ [13]

Consider the thought behind these words. His message to Weizmann, the international bankers and all who had direct and indirect access to the British policy, was that if they took the opportunity which Britain presented, an independent Jewish State could be within their grasp. Put very simply, the message that Jews all over the world heard was that if they supported Britain, Britain would support them. Having said that, Balfour immediately contradicted himself by adding that the suggested declaration might raise false expectations which might never be recognised. [14]

It was classic double-speak, but he knew what he was doing.

1. War Cabinet no. 261 p. 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. GT 2263.
5. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 226.
6. Will Podmore, British Foreign Policy since 1870, p. 21.
7. Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 115.
8. W.T. Stead, quoted in Hennie Barnard, The Concentration Camps 1899-1902.
9. One example being Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration.
10. Mayir Verete, The Balfour Declaration and its Makers, Middle Eastern Studies, 6 (1), January 1970. p. 50.
11. Ibid., pp. 54-57.
12. War Cabinet 261, p. 5.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 6.

The Balfour Declaration 9: Ignoring The Facts

The Arab cause was severely handicapped because it had no voice at the heart of the Secret Elite and no champion in Parliament. Financial and industrial powers wanted control of the resources under the sands and cared little for the indigenous population. In fact the Arabs were mere pawns in a larger game of international chess. Even at the lesser levels of power, they had no influential advocate. They were disadvantaged at every turn. T.E. Lawrence, who fought side by side with Faisal and the Husseins, knew that he was merely part of a conspiracy.

Lawrence had personally endorsed the promises made by the British cabinet, assuring the Arabs that their reward would be self-government. He wrote of ‘our essential insincerity’, of his conviction that ‘it was better we win and break our word, than lose’ the war in Arabia. His much heralded relationship with the Arabs was underpinned by fraud and he knew it. [1] Lawrence’s comments were made in relation to the Sykes-Picot agreement of which he had been fully informed. He was not party to the Balfour Declaration, but his Zionist sympathies later became apparent.

The Machiavellian intrigues which took place in London and Washington added a deeper level to this deceit. It had been argued that the British government, and A.J. Balfour in particular, did not fully realise what they were doing when they approved the fateful decision to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was patently untrue. Two of the most experienced politicians in the British Empire, Lord George Curzon, former viceroy and Governor-General of India and Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, both lobbied the War Cabinet against entering into an agreement with the Zionists without a much fuller analysis of what that would mean. Their Cabinet papers on The Future of Palestine [2] and Zionism [3] should have been taken seriously, but were ignored. Indeed their views were presented to the War Cabinet so late in the day that it had the feel of a cosmetic device to imply some kind of balanced judgement. Mere dressing.

Curzon agonised about conditions in Palestine where the Turks had broken up or dislocated Jewish colonies and warned that after the ravages of war and centuries of neglect and misrule, any revival would depend on a colossal investment. He warned that Palestine had no natural wealth. The land contained no mineral wealth, no coal, no iron ore, no copper gold or silver. Crucially Curzon alluded to a more immediate problem. What would happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants? He estimated that there were ‘over half a million Syrian Arabs – a mixed community with Arab, Hebrew, Canaanite, Greek Egyptian and possibly Crusader blood. They and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. They own the soil…they profess the Mohammedan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.’ [4]

He also informed Cabinet that anyone who glibly dreamt of a Jewish Capital in Jerusalem did not appreciate the complexity of the ‘holy places.’ Too many people and too many religions had such a passionate and permanent interest that any such outcome was not even ‘dimly possible.’ His final warning was profoundly clear: ‘In my judgement, it [Zionism] is a policy very widely removed from the romantic and idealistic aspirations of many Zionist leaders whose literature I have studied, and whatever it does, it will not in my judgement provide either a national, a material or even a spiritual home for any more than a very small section of the Jewish people.’ [5] His analysis was superb. His words were left to gather dust on the cabinet shelves and have been ignored because they destroyed the illusion which Zionists repeated about a land without people waiting for a people without land.

Edwin Montagu’s Cabinet paper on Zionism was distributed at the same meeting. It included a highly perceptive report from Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell, the acting Political Officer in Baghdad. The Oxford educated writer and sometimes British Intelligence operative pointed out that: ‘Jewish immigration has been artificially fostered by doles and subventions from millionaire co-religionists in Europe; [The most prolific giver of doles and subventions was Edmund de Rothschild] …The pious hope that an independent Jewish state may some day be established in Palestine no doubt exists though it must be questioned whether among local Jews there is any acute desire to see it realised, except as a means to escape from Turkish oppression; it is perhaps more lively in the breasts of those who live far from the rocky Palestine hills and have no intention of changing their domicile.’ Lord Cromer took pleasure in relating a conversation he held on the subject with one of the best known English Jews who observed: ‘If a Jewish kingdom were to be established in Jerusalem, I should lose no time in applying for the post of Ambassador in London.’ [6] Tantalisingly, Cromer was not prepared to name the alleged wit.

Gertrude Bell’s acutely accurate observation held the key to understanding what was happening. The clarion call to a Jewish homeland in Palestine came not from the small Jewish communities which had been established there or the few more recent immigrant settlers. Naturally those Jews who, together with their Arab and Muslim neighbours, had suffered under the harsh Turkish yoke, welcomed change. What she questioned was the validity of those who canvassed for a ‘homeland’ to which they had no intention to return. How many of those Britons or Americans who supported the idea of a Jewish homeland, actively considered packing their bags and moving to a community in Palestine? This was not the message that the Secret Elite wished to consider.

Edwin Montagu was the second British Jew to hold a cabinet post and held the office of secretary of state for India. He had a keen interest in Muslim affairs and his concerns reflected an awareness of such sensitivities. Montagu made an observation about Chaim Weizmann which resonated with the evidence which we have already presented. In recognising Weizmann’s services to the Allied cause and his reputation as an exceptional chemist, he reminded the Cabinet that Weizmann was a religious fanatic, a zealot for whom Zionism had been the guiding principle for a large part of his life. He saw in Weizmann’s over-whelming enthusiasm, an inability to take into account the feelings of those from his own religion who differed from his view or, and herein lay a critical point, those of other religions whom Weizmann’s activities, if successful, would dispossess. [7]

In an attempt to dispel the assumption that Weizmann’s brand of Zionism was widely supported within the Jewish community in Britain, Montagu added a list of prominent British Jews active in public life whom he termed Anti-Zionist. It included Professors, Rabbis, Jewish members of the Government (Sir Alfred Mond and Lord Reading) three Rothschilds, Sir Marcus Samuel (of Royal Dutch/Shell) and many more British Jews. [8] He begged the war cabinet to pause and think before it ignored the British voice of the many Jews who had ‘lived for generations in this country, and who feel themselves to be Englishmen.’ [9] He countered claims that American Jews were in favour of Zionism by quoting from the Convention of the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis held in June 1917: ‘The religious Israel, having the sanctions of history, must not be sacrificed to the purely racial Israel of modern times.’ Note how the term Israel was used. Jacob Schiff’s views were included with specific emphasis on his belief that ‘no effort should be made to re-establish a Jewish nation…’ Similar sentiments from leading French and Italian Jews were included.

These were very deep-felt pleas. Curzon’s warning ought to have alerted the experienced politicians in the war Cabinet. Milner had gone to war with the Boers to protect the Empire and its gold-mines, but General Smuts knew how easily native populations resented incomers who laid claim to their land. Sir Edward Carson had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war in 1914 over the rights of different communities in the North and South of that island. Surely he was aware of the tensions caused by any threat to introduce different values to old cultures. In truth, the Secret Elite had come to its conclusion, and no other view was welcomed. Their concern was the future of the British Empire which had to be of paramount importance in every circumstance. Advice from Curzon and Montagu was ignored. Curzon ought to have had the courage to resign, but acquiesced in silence when the vote was taken. [10]

1. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 5-6.
2. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/30.
3. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/28.
4. National Archives, Cabinet Papers: CAB 24/30 p. 2.
5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Ibid., p.4.
7. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:GT- 2263 p. 1.
8. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/28, GT 2263.
9. Ibid., p. 2.
10. Ibid., p. 3.

The Balfour Declaration 3: Peeling The Onion – Secret Collusions

The November 1917 Balfour Declaration was the final product of many interested parties with whom the Secret Elite was intimately involved. For over a century historians and journalists have focussed attention on the final outcome, the Balfour Declaration itself, but the process through which that brief letter of support was constructed clearly demonstrated the collusion of governments and lobbyists which spells out a conspiracy which has been ignored or airbrushed from the received history of the time. Take for example the role of Alfred Lord Milner, the central influence inside the Secret Elite and unelected member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet.  At a previous Cabinet meeting on 4 October 1917, participants had considered a draft declaration written by Milner himself and influenced by his Round Table acolytes.

His draft specifically supported the view that the government should ‘favour the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish Race’. [1] The capitalisation of the term National Home was later altered, as was the very Milnerite phrase, ‘Jewish Race’. Lord Milner was a very precise thinker. While the words National Home implied that the Jewish people throughout the world should have a defined area to call their own, his version favoured ‘the establishment’ of such a place. It did not imply a return to a land over which they had assumed rights. Secondly, Alfred Milner held Race in great esteem. He defined himself with pride as a British ‘Race Patriot’. [2] His wording was a mark of respect. Others feared that it was a dangerous phrase which might be interpreted aggressively. It clashed with the concept of Jewish assimilation, like Jewish – Americans, and hinted that as a faith group, Jews belonged to a specific race of peoples. Consequently, his version was toned down.

