THERE IS A PASSAGE IN MARGOT ASQUITH’S diaries, two months into the Great War, where she registers her shock at how the constitutional crisis that followed the People’s Budget of 1909 had destroyed normal civilised relations between prominent members of the Liberal and Conservative parties: “politicians losing all sight of truth and courtesy, hurling the foulest charges against their enemy and using the ugliest language; cutting, forgetting and trying to oust all their oldest friends; and Society so flippant, callous, idle and blasphemous”.
The Tory-dominated House of Lords had voted for the first time since the reign of Queen Anne to defeat a money bill. A general election provided a mandate for the Bill to pass, but it was also decided to remove the Lords’ right of veto to prevent such a situation happening again. That was when things really turned ugly, when a large group of Tory peers — the so-called die-hards — resolved “to die in the last ditch” rather than to see the