Secretly, the War Cabinet decided to seek the opinion on the final wording of the declaration from both representative Zionists (their phrase) and those of the Jewish faith opposed to the idea of a national homeland. It is crucial to clearly understand that inside the international Jewish community there was a considerable difference of opinion in favour of, and against this idea of a Jewish ‘homeland’. That these groups were apparently given equal standing suggested that the Jewish community in Britain was equally split on the issue. They were not. The number of active Zionists was relatively small, but very influential.

Furthermore, the War Cabinet sought the American President’s opinion on the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. [3] The minutes of the 245th meeting of the War Cabinet in London revealed that Woodrow Wilson was directly involved in the final draft of the Declaration. So too was his minder, Colonel Edward Mandell House [4] and America’s only Jewish Chief Justice, Louis Brandeis, [5]  both of whom telegrammed different views to the British government. [6] On 10 September, Mandell House indicated that the President advised caution before proceeding with a statement on a future Jewish homeland; on 27 September, Judge Brandeis cabled that the President was in entire sympathy with the declaration. Much can change in politics inside two and a half weeks.

As each layer of the onion is slowly peeled away from the hidden inner core of the eponymous Declaration, it becomes apparent that the given story has glossed over key figures and critical issues. There are hidden depths to this episode that mainstream historians have kept from public view and participants have deliberately misrepresented or omitted from their memoirs.

The previous minutes of the War Cabinet Committee held on 3 September 1917, showed that the earlier meeting had also been crammed with Secret Elite members and associates including Leo Amery, formerly Milner’s acolyte in South Africa. [7] Item two on the agenda revealed that ‘considerable correspondence… has been passed between the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (A.J. Balfour) and Lord Walter Rothschild … on the question of the policy to be adopted towards the Zionist movement.’ [8] What? ‘Considerable correspondence’ had been exchanged between Lord Rothschild and the Foreign Office; not a letter or enquiry, but considerable correspondence. A copy of one of these letters sent from the Rothschild mansion at 148 Piccadilly on 18 July 1917 has survived in the War Cabinet minutes. What it reveals shatters the illusion that the British government’s promise of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine stemmed exclusively from the foreign office under the pen of Arthur Balfour. Lord Rothschild’s letter began:

‘Dear Mr. Balfour,
At last I am able to send you the formula you asked me for. If his Majesty’s Government will send me a message on the lines of this formula, if they and you approve of it, I will hand it on to Zionist Federations and also announce it at a meeting called for that purpose…’ [9]

He enclosed his (Rothchild’s) recommendation for a draft declaration. It comprised two sentences: (1) His Majesty’s Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. (2) His Majesty’s Government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organisations.’ [10]

Balfour’s reply ‘accepted the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted…and [we] will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them.’ What? How do you ‘reconstitute’ a country? It might be interesting to consider the precedent that was being set. Could this mean that one day America might be reconstituted as a series of native Indian reserves or parts of England as Viking territory? Astonishingly, the Zionist movement was invited to dictate its designs for British foreign policy in Palestine. [11] This was not some form of loose involvement. It was complicity. Lloyd George’s government, through the war cabinet, colluded with the Zionist Federation to concoct a statement of intent that met their (Zionist) approval. Furthermore, it was agreed that such an important issue, namely the future of Palestine, should be discussed with Britain’s allies, and ‘more particularly with the United States’. [12] This action had all the hallmarks of an international conspiracy.

How many lies have been woven around the design and origins of the Balfour Declaration? Lord Walter Rothschild was the chief intermediary between the British government and the Zionist Federation. In this capacity he had been involved in the process of creating and formulating a new and explosive British commitment to the foundation of a Jewish home in Palestine. More than that, Rothschild and his associates sought to control ‘the methods and means’ by which it would be created. This mindset never wavered in the years that followed.

What influences had been activated to bring Lloyd George, in conjunction with Woodrow Wilson, to such a position by November 1917? Behind the scenes, who was pulling the strings? Who were these Zionists, and why were they given such immense support from the Secret Elite and, in particular, their British political agents? How could a minority group, suddenly command such power on both sides of the Atlantic? An exceedingly small minority group of no previous political or religious influence, whose ideology had been dismissed by many leading Rabbis as contrary to true Jewish belief, emerged as if from nowhere to strut the world stage. This did not happen by chance.

It happened by design. This we will demonstrate over the next few blogs.

1. National Archives: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6.
2. A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 401.
3. National Archives: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6.
4. National Archives: GT – 2015.
5. National Archives: GT – 2158.
6. National Archives: CAB 23/4/19 p. 5.
7. National Archives: CAB 23/4/1. WC. 227, p. 1.
8. National Archives: GT-1803 – The Zionist Movement.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. National Archives: CAB 24/24/4.
12. National Archives: CAB 23/4/1. WC 227, p. 2.

The Great Coup of 1916, 7: The End Of Democracy

Lloyd George immediately accepted the King’s invitation to form a government on 7 December 1916. His own version of events dripped insincerity, giving the impression that the onerous task of leading the government was thrust upon him suddenly, as if by magic. ‘As soon as the King entrusted me with the task of forming an Administration in succession to the Ministry that had disappeared, I had to survey the tasks awaiting me …’ [1] What arrant nonsense. ‘The ministry that had disappeared.’ This was not a Harry Potter. Perhaps he was thinking more in terms of a mafia ‘disappearance’. He would have been at home with the Mafiosa.

One of Lloyd George’s first moves was to summon Maurice Hankey to the War Office to ‘have a long talk about the personnel of the new Govt., the procedure of the select War Ctee., and the future of the war.’ [2] He asked Hankey to write a memo giving his view on the state of the war and as early as 9 December, Hankey spent the whole day with the new War Cabinet. [3] How more central could he have been to all of the discussions which finally approved Lloyd George’s decisions? [4] Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maurice Hankey was not surprised to find that Milner had been appointed directly to the inner-sanctum of Britain’s war planning. Unelected, unknown to many ordinary men and women, Lord Milner appeared as if out of the ether to take his place among the political elite charged with managing the war to ultimate victory. [5] Lloyd George claimed, laughably, that ‘I neither sought nor desired the Premiership’ and explained Milner’s inclusion as representing the ‘Tory intelligentsia and Die-Hards.’ [6] What lies. Lloyd George had always exuded unbridled ambition and had been plotting the coup against Asquith with Milner’s cabal for months. [7] His premiership was conditional on their support. Lord Milner was to have a place by his side.

The myth of Lloyd George’s ‘lightening rapidity’ in assembling around him ‘all that is best in British Life’ was coined by Lord Northcliffe in an article printed by the international press on 10 December. [8] Northcliffe had been highly influential in supporting Lloyd George, largely, but not exclusively through his editor at the Times, Geoffrey Dawson.

Although he thought nothing of telephoning the new prime minister in person, [9] the owner of the Times could not stop other influences obligating Lloyd George to retain what Northcliffe called ‘has-beens’ in cabinet posts. [10] His Daily Mail and Evening News called for the removal of Arthur Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil to no avail. Did Northcliffe not know that both men were deeply entrenched inside the Secret Elite?

Let there be no doubt, the coup was devised and executed by members and agents of the Secret Elite. Once Asquith had been replaced, they permeated the new administration with Milner’s acolytes and associates from top to bottom, and on all sides as well. [11] Let Lloyd George be the figurehead, but the Monday Night Cabal and their Secret Elite supporters were absolutely determined to place themselves and their trusted allies in all of the major offices of state. Furthermore, Lloyd George was subtly but securely scrutinised at every turn. He would not be given free rein. Thus their chosen men were placed in key positions, with a smattering of useful Conservative and Labour MPs given office in order to guarantee that the government could survive any parliamentary vote. On his return to London on 10 December, Hankey ‘had to see Lord Milner by appointment’. He noted in his diary ‘I have always hated his [Lord Milner’s] politics but found the man very attractive and possessed of personality and [we] got own like a house on fire’. [12] Of course they did. Hankey would not have survived otherwise. He was well aware of Milner’s power and influence.

Another myth still widely accepted is that Lloyd George’s very special cabinet, which literally took control of every strand in the prosecution of the war, was assembled at break-neck speed by the Welsh genius. It had taken months of deliberation and consultation before appointments and tactics were finally agreed inside the closed ranks of the Monday Night Cabal. The final selection which bore Lloyd George’s alleged stamp reflected the Secret Elite’s approval of men in whom they had faith. The War Committee initially comprised prime minister Lloyd George, who had been in the Secret Elite’s pocket since 1910, [13] Viscount Alfred Milner, the most important influence inside that secret movement [14] George Curzon of All Souls and twice Viceroy of India, [15] Andrew Bonar Law, still the formal leader of the Tories and the Labour MP Arthur Henderson, an outspoken champion of the war effort. [16] This central core took charge. They held daily meetings to better manage the war. Sometimes two and three meetings took place in a single day. These five men alone were supposedly the supreme governors of the State. [17] But they were not in any sense, equals.

The old order of senior Liberal politicians was mercilessly purged. Out went Asquith despite his years of loyal service. Sir Edward Grey had forfeited his right to office when he began to consider possibilities of peace with the Americans. He was put out to pasture. Reginald McKenna, long a thorn in Lloyd George’s side was dismissed. Lord Crewe remained loyal to Asquith and was not considered. To his great disappointment, Winston Churchill was not deemed suitable.  He had many enemies in the Tory  party. One Liberal Party stalwart, Samuel Montagu, who took over at the Ministry of Munitions when Lloyd George moved to the War Office in July 1916, had to go in order to find room for other appointees, but his patience was to be rewarded some short months later when he was made Viceroy of India. [18] This is precisely how the Secret Elite adjusts its favours and looks after its own. It still does.

The Secret Elite stamped their authority over every important level of government. With Sir Edward Carson at the Admiralty and Arthur Balfour at the Foreign Office, Lord Derby became Secretary of State for War and Lord Robert Cecil continued in his position as Minister of Blockade. Home Secretary, Sir George Cave took office barely months after he and FE Smith had successfully prosecuted Sir Roger Casement and refused his right to appeal to the House of Lords. [19] Secret Elite agents, every one.

Milner ensured that his close friends were given positions of influence and authority. Take for example the meteoric rise of Rowland Prothero. He claimed to know only two men ‘prominent in public life’. [20] It transpired that these were Lords Milner and Curzon. In 1914 Prothero was first elected to parliament as one of Oxford University’s MPs. In late 1915 he served on a Committee on Home Production of Food with Alfred Milner. In 1916, Milner’s friend was given the cabinet post of President of the Board of Agriculture. [21] It took him a mere two and a half years to move from new recruit to cabinet minister. In addition, Arthur Lee, who had accommodated many of the secret meetings which foreshadowed the coup, was appointed Director-General of food production. Other known members and supporters of the Secret Elite who shamelessly benefitted from the coup included H.A.L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, [22] Walter Long as Colonial Secretary and Sir Henry Birchenough at the Board of Trade. [23] They were everywhere … and not just politicians.

Lloyd George had risen to high office through the unseen patronage of the Secret Elite. His performance at the Board of Trade [24] guaranteed him the benevolent approbation of leading figures in shipping and ship-building. As Chancellor he laid claim to saving the City [25], took advice from Lord Rothschild, financiers and insurance brokers, linked the British economy to America through Morgan-Grenfell and met and socialised with the great mine-owners and manufacturers of the time. In December 1916 he revolutionised government control of production by bringing businessmen into political office. Unfortunately the appointment of interested parties to posts from which their companies could reap great profit was not a success.

Sir Joseph Maclay was appointed in charge of shipping. As a Scottish ship-owner and manager, Maclay had been critical of the government’s concessions to trade unions and he opposed the nationalization of shipping. The Admiralty treated Maclay with deep hostility, and opposed his idea of convoys after the onset of Germany’s unrestricted submarine offensive in February 1917. Maclay was proved right [26] though shipowners still reaped unconscionable fortunes.

The new prime minister made Lord Devonport food controller. Chairman of the Port of London Authority (1909-25), he broke the dockers’ strike in 1912, causing great distress and hardship in East London. Imagining that his hard-man image equated to strength of character, Lloyd George appointed Minister of Food Control. [27] Not so. Devonport protected his own grocery interests and resisted the introduction of rationing until May 1917. 

Lord Rhondda, the Welsh coal magnate and industrialist was entrusted with the Local Government Board and his popularity grew when he was asked to take over the role of the incompetent Devonport as minister of food control. He grasped the nettle, by fixing food prices and ensuring government purchases of basic supplies. [28] Compared to the others, he was a shining light.

Westman Pearson, later Viscount Cowdrey, was placed in charge of the Air Board. Pearson had acquired oil concessions in Mexico through his questionable relationship with the Mexican dictator, Diaz. [29] His ownership of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company (which became part of Royal Dutch Shell in 1919) guaranteed Pearson vast profits throughout the war.

Sir Alfred Mond, elevated by Lloyd George in 1916 to Commissioner of Works was the managing director of the Mond Nickel Company and a director of the International Nickel Company of Canada. Nickel hardens armour and special steels. Basically it is a strategic material which came to the fore in the so-called naval race prior to 1914. [30]

The Mond companies made great profits during the prolonged war. In 1915 Britain sent twelve times the amount of nickel to Sweden that it had in 1913. [31] There, it was either manufactured into war materials and sold to Germany, or re-exported in its raw state. Incredibly, the Chairman of one of the Empire’s most important metal processing and exporting businesses, which was directly and indirectly supplying Germany, was created Commissioner of Works. Questionable deals were subsequently negotiated between the British government and the British-American Nickel Corporation which were strongly criticised in parliament [32] but Alfred Mond ended his career as Lord Melchett of Landforth. You couldn’t make this up.

In addition, Milner and his Secret Elite associates literally took over Lloyd George’s private office. As early as 10 December Hankey realised that he was not to be the only member of the new prime minister’s secretariat. At Milner’s request, Leo Amery, his loyal lieutenant in South Africa, was unaccountably placed on the staff of the War Cabinet, but not as joint Secretary. Hankey remained secure in Lloyd George’s trust in charge of the War Cabinet organisation. [33]

A curious new chapter in Downing Street’s history was created outside the prime minister’s residence. Literally. Temporary offices were constructed in the Downing Street garden to accommodate a select group of trusted administrators who monitored and directed all contact between Lloyd George and departments of government. [34] The man in charge throughout its existence was Professor W.G. S. Adams, an Oxford Professor and member of Milner’s entourage [35] who later became editor of War Cabinet Reports and Warden of All Souls in Oxford. [36] This appointment was swiftly followed by that of two former members of Milner’s famous Kindergarten; [37] Philip Kerr became Lloyd George’s private secretary and Lionel Curtis, another of Milner’s loyal acolytes, was also drafted into service. It did not stop there. Waldorf Astor and Lord Northcliffe’s younger brother, Cecil Harmsworth followed shortly afterwards.

To complete the pack, Milner insisted that Lloyd George reconsider appointing John Buchan to his staff after Haig’s apologist had been turned down for a post. In a private letter which has survived because it comes from the Lloyd George archives, rather than Milner’s much culled and carefully shredded papers, he wrote:
‘My Dear Prime Minister, Don’t think me too insistent! I wish you would not turn down John Buchan, without seeing him yourself…. I am not satisfied to have him rejected on hear-say, & ill informed hear-say at that.’ [38]
Buchan was appointed to the prime minister’s staff as Director of Information. And historians would have us believe that these were Lloyd George’s appointments.

It was as if the Monday Night Cabal had kidnapped the prime minister. Just as Alfred Milner had captured, then captivated, the nascent talent of young imperialists from Oxford University at the turn of the century and taken them to South Africa to help him govern and renovate the post Boer-War Transvaal and Cape colonies, so now, the very same men ‘guided’ Lloyd George and filtered the information which flowed to Downing Street. They were not Lloyd Georg’s men … they were Lord Milner’s. He was in charge.

To the anguish of Asquith’s political allies, this new bureaucracy had metamorphosed into an undemocratic monster fashioned by Alfred Milner. They could see it and railed against it. What we need to know is, why has this wholesale coup d’etat been studiously ignored by mainstream historians? Why do they continually write about Lloyd George’s government and Lloyd George’s secretariat when his very position was bound and controlled by Milner and his Garden Suburb minders? The radical journalist, H W Massingham published a vitriolic attack on Milner’s organisation in early 1917:

‘… A new double screen of bureaucrats is interposed between the War Directorate and the heads of [government] Departments, whose responsibility to Parliament has hitherto been direct … The first is the Cabinet Secretariat … the second is a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister’s garden …These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service Cabinet. They are rather a class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner … The governing ideas are not those of Mr. Lloyd George … but of Lord Milner … Mr George has used Toryism to destroy Liberal ideas; but he has created a Monster which, for the moment, dominates both. This is the New Bureaucracy which threatens to master England …’ [39]

It was indeed. This was the Secret Elite’s most successful coup so far, accomplished by the critical silence and complicity of a compliant press. Elected parliamentary government had been purged. The Secret Elite spurned democracy because they ordained that democracy did not work. Their dictatorship was masked by Lloyd George, happy to pose and strut as the man who would win the war. Perhaps you were taught that he did? It is a self-serving myth. He operated inside a political straitjacket and fronted an undemocratic government.

And the sacrifice of youth continued.  And the profits of war grew ever larger.

[1] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 620.
[2] Hankey, Diary 10 December 1916.
[3] War Cabinet 1, CAB 23/1/1 discussed the cost of loans from America which were running at $60 million per week. Messrs. Morgan, Grenfell and Co. continued as the conduit for all American payments. Hankey also recorded in these minutes that the Press had been informed that the War cabinet would meet every weekday.
[4] Lord Vansittart recorded that Hankey ‘progressively became secretary of everything that mattered. He grew into a repository of secrets, a chief Inspector of Mines of information.’ Robert Gilbert Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 164.
[5] While Lloyd George spends many pages expressing his opinion on most of his colleagues, he curiously omits a pen-picture on Lord Milner. Possibly the Censor removed it. Either way it is interesting to note how carefully Milner’s contribution to Lloyd George’s ascent to the premiership has been airbrushed.
[6] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 596.
[7] See blog, The Great Coup of 1916: 4 The Monday Night Cabal, 3 August 2016.
[8] The Times estimated that Lord Northcliffe’s lengthy article in praise of Lloyd George had been carried in one thousand American, Australian, Canadian, South African, French, Italian and other journals. [Times 11 December, 1916]
[9] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 329.
[10] The Times, 11 December 1916, p. 4.
[11] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 376.
[12] Ibid., p. 329.
[13] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 164-5.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 6-9 and pp. 140- 47.
[15] The place of All Souls college at Oxford as the centre of the Secret Elite intelligentsia in Britain was identified by Professor Quigley. See The Anglo-American Establishment pp. 20-26.
[16] In August 1914 Arthur Henderson had been outspoken in his objection to war, but he changed his position absolutely within weeks.
[17] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 391.
[18] E.S. Montagu was both a friend of Asquith’s and respected colleague of Lloyd George. To most observers his omission from Asquith’s cabinet in 1916 spelled the end of his political career. But this is not how the Secret Elite work. In stepping down temporarily, Montagu earned the right to be promoted to the prestigious position of Viceroy of India in 1917.
[19] Thomas S. Legg, Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Cave, George, Viscount Cave (1856–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[20] Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster, p. 248.
[21] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 27.
[22] Ibid., p. 312.
[23] Ibid.
[24] President of the Board of Trade was Lloyd George’s first cabinet post in 1906. During his tenure there he became popular with the business class whose interests he often championed.
[25] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 61.
[26] Ibid., pp. 688-95.
[27] Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Kearley, Hudson Ewbanke, first Viscount Devonport (1856–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[28] John Williams, ‘Thomas, David Alfred, first Viscount Rhondda (1856–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[29] Geoffrey Jones, Westman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdrey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[30] Gordon H. Boyce, Co-operative Structures in Global Business, pp. 84-5.
[31] Rear Admiral MWWC Consett, The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, p. 201.
[32] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 14 January 1918 vol. 101 cc5-6.
[33] Maurice Hankey, Supreme Command, vol. II, p. 590.
[34] John Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat, p. 1.
[35] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[36] Ibid., pp. 91-93. All Souls College in Oxford has been closely associated with the Rhodes/Milner group so integral to the Secret Elite in England.
[37] The title Milner’s Kindergarten was given to the group of young Oxford University graduates whom Milner attracted to help him rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. They subsequently enjoyed stellar careers in journalism, politics, banking and finance every area of Secret Elite influence. Further reading – Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men.
[38] Milner to Lloyd George 17 January 1917, in the Lloyd George Papers.
[39] H.W. Massingham, The Nation 24 February, 1917.

The Great Coup of 1916, 5: The Sacrilege Of Peace

As the Monday Night Cabal and Milner’s wider circle of friends and associates continued their manoeuvres through much of 1916, the issue which above all others fired their fears, was talk of peace. To the Secret Elite who had invested in the war, who had funded the war and who facilitated the war, this was a pivotal moment. Their aims and objectives were nowhere in sight. Indeed, cessation of the war would a greater disaster than the huge loss of life if it continued.

The bloodletting across the western front was suitably reducing the masses who might be induced to rise against the middle-class plutocracies, but even in 1916 there was still a sense of denial about the human cost in the purified air of the upper echelons. In early February, Sir Edward Grey told President Wilson’s emissary from America, Colonel House, that Britain had not been seriously hurt by the war, ‘since but few of her men had been killed and her territory had not been invaded.’ [1] Whether this was a stupid lie or callous disregard for the tragedies suffered in every part of the land we will never know, but in that same month (February, 1916) the Times carried column after column of the lost legions of dead and missing every day. [2]

The cost of peace did not bear contemplation. Think of the massive and unprecedented loans that could only be repaid if there were spoils of victory to plunder. Think of the manufacturers whose investments in new plant, new infrastructure and expanded capacity was predicated upon a long war. There were billions of pounds and dollars to be made from extortionate prices, but that only followed a period of sustained and costly investment. The profiteers had initially bought into procuring the loans and providing the munitions because they had been promised a long war. Such are the prerequisites of greed.

Nor would a negotiated peace safeguard the future of the Empire. Indeed it would have had the opposite effect. If Great Britain and the Empire and all of the Allies could not defeat the German/Austro-Hungarian/Ottoman powers, then the message would reverberate across the world that the old order had passed.

Given the massive loss of life already inflicted on the troops from Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, the outcry against a feeble Mother country that had given up the struggle would grow to a clamour. Any notion of a commonwealth of nations would dissolve in cynical spasms of derision. [3] And a negotiated peace would leave Germany free to continue her plans of expansion into the Near and Far East. The real reasons for war, the elimination go Germany as a rival on the world stage, would not be addressed at all. Peace would be a calamity for the Elite under such circumstances. To talk of it was sacrilege.

The flying of ‘Peace Kites’, as Maurice Hankey described Colonel Houses’s approaches, brought one benefit for Milner’s intriguers. Those members of Asquith’s coalition who were attracted to a negotiated peace exposed their lack of commitment to the ultimate goal. Reginald McKenna, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, felt that Britain would gain a ‘better peace now [January 1916] than later, when Germany is wholly on the defensive.’ [4] The Secret Elite were watching and listening. Literally.

As Asquith’s personal confidante and permanent secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, [5] Maurice Hankey was privy to many confidences but even he was surprised to learn that the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Blinker Hall, [6] had in his possession American diplomatic codes and was monitoring the telegrams sent from Colonel House to President Wilson. What the Americans claimed was that they would broker ‘a reasonable peace’ [7] and call a conference. If Germany refused to attend, the USA would probably enter the war on the side of the Allies. [8] Note that the promise was definitely not absolute.

In late January, Hankey went to Hall at the Admiralty on another pretext [9] and discovered to his horror that Colonel House’s visit was a ‘peace stunt’. 1916 was, after all, an election year, and President Wilson had to appear to be a serious peace-broker. It was a sham. Worse still, Sir Edward Grey had given the Americans an assurance that he would trade Britain’s blockade, euphemistically called the ‘freedom of the seas’, against an end to German militarism. Hall claimed that this priceless secret information had not been shared with Arthur Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, which begs the question, with whom was it shared? The Foreign Secretary had made promises behind the backs of his cabinet colleagues, and we are expected to believe that Captain Hall told no-one? Grey was clearly mentally exhausted. Fearful that he might miss an opportunity to ‘get a decent peace’, if the war ‘went wrong’ Sir Edward Grey brought the American proposals before the War Committee in March 1916. They ignored it. When the Americans again pressed for a decision on the President’s offer to intervene in May 1916, the Cabinet was split. Asquith, Grey, McKenna and Balfour were apparently in favour; Lloyd George and the conservative leader Bonar Law, were against.

Alarm bells sounded. The Army Council, a body whose admiration for Alfred Milner could hardly have been stronger, threatened to resign if the War Council insisted on discussing ‘the peace question’, [10] but the threat had not passed.

Asquith was prepared to accept that ‘the time has come where it was very desirable’ to formulate clear ideas on proposals for peace and at the end of August suggested that individual members of his cabinet put their ideas on paper for circulation and discussion. [11] In September E.S. Montagu, then Minister for Munitions, advised that it was not safe to ignore the possibility of a sudden peace since no-one was more likely to ‘get out’ when the fight was up, than the Germans. [12] He also asked what an unqualified victory might mean. The General Staff brought forward their own Memorandum [13] which erroneously claimed that the French Prime Minister, Briand, would likely have ‘very decided views worked out, under his direction, by very clever people who swerve him and who do not appear on the surface of political life.’ They also offered their opinion on how an armistice might be managed to Britain’s advantage.

Foreign Office papers which were shared with the Cabinet in October 1916, showed that Germany was prepared to offer peace to Belgium irrespective of Britain’s position. Herbert Hoover who was running the scandalous Belgian Relief programme, [14] warned the Foreign Office that the German government intended to negotiate with the Belgian government in exile. He alleged that the Germans would evacuate the country, guarantee complete economic and political liberty and pay an indemnity for reconstruction purposes. Furthermore, in order to end the conflict with France, they were prepared to cede the whole of the province of Lorraine under the condition that the French would promise to supply five million tons of iron ore each year to Germany. Their ‘terms’ also included independence for Poland and an unspecified ‘arrangement’ in the Balkans. [15]

(A knowledgeable observer will have noted that in combining the Belgian Relief agency with the supplies of iron and steel from Briey and Longwy, two of the biggest scandals of the First World War were rolled together as a lure to peace.) [16] Hoover had no truck with such suggestions. When he next went to Brussels, the German-American member of the Belgian Comite Nationale, Danny Heinemann, approached him to try to find out what the British terms for peace might be. Hoover claimed that ‘he was not in the peace business’. He most certainly was not. He was in the business of profiteering from war.  [17]

The more circumspect Lord Lansdowne, a member of Asquith’s coalition cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, asked a telling question on 13 November, 1916: ‘… what is our chance of winning [the war] in such a manner, and within such limits of time, as will enable us to beat our enemy to the ground and impose upon him the kind of terms we so freely discuss?’ [We might well read this as a ‘get-real’ moment, but when he continued by regretting that the Allied cause remained ‘partly vindictive and partly selfish’ to the extent that any attempt to get out of the impasse of a stalemate was viewed in negative terms, Lansdowne’s immediate future in politics was decidedly limited. [18]

Kitchener’s timely and suspicious death in June 1916 brought to an end any chance of his interference in what he looked forward to as a just peace, [19] but for the Secret Elite, their immediate problem focussed on politicians who clearly lacked the commitment to crush Germany. Asquith had run his course. His prevarications and capacity to ‘wait and see’ had no place at a time when the Secret Elite needed decisive firmness to see it through. Although Asquith went to considerable lengths in Parliament in October 1916 to shun any notion of a settlement, it was too late. His pain was heartfelt [20] when he declared:

‘The strain which the War imposes on ourselves and our Allies, the hardships which we freely admit it involves on some of those who are not directly concerned in the struggle, the upheaval of trade, the devastation of territory, the loss of irreplaceable lives—this long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by deathless examples of heroism and chivalry, cannot be allowed to end in some patched-up, precarious, dishonouring compromise, masquerading under the name of Peace.’ [21]

Less than two months later the men who had even considered defining peace had gone from government: Asquith, Grey, Lansdowne, Montagu and McKenna were disposed of. They had committed sacrilege. Their unforgivable sin was the contemplation of peace. There would be no peace.

[1] Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 1915-1917, p.175.
[2] By this time there were daily examples of the horrendous waste of life on the Western Front. one example amongst hundreds can be found in The Times 1 February, 1916, p.10.
[3] Alfred Milner and his associates in the Round Table group in Britain had from 1905 onwards worked tirelessly to promote the Empire and indeed prepare the Empire of r ‘the coming war’. See Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the first World War, pp. 153-160.
[4] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Volume 1, 1877-1918, p. 245.
[5] This secretive committee was originally formed in 1902 to advise the prime minister on matters of military and naval strategy. Maurice Hankey had been Assistant Secretary since 1908 and was the immensely authoritative Secretary from 1912 onwards.
[6] The nerve centre of British intelligence was in Room 40 at the Admiralty where the highly secretive Captain (later Rear- Admiral) William ‘Blinker’ Hall monitored radio and telegraphic messages from Germany and German ships. Britain had had possession of all German codes from the first months of the war. See Blog; Lusitania 1: The Tale of there Secret Miracles, 28 April 2015.
[7] House and Seymour, The Intimate Papers, p. 135.
[8] Ibid., p. 170.
[9] Allegedly, Hankey visited Hall on 27 January 1916 to discuss a ploy to put false German banknotes into circulation and the conversation just happened to wander into Mandell House’s visit to Sir Edward Grey. So they would have us believe. Roskill, Hankey, p. 247.
[10] CAB 42/14/12.
[11] CAB 42/18/ 8.
[12] CAB 42/18/ 7.
[13] CAB 42/18/10.
[14] See Blog; Commission For Relief in Belgium 13: As If It Had Never Happened. posted on 25 November 2015.
[15] FO 899 Cabinet Memoranda 1905-1918, Memorandum by Lord Eustace Percy, 26 September 1916.
[16] See our four Blogs on Briey from 12 November 2014 onwards.
[17] See Blog; Commission For Relief in Belgium 12: Hoover, Servant Not Master, posted on 18 November 2015.
[18] Harold Kurtz, The Lansdowne Letter, History Today, Volume 18 issue 2 February 1968.
[19] Randolph S. Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, p. 210.
[20] Asquith had lost his son Raymond, on 15 September 1916, at the Somme. It was a crushing personal blow.
[21] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11 October 1916, vol 86 cc95-161.

The Great Coup of 1916, 4: The Monday Night Cabal

Asquith’s Coalition government of May 1915 changed little in terms of Britain’s war management. It was hardly likely to given that it was a basic reshuffle of old faces and older politics. Alfred Milner was well aware that this would be the case, and as such, it suited the Secret Elite to bide their time before catapulting their leader into front-line politics. Milner was initially stirred into action over Asquith’s inability to make clear decisions, and criticised the ‘contradictions and inconsistencies which have characterised our action as a nation’. [1] He began to turn the screw on the prime minister in the House of Lords early in 1916 and Sir Edward Carson did likewise in the Commons. [2] Carson had originally been the protege of Alfred Balfour, and was a fellow member of the Secret Elite. It did not take long for the unnatural coalition of conservatives and liberals to unravel inside the Cabinet.

Within the context of 1916, the British nation had no respite from disaster. The Somme [ref] produced heavy losses made more unpalatable by negligible gains. In the War Committee, Curzon and Balfour waged a bitter and prolonged inter-departmental dispute over the future of the Air Board [3] to the detriment of other critical business. Without Kitchener, the General Staff appeared complacent and Maurice Hankey feared the generals were ‘bleeding us to death’. [4] He warned Lloyd George that the British Army was led by ‘the most conservative class in the world, forming the most powerful trades union in the world’ [5] It was an astute observation. The Staff ‘ring’ (and these were Hankey’s words) which had been brought together under the pre-war influence of Milner’s great ally, and former head of the Army, Lord Roberts, [6] was indeed a closed union of former cavalry officers, so self satisfied and complacent that they ignored the views of others. [7] Whatever the obscene consequences of their mistakes, they continued to repeat them with the arrogance of those who are convinced that they know better.

Confirmed in their view that the democratic process had failed to provide the leadership and organisation which was needed to win the war on their terms, Milner and the Secret Elite began the process of completely undermining the government and replacing it with their own agents. In January 1916 a small group of Milner’s closest friends and disciples formed a very distinctive and secret cabal to prepare the nation for a change so radical, that it was nothing less than a coup; a planned take-over of government by men who sought to impose their own rule rather than seek a mandate from the general public. [8] Having ensured that the war was prolonged, they now sought to ensure that it would be waged to the utter destruction of Germany.

The men behind the carefully constructed conspiracy were Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Sir Edward Carson, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, F.S. Oliver the influential writer who believed that war was a necessity, [9] and Waldorf Astor, the owner of The Observer. They met regularly on Monday evenings to formulate their alternative plans for war management over dinner. These men were drawn from the inner-circle of Milner’s most trusted associates. [10] Others who were invited to join them included, Lloyd George, Sir Henry Wilson, (at that point a corps commander on the Western Front) Philip Kerr, another of Milner’s proteges from his days in South Africa, and Sir Leander Starr Jameson, the man who almost brought down the British government in 1896 in the wake of his abortive raid on the Transvaal. [11] Could anyone have anticipated that Jameson would have reemerged in London inside a very powerful conspiracy some twenty years after he had almost blown Cecil Rhode’s dream apart? [12] But then he was always the servant of the mighty South African arm of the Secret Elite.

On the rare occasions that this clique has been mentioned by historians, it is usually referred to as a ‘Ginger Group’. Yet another veneer of deception. Their objective was not to spice up the opposition to Herbert Asquith but to rule in his place. It was, as Alfred Milner’s biographer put it, a very powerful fellowship devoid of party hacks and faceless civil servants, [13] Carson, still the hero of Ulster Unionists, was the foremost of the Tory critics in the House of Commons; Dawson at The Times was probably the most influential journalist in the Empire and had the full backing of its owner, Lord Northcliffe; Astor’s Observer added hugely valuable weight to Milner’s battalions in the press; Oliver was fanatical in his disdain of grovelling peacemakers. He proposed that the whole nation rather than the armed forces must be conscripted. [14]

Alfred Milner was the undisputed leader of this ‘Monday Night Cabal’. [15] The agenda notes for one of the meetings in February demonstrated clearly that they planned to demolish the widely held notion that there was no alternative to a combination of Asquith and Bonar Law. Their solution was to repeat ‘in season and out of season’ that the current coalition was having a paralytic effect on the conduct of the war and it was absurd to believe that there was no alternative.  [16] They were the alternative.

Here we find one of the few examples of precisely how the Secret Elite worked to influence and dominate British politics. The cabal comprised the key players at the core of the opposition to Asquith. They instructed their supporters and agents to lobby both inside and outside parliament for the policies that were determined over their private dinners. The rank and file were never invited to these exclusive gatherings which remained the preserve of the select. [17] A second assault-route was through the press, whose influential leaders were also at the heart of the Monday Night Cabal. Public opinion had to be turned against the Asquith coalition. One of he most successful influences which the Secret Elite still wield is the power to make the public believe that they want the changes expounded by a corrupted press.

Geoffrey Dawson led the attack from his lofty office at The Times. Instructed in the Milnerite catechism of Coalition failure, his editorials began the campaign to champion Alfred Milner into high office without the niceties of a political mandate. On 14 April his leading article was the first salvo in that offensive:

‘Let there be no mistake about it. What the country want is leaders who are not afraid to go to all lengths or undergo also sacrifices, party or personal, in order to win the war… We believe that in Lord Milner they possess yet another leader whose courage and character are needed in a national crisis. It is a most damning indictment of the coalition, and especially of those Unionist leaders who had a free hand to strengthen its composition, that such a man should be out of harness at such a time.’ [18]

The plot which had been carefully constructed over months of detailed planning was promoted in a series of newspaper editorials which advanced Milner’s intentions. Their new mantra was that change was needed; change was vital to save the country from disaster. But not everyone would be sacrificed. No. Not at all. What was proposed was far more subtle. They proposed that the Secret Elite’s chosen men in Cabinet (Balfour etc.) needed the support of a more organised system (behind them) and there was ‘no reason whatsoever why they should not continue…’. However, those who had served their purpose, who ‘were encrusted in the old party habit, worn out … by a period of office which has lasted continuously in some cases for more than a decade … are a sheer danger to the State.’ [19] Translated into personalities their targets were Herbert Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Walter Runciman and the remnants of the original Liberal government.

Dawson rampaged against the ‘weak methods’ and ‘weak men’ who were failing the country. Unresolved problems of man-power, of food control and food production, of conflict over the output of aircraft and merchant ships were attributed to a system where, according to the clique, the country was being governed by a series of debating societies. He was disgusted that the War Committee had reverted back to the old habits of ‘interminable memoranda’ and raged about the impossibility of heads of great departments having additional collective responsibility for correlating all of the work of a war government. Every design which the Monday Night Cabal had agreed was promoted by Dawson at The Times.

Popular newspapers ensured that their message was unrelenting. Tom Clarke, then editor of the Daily Mail wrote in his diaries that he was instructed by Northcliffe in December 1916 to undermine the Prime Minister. He was told to find a smiling picture of Lloyd George and underneath it put the caption, “Do it Now” and get the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it, “Wait and See”. [20] It was to be billed as if it was Action-Man against the ditherer.

The major beneficiary from the conclusions of the Monday Night Cabal was David Lloyd George. Since the day he was given his first government post as President of the Board of Trade in 1905, Lloyd George had pursued his career with the singular intention of rising to the top. His firebrand oratory which made him a champion of the people not matched by his machiavellian self interest. While basking in the credit for providing pensions in old age, he befriended the leaders of industry, the bankers and financiers in the City, the money-men in New York and newspaper owners like Northcliffe and Max Aitken. (Lord Beaverbrook) The Secret Elite had identified Lloyd George many years before [21] as the man most likely to front popular appeal for their policies, but his negotiations between the conspirators in 1916 had to be carried out well away from prying eyes.

They chose Arthur Lee [22] as the facilitator for many of the secret meetings between Lloyd George, Maurice Hankey, Alfred Milner and Geoffrey Dawson at Lee’s house in the Abbey Garden at Westminster. [23] An opponent of Lloyd George in previous times, Lee had married into the New-York financial elite and his wife Ruth inherited a substantial fortune. He was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt with whom he corresponded frequently. [24] Lee had apparently become increasingly frustrated with the conduct of the war by the Asquith government and sought out David Lloyd George as the one member of the government whom he considered had ‘sufficient courage and dynamic energy … to insist upon things being done’ [25]. Note how Lee offered his services to Lloyd George who invited him into the Ministry of Munitions as parliamentary military secretary. Later, in his War Memoirs, Lloyd George went out of his way to praise Lee’s ‘untiring industry, great resource, and practical capacity’, [26] without mentioning his role as co-conspirator in Asquith’s removal.

On Lloyd George’s move to the War Office, Lee became his personal secretary. He was also a member of the Unionist war committee which acted as a focus of back-bench opposition to the Asquith coalition in 1916. [27] Whether he was aware of it or not, the Secret Elite ensured that Arthur Lee was well placed to watch over Lloyd George in the critical months leading up to the coup.

Safe from prying eyes, the conspirators drew an ever compliant Lloyd George to the centre of their web. His closest aide ensured that they could contact him with ease without rousing the suspicion of mere mortals. They organised their policies, decided their tactics and picked their chosen men. The Secret Elite were poised to take over the governance of the war and run it along their lines, but the old order had to be removed. As ever with Alfred Milner, he required his opponent, in this instance, Asquith, to make the first unforgivable mistake.

[1] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 December 1915 vol 20 cc696-744.
[2] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 320.
[3] Memorandum for the War Committee, Doc. 658, November 1916 and Reply to The First Report of the Air Board, Doc.658, November 1916 in Cabinet Memoranda 1905-1918, vol. IV, F.O. 899.
[4] Maurice Hankey, Diary entry 28th October 1916, quoted in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, p. 312.]
[5] Ibid.
[6] For a detailed examination of the influence which Lords Roberts exerted over the British Military Establishment see Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, chapter 15, The Roberts Academy, pp. 194-203.
[7] Gollin, Hankey, p. 313.
[8] Ibid., pp. 323-4.
[9] F.S. Oliver , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, author, Richard Davenport-Hines.
[10] Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Philip Kerr, Waldorf Astor and Geoffrey Dawson were specifically placed inside what Carroll Quigley called The Society of the Elect in his work, The Anglo-American Establishment, while Leander Starr Jameson was placed in the outer circle. [pp. 311-313.] We have enlarged the group under the collective title of the Secret Elite. [
[11] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, Prologue, pp. 1-5.
[12] Sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment for his involvement in the infamous Jameson Raid, he served barely three before being pardoned. His career flourished thereafter. From 1904-1908 Jameson was prime minister of the Cape Colony. He returned to England in 1912 and remained one of Alfred Milner’s trusted confidantes.
[13] Gollin, Hankey, p. 324.
[14] Davenport-Hines, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See above.
[15] It is often interesting to consider the manner in which historians entitle events. In A.M. Collin’s Proconsul in Politics, he boldly christened Milner’s group as The Monday Night Cabal – which it certainly was, while Terence O’Brien, in his work, Milner, stepped away from controversy by calling it the Monday Night Group, thus omitting any hint of conspiracy. [Terence O’Brien, Milner, p. 266.]
[16] Amery Papers, “Notes for Monday’s Meeting, 19th February 1916.”
[17] Gollin, Hankey, p. 325.
[18] The Times, 14 April, 1916, p. 9.
[19] The Times, 1 December 1916, p. 9.
[20] Tom Clarke, My Northcliffe Diary, p.107.
[21] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, chapter 12, Catch a Rising Star, pp. 161-171.
[22] Later Viscount Lee of Farnham. Typical of many Secret Elite associates, his loyalty was rewarded with political appointments including Director General of Food Production from 1917-18, President of the Board of Agriculture, 1919-21 and first Lord of the Admiralty, 1921-22. He donated Chequers, still the country residence of British prime ministers, for that purpose.
[23] Gollin, Hankey, p. 348 and p. 354.
[24] A. Clark, A Good Innings: the private papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, p. 92.
[25] Ibid., p.140.
[26] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 346.
[27] V.W. Baddeley, ‘Lee, Arthur Hamilton, Viscount Lee of Fareham (1868–1947)’, rev. Marc Brodie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Great Coup of 1916, 3: The Compromise Government of ‘Unity’, 1915

The given explanation for the introduction of a ‘national’ or ‘unity’ government in May 1915 goes as follows:

Pushed over the edge by the resignation of Lord Fisher as First Sea Lord at the Admiralty, the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law met Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, privately, at the Treasury. Following this, he sent a letter from the Conservative Opposition to prime minister Asquith stating:

‘In our opinion things cannot go on as they are, and some change in the constitution of the Government seems to us inevitable if it is to retain a sufficient measure of public confidence to conduct the War to a successful conclusion.’ [1]

He surreptitiously sent a copy of the same letter to Lloyd George. They were clearly in cahoots. [2] Lloyd George and Bonar Law claimed a personal friendship, ‘on terms of greater cordiality than is usual’ according to the Chancellor himself. [3] In fact, Lloyd George was in agreement with the major issues raised by Bonar Law because the proposed coalition government was no threat to his own career. Their meeting and the subsequent events were more stage-managed than genuine.

What is astounding is the speed at which Asquith accepted the offer to form a coalition. Lloyd George played the role of marriage broker and physically took Bonar Law into the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street to talk through the conditions under which the Conservatives would join forces with the government. It took only fifteen minutes to bring to an end the last purely Liberal government in British history. Thus the deed was done. Or so we have been told.

But surely the offer was the wrong way round? To have had credence, to merit the sense of a government striving to do its best for the Empire, surely Asquith should have taken the first steps? Be mindful that a prime minister may appear to be in charge, but is always subject to the power-brokers above him/her.

Instead, a gun was put to his political head and he did not hesitate to capitulate. Why? Who had spoken to him? Did Lloyd George threaten to resign too, unless the coalition was formed? Or was it simply the only way for Asquith to save his own political skin? Hours later he told the King that ‘the Government must be reconstructed on a broad and non-party basis’. [4] Two days later the prime minister announced in the House of Commons ‘that steps are in contemplation which involve the reconstruction of the Government on a broader, personal and political basis.’ He clarified three points, inferring that all of this was of his own doing. He and Sir Edward Grey would definitely remain in post. The prosecution of the War would continue ‘with every possible energy and by means of every available resource.’ Finally, ‘any reconstruction that may be made will be for the purposes of the War alone …’ [5]

The first steps in the Secret Elite takeover of every aspect of war government was underway, but it had a slow-burning fuse.

Political niceties had to be followed. The main condition for ‘unity’ placed on the table by Bonar Law was the immediate demise of Winston Churchill. The Conservatives would not countenance his continuation at the Admiralty after Lord Fisher’s walk out; the Ulster Unionists would never forgive nor forget his pre-war threats to their cause and well, had he not abandoned both his class and his party by crossing over to the Liberals? During the period of horse-trading between Asquith and the Conservatives, the only certainty was, as the Times put it, that ‘Churchill will leave the Admiralty…that is virtually a sine qua non of the reconstruction.’ [6] Winston Churchill was insulted at being shunted off to the inconsequential post of Chancellor of the Dutchy of Lancaster, but he accepted the sinecure, in order to remain a member of the War Council. In the fight for the best pickings, the Conservatives had insisted that he be relegated to a minor position, and Asquith was neither willing nor able to save him. Churchill railed at Asquith for being ‘supinely weak’. He did not stay long in post, resigning on 15 November after he had been denied a place in the revised War Committee. [7]

But Asquith failed one of his best friends, Richard Haldane. It was a stain on his character that he dismissed Haldane, the man who created the BEF, whom he sent to the War Office on 4 August to initiate mobilisation, and abandoned in May 1915 ‘after one of the most discreditable smear campaigns in British history.’ [8]

You might well ask why the Secret Elite were prepared to countenance the loss of two of their agents who had taken Britain into war; in this instance Churchill and Haldane? Basically, they were replaceable. All political agents no matter what their supposed allegiance, were replaceable. They still are. Churchill was a self-publicist who had upset too many important Conservatives. Haldane was an academic, a well read, knowledgeable lawyer who had the complete confidence of King Edward VII. Yet he had been subjected to malicious and ignorant abuse because of his oft-stated admiration and sympathy for Germany. [9] He found himself threatened with assault in the street, and was aware that he was in danger of being shot at. [10] Ridiculous abuse and false accusations were levelled against him by the Daily Express. [11] In an atmosphere of poison, his detractors claimed that he had ordered the release of a ship laden with copper which had been impounded in Gibraltar so that the cargo could be delivered to Germany. [12] A clever lie. Blame Haldane for blockade-bursting and cut him adrift.

What mattered was that both men were unpopular with the public, and the Secret Elite understood that every act which might make the public question the government’s actions threatened their ultimate objective.

This far-from-radical change marked the first step towards a full-blown coup, for that was not yet possible. The government (they called it a National Government) was formed over the next weeks; a government which both re-introduced well known faces and retained some old problems. Asquith’s 22-man coalition had included 12 Liberals, 8 Conservatives, a single Labour MP and Lord Kitchener, retained because of his immense popularity. Despite his support amongst the military chiefs, amongst the liberal imperialists and Conservative grandees, Alfred Milner did not join Asquith’s cabinet. Milner was of course a member of the House of Lords and an outspoken advocate for conscription rather than voluntary recruitment to the army. In truth, keeping unity amongst the coalition government was always going to test Asquith’s skills, and he would have feared Milner’s direct influence over so many in this cabinet. Alfred Milner stood ready, but waited patiently for the turning tide.

The unseen hand of the Elite had redrawn boundaries and ensured that senior posts were allocated to major players from Milner’s associates. [13] The Empire was back. [14] Two former Viceroys of India, Lords Curzon and Lansdowne, were elevated to cabinet posts. Lord Selborne, former High Commissioner in South Africa became President of the Board of Agriculture. Sir John Simon was made Home Secretary, Arthur Balfour replaced Churchill at the Admiralty and Lord Robert Cecil made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and both Sir Edward Carson (the uncrowned King of Ulster) and F.E. Smith were included as Attorney General and Solicitor General.

What of Andrew Bonar Law, the man who had assisted Lloyd George in demanding a national government? Surely he would be well-rewarded with a senior cabinet post? Not so. Bonar Law, though leader of the Conservatives, had neither the aristocratic pedigree nor Oxford University kudos to be a member of the Inner-circle of the Secret Elite. Indeed, Professor Carroll Quigley omits him entirely from membership of secret cabal; he was not ‘one of them’. Asquith, in his later reflections on there events of December 1915 talked of the deception and lies which were spun by Lloyd George, but held no animosity towards his Conservative rival. [15] The outsider was obliged to accept the relatively minor position of Secretary of State for the Colonies hardly a handsome reward for his political connivance with the man who had everything to gain.

British newspapers hailed the new non-party Cabinet for its inclusive strength, but John Redmond, leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, would not accept Asquith’s offer of a minor post. He had little option given the prominent inclusion of leading figures from the Ulster campaign to oppose Home Rule from 1912-14. The men who had openly threatened a breakaway government in Belfast were back in power at Westminster. How ironic that British justice was placed in the hands of those who had been openly prepared to defy that rule of law [16] by raising and arming an illegal private army in Ulster [17] and conveniently taking Britain to the brink of what looked like civil war.

Lloyd George was paid his asking price. His disloyalty was bought off with the creation of a Ministry of Munitions in which he was given supreme authority. [18] He knew that the burning issue of the moment was the alleged lack of munitions and heavy artillery. He was aware of the clamour from the Military High Command for better shells; he knew that the exaggerated shortage of weaponry would gather public voice and turn to outrage if not addressed. He believed that this was a job that he alone could do, and that his backers in Britain and in America would support him all the way. He was correct.

Lloyd George received a remarkable letter dated 1 June 1915 from Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States, a Pilgrim [19] and close associate of the J.P. Morgan associates. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic advocate for the spread of the English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon expansion across the world [20] and as such was an agent of the Secret Elite. His letter read;

‘I wish to congratulate you upon the action you have taken in getting a coalition cabinet, and especially your part therein. More than all I wish to congratulate you upon what you have done in connection with this war … the prime business for you to do is to save your country.’ [21]

The former President of America gave the newly appointed Minster of Munitions his full approval for ‘what you have done’. It was an apostolic blessing from the other side of the Atlantic. Lloyd George was congratulated for his action, not Asquith or Bonar Law, because Roosevelt knew that Lloyd George had masterminded this coalition and was the one man who understood what action to take. He was their man. That letter confirmed their approval.

Asquith was sufficiently astute to keep the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer within the Liberal domain, by stating that Lloyd George’s transfer to the new Ministry of Munitions was a temporary arrangement.

The Secrete Elite’s man at the hub of the war effort, Maurice Hankey, [22] remained exactly where he had always been, at the very heart of the decision-making. In every reorganisation, every shifting of seats or consolidation of power, in every alteration or formation of committee or council that had power and influence, that involved the inner-cabinet, the real decision-makers, Hankey remained quietly in the background as secretary or minute-taker. His was the ever – present hand that recorded the meeting and increasingly advised the members. [23] He, above all, was in the know.

But Asquith remained to the fore and so too did most of the problems. Getting rid of elected officials is always fraught with some danger, and there was a feeling that this national government would lack the competence to pull the nation together. When analysed critically, the deck-chairs had been shuffled but, with the exception of Lloyd George’s new role, little else changed.

Milner knew it would fail. That’s why he was waiting in the wings.

[1] A. Bonar Law to Asquith, 17 May 1915.
[2] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 137.
[3] Ibid., p. 135.
[4] Roy Jenkins, Asquith, pp. 360-1.
[5] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 19 May 1915 vol 71 cc2392-3.
[6] The Times, 20 May 1915, p. 9.
[7] Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill, p. 204.
[8] Michael and Eleanor Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Virginia Stanley, p. 598.
[9] The Times Obituary , 20 August 1928, p.17.
[10] Richard Burdon Haldane, An Autobiography, p. 287.
[11] Maurice, Haldane 1856-1915. p. 359.
[12] Ibid. p. 363.
[13] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 141.
[14] The Times, 26 May 1915, pp. 9-10.
[15] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 141.
[16] Brian P. Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal, p. 45.
[17] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-18, p. 25.
[18] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 142.
[19] Founded in 1902, this exclusive association of politicians and financiers, ambassadors and businessmen in New York and in London, aimed to preserve the bonds of the english-speaking peoples and promote the Anglo-Saxon race values.
[20] Anne Pimlott Baker, The Pilgrims of America, p. 4.
[21] Roosevelt to Lloyd George, 1 June 1915, reproduced in full on p.145 of his War Memoirs.
[22] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[23] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, 1877-1918, pp. 179-185.

The Great Coup of 1916, 2: The Start of the Process; May 1915

Nine and a half months into the war, no decisive military success had been registered, and public enthusiasm which overflowed in August 1914 began to wane [1] By May 1915 the protagonists had been entrenched in a stalemate on the Western Front for around six months and the Dardanelles Campaign was beginning to feel like a very costly failure. Churchill had promised that the Germans would be on their knees after  nine months of naval blockade [2] but his wild claims were exaggerated lies. How could they be otherwise? The Admiralty was nominally in charge of the tiny blockading force, the 10th Squadron, out in the North Atlantic, but it was the Foreign Office which  nullified their best efforts to deny Germany the key resources for war. Behind the backs of the British people, in blatant defiance of the will of the British Parliament and widely accepted international law, ‘the process of stopping ships that were carrying contraband … was completely undermined by influences inside the British Foreign Office through an invention called the Contraband Committee.’ [3] It was part of a greater lie to dupe the populace into believing that war was being pursued by every possible means. It was not.

Failure risks accountability, but it is rare indeed that the real culprits are ever brought to trial. Mismanagement on the battlefield was glossed over by loud support in the newspapers for Sir John French, Sir Henry Wilson and General Haig. There were however, politicians who could be replaced without any appreciable detriment to the cause of war. To Lord Milner and his Secret Elite cabal, the management of the war lay in the hands of hapless party politicians. Asquith, Grey and Haldane had certainly delivered the war on Germany, but the other liberals inside the Cabinet had no idea how a war should be effectively pursued. We have repeatedly shown that the Secret Elite were contemptuous of the British parliamentary system and held an absolute belief that elected democratic government was no alternative to the ‘rule of the superiors’. [4] They meant, of course, themselves.

Milner knew what was needed; he had managed a successful war in South Africa, a war he deliberately caused while making it appear that the Boers were the perpetrators [5] The war against Germany had to be managed. Ultimate victory in a long and punishing conflict had to be properly planned. Manpower had to be organised and one of the problems caused by Kitchener’s success was that voluntary enlistment disrupted many essential industries. The international financiers would provide the money and in the long term such loans would have to be repaid. International armaments combines would provide the weapons of destruction at huge cost, and that too would require financial commitment beyond the scope of previous ministries. This would take time to deliver.

Advised as he was by the City money-men in London, and linked to the New York bankers through Morgan/Grenfell/Rothschild, David Lloyd George was the only member of Asquith’s government who agreed that a new kind of management was required. As he put it, ‘the war was not being treated either with sufficient seriousness or adequate energy.’ [6] What these platitudes actually meant was that he considered himself the serious and energetic leader who was prepared to front the Secret Elite’s drive to destroy Germany in the manner they approved … providing he was in charge of the government. Lloyd George did not lack conceit. Strong control over all aspects of the conflict was the prerequisite for success, and the only success the Secret Elite were interested in was the total destruction of Germany. While they were set on a prolonged war, they needed to find scapegoats.

Parliamentary government was not geared to war. Ministers guarded their departments like fiefdoms, refusing to share knowledge or give detailed explanations of their strategies to either House of Parliament. Communications were hampered by an over-exaggerated ‘need to know’. Kitchener had spoken in the House of Lords on only 34 occasions between 1914-16 [7] making ‘Olympian pronouncements upon military policy’. [8] In other words he appeared to make pronouncements like one of the ancient gods without expecting to be subjected to any questions.

Kitchener was a law unto himself. He did not trust the discretion of most of Asquith’s cabinet, claiming that they were ‘leaky’, and added, ‘if they will only divorce their wives … I will tell them everything.’ [9] He had cause to be cautious. The prime minister’s wife Margot was a notorious gossip in London society and Asquith’s intimate relationship with the much younger Venetia Stanley was completely out of order. He wrote to her daily, sometimes twice a day, and confided information of such sensitivity that his indiscretion broke every law on secrecy in wartime. [10]

Parliament averaged only 8 meetings per month in the first nine months of the war. [11] That was bad enough, but the War Council, the select group of senior ministers and their military and naval advisors was not established until the end of November 1914. Although it comprised the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, The Chancellor, Lloyd George and its increasingly influential secretary, Maurice Hankey, an unexpected anomaly had ‘evolved’. The Army was directly represented by the Secretary of State for War and Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener, while the Navy, the much revered ‘senior service’, was represented by a politician, Winston Churchill.

In the five and a half weeks between 6 April and 14 May 1915,  the War Council was not convened. It was as if leadership was ‘in a coma’. [12] Consider the events that took place over that timescale;  [13] dangerous reversals on the Eastern Front, the Second Battle of Ypres, Allied landings at Gallipoli, the sinking of the Lusitania and the publication of the highly prejudicial, anti-German propaganda report from Lord Bryce on ‘atrocities’ in Belgium. [14] Yet there was apparently no need for a meeting of the War Council? Who was in charge? At times it appeared that the answer was no-one but do not be fooled. Beyond the scope of the officially elected government powerful men continued to pursue their long-term objectives and the person whose influence was most telling at this juncture was Viscount Alfred Milner.

Milner [15] stood at the head of a mighty and resourceful network of secret intelligence. Politicians, academics, industrialists, soldiers, journalists and newspaper editors wrote to him to ensure that he knew about their grievances. The reader should be aware that after the crisis in Ulster in 1914, [16] the men who led the British army did not trust the Prime Minister [17] but held Lord Milner in the highest esteem.

Senior army officers wrote to him confidentially and told him their highly suspect version of the ‘truth’ about the desperate state of the war as it progressed. General Sir Henry Wilson had crossed to France on 14 August 1914 as a key member of General Sir John French’s GHQ and within a week was complaining about the  ‘cowardly ignorance’ of his superiors in London. Lord Roberts complained to Milner that the army command was disjointed. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, kept him informed about all manner of events that could not be officially reported because of censorship. Leo Amery, Milner’s most ardent acolyte, wrote to him from France and from Lemnos during the Gallipoli campaign, ensuring that he knew more about the failings of the British Army than any member of Asquith’s government, except, perhaps, Kitchener. [18]

From March till the end of May 1915, there was a buzz of intrigue around Westminster. Lloyd George wrote that a fear was growing in the corridors of power  ‘that we could lose the war’, [19] though he above all knew that too much had already been invested by the American Establishment to allow such a disaster. Britain was never at risk of losing the war. Indeed, as we have demonstrated, a range of cleverly contrived arrangements allowed Germany to survive the so-called ‘blockade’ and enabled her to continue her military-industrial output. Lloyd George voiced what the Secret Elite believed the problem to be; a crisis of commitment to war. Most of his colleagues had no stomach for it. They had to go.

Milner knew that serious pressure had to be put on the Asquith government to shake out those ministers whose commitment to a prolonged war was suspect. But he was not yet prepared to lead the opposition publicly. [20] That was not his style. What was wanted was a government with the courage to break away from the laissez-faire attitude to enable greater control of the entire war effort to be given to men who would take his instruction. The Secret Elite knew that victory in a protracted struggle depended on the most efficient exploitation of the resources and manpower of the country. The answer lay in taking over government departments.

While those above him in the corridors and smoke-filled clubs for the privileged pushed for key changes in government, Lloyd George was the only Cabinet member convinced of this necessity. [21] Four years before, in 1910, he had shown himself willing to work in coalition with the Conservatives [22] and, in conjunction with Arthur Balfour, had openly accepted the value of compulsory military service. These were words close to Lord Milner’s heart. He and the former Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, had argued for many years in favour of  conscription as a much more effective way of providing a professional army. Once more, the word ‘coalition’ was being secretly whispered in the select private clubs frequented by the real power-brokers. Some even called it a  ‘National Government’.

Historians have repeatedly analysed the events of May 1915 and concluded that the political crisis ‘arose with extra-ordinary suddenness’ as if to suggest that by some strange mixture of expediency and good fortune, Asquith’s government was transformed overnight into an all-party alliance. The great historical guru of the 1960s, A.J.P. Taylor, claimed that the emergence of a ‘National Government’ was  ‘one of the few political episodes of the First World War on which solid evidence is lacking’. [23] These are words which should raise alarm. If evidence is lacking, it is because it has been destroyed. Experience proves that to be fact. Lloyd George’s verdict was that ‘political crises never come out of the blue’, and he knew precisely what was going on. [24] Asquith’s government was teetering towards collapse because the old-fashioned Liberals did not have the necessary backbone to see a prolonged war through to its end. Circumstances at home provided the cover to manipulate the change.

Admiral Jackie Fisher, whom Churchill had brought from retirement to become First Sea Lord resigned his post over the Dardanelles fiasco. He believed that vital warships were exposed to unnecessary danger in this theatre of operations. Fisher was beside himself with rage at Churchill whom he called ‘a mad gambler’. [25] The Conservative party in parliament hated Winston Churchill whom they regarded as a turn-coat in politics and an amateur in war. [26] They had a point. On 17 May 1915, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, met secretly with Lloyd George at the Treasury. They had been personal friends for years and according to the Chancellor, on friendlier terms ‘than is usual between political adversaries …’ [27] Lloyd George received the proposal to form a national government with open arms. When confronted by this united front, Asquith caved in and made no attempt to stand his ground and defend his cabinet. Why? Many have tried to find a suitable answer. He had been emotionally upset by Venetia Stanley’s sudden split from him … an unexpected turn of events in itself. Was he ordered to accept the inevitable given the formidable combination of the second minister in his government joining forces with the leader of the Opposition?

A convergence of military, naval and political embarrassment had to find public redress. Milner knew that the government had to be firmed up, be resolved to see through unpopular crises, and take greater direction from his Secret Elite agents. The days wasted on propping up the sham of democracy were numbered. Yet ridding the government of it’s deadwood faced the Secret Elite with a difficult quandary. Changes had to be managed carefully. The public had to believe that this was what they wanted. Should opinion turn against the war and muted cries in favour of peace gain support, Germany would not be crushed. Victory was meaningless unless it broke German industrial and economic power. This wasn’t about winning a battle but destroying an enemy.

But which enemy? Churchill? Yes, he was despised by the Conservatives in parliament, and the newspapers had begun to question his judgement. Kitchener? Yes, but his national status placed him above criticism, and the army had to be supported at all costs. Asquith? Not so easy. To sack him would have thrown the government and possibly the country into chaos. Above all, the genuine unwitting liberals who had accepted their role in government, but who had no great enthusiasm for war, had to be wiped out. Democracy would be dismantled and what better way to start the process than under the guise of national unity?

[1] Alfred Gollin, Freedom or Control in the First World War,  (The Great Crisis of May 1915)  Historical Reflections, Vol. 2, no. 2, Winter 1975, pp. 135-155.
[2] The Times, 10 November 1914.
[3] George F.S. Bowles, The Strength of England, p. 173.
[4] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 55-6.
[5] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War p. 115.
[6] Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, p. 133.
[7] http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/mr-horatio-kitchener/1914
[8] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 249.
[9] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, vol 1, 1877-1918, p. 216.
[10] Michael and Eleanor Brock, H H Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley. A typical example may be found on page 266 where he discloses the position of Sir Henry Rawlinson’s troops on the road to Bruges and Ghent before sharing Kitchener’s thoughts on an impending stalemate.
[11] http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/sittings/1914/
[12] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 134.
[13] http://www.firstworldwar.com/timeline/1915.htm
[14] See blogs published 3 and 10 September 2014.
[15] Alfred Milner’s power base is best explained in Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 84-88.
[16] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History,  pp. 301-319.
[17] Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 251.
[18] Letters from these correspondents are included in what remains of the much-culled Milner papers at the Bodleian Library (special section) at Oxford.
[19] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 133.
[20] Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, pp. 251-2 .
[21] A.J.P. Taylor, Lloyd George, Rise and Fall, p. 23.
[22] John Grigg, Lloyd George, The People’s Champion, pp. 362-8.
[23] A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, p. 31.
[24] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 133.
[25] Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, p. 174.
[26] Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 258.
[27] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p.135.