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An exploration of the debate around the 'strange death' of Liberalism.

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This book review from 1981 sees him as a failure

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Paul Addison

Joseph Chamberlain: A Political Study by Richard Jay
Oxford, 383 pp, £16.95, March 1981, ISBN 0 19 822623 3

A century ago Joseph Chamberlain was the Tony Benn of his time, the bogeyman of moderate and conservative opinion. The point is familiar to historians of the period, but never easy to convey. Why, after all, should the upper classes have been scared of a Liberal? Were the Liberals not a party of property and wealth? Indeed they were, and from the gallery of the House of Commons one could observe a multitude of well-fed, broad-bottomed types on the Liberal benches. But seen through the eyes of a true Tory, bred to the Church and the Land, these gentlemen appeared to be a pretty suspect crowd. Welshmen, Scots, Dissenters, tradesmen - there was something wrong with all of them. Many were in league with Irish agitators and the whole party was nothing but a confederacy directed against the traditional ruling class. Their leader, Mr Gladstone, was a dangerous old man and a firebrand at heart, and after him worse would surely follow. On the left of the Party, where the real crackpots and doctrinaires gathered, stood the lean, arrogant and transparently ambitious figure of Joseph Chamberlain.

Chamberlain had made a fortune in Birmingham from the manufacture of screws. His political position he owed to the support of Liberal Party constituency activists. A born agitator and organiser, he had welded the radical caucuses of the cities into a party machine, the National Liberal Federation. This he employed as a battering-ram to impose more radical policies, and of course his own claims to leadership, on the Parliamentary Party. Chamberlain's doctrine was the Victorian version of the class war: not labour versus capital, but the productive classes against a parasitical aristocracy. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader, he attacked as the chief representative of a class 'who toil not, neither do they spin'. 'What ransom,' he asked, 'will property pay for the security it enjoys?' - and his words were intended as a threat. Perhaps this was rhetoric only, but no one could be sure, and in the meantime Chamberlain was caricatured as the English Robespierre.

A second comparison with Tony Benn also presents itself. Chamberlain, too, abandoned in middle age the politics of his youth. But where Benn was born again as a socialist, Chamberlain was a convert to imperialism. That 'Radical Joe' would transform himself, in the words of Winston Churchill, from Fiery Red to True Blue was a change beyond the wit of political pundits to predict. But then, no one could possibly have predicted the explosive impact of the Irish question on political alignments. In 1886, Gladstone declared in favour of Home Rule and introduced into the House of Commons the first Home Rule Bill. The Liberal Party split. A radical section led by Chamberlain and a Whig section led by Hartington combined to defeat the Bill and broke away to form an independent group, the Liberal Unionists. Chamberlain was launched in a new direction.

A minor party, the Liberal Unionists were nevertheless a decisive force in their day. Claiming at first to be independent, they quickly developed an electoral alliance with the Conservatives which guaranteed a 20-year period of Tory supremacy. In 1895, they entered a coalition under Salisbury, with Chamberlain claiming the Colonial Office as his reward. At first sight, it was an eccentric choice: a ministerial backwater far removed from the mainstream of domestic affairs. But Chamberlain was now a new man, bitten by the bug of imperialism, and longing to put into practice his recently-proclaimed faith in the expansion and development of the Empire. It was he rather than Salisbury who led the Cabinet into the Boer War; and when the war was over it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley's vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century.

Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor who had sold out his friends for the proverbial mess of pottage. The weakness of this explanation is its failure to account for Chamberlain's lifelong communion with the electorate of the West Midlands. Whether he was Radical Joe or the Jingo of the Boer War, no politician commanded greater loyalty at the grass roots. In the end he suffered for it: the celebrations laid on in Birmingham to mark his 70th birthday in 1906 brought on the stroke that ended his active career.

The fact that Chamberlain was a quintessential Brummy has encouraged historians to seek a unifying theme or purpose in his career. One theory is that his politics mirrored the changing role of the middle classes. In the mid-Victorian period, the argument runs, the middle classes were still to some degree hostile to the aristocracy, and closer in spirit to the artisans: hence Cobden, Bright and Chamberlain Mach I. But with the rise of organised labour threatening the middle classes from below, and the British Empire beginning to bring in dividends for investors, a merger of interests produced a new political alliance: hence Chamberlain Mach II. Another view is that Chamberlain's career demonstrated an intellectual commitment to collectivism, a revolt against laissez-faire. By a logical progression, Chamberlain began with municipal socialism in Birmingham, moved on to social reform for Britain as a whole, and finally transferred his ambitions to the development of the entire British Empire.

In many ways Chamberlain's career embodied the restless, forward movements of his era, 'the spirit of the age'. In his new book Richard Jay has explained how and why this happened. There have been several biographies and studies of Chamberlain, but this is the best analysis of the public man, finely wrought and exact, and undoubtedly demanding of the reader. Old politics can be very stale and many dead controversies have to be exhumed, but at any rate Chamberlain himself slowly comes back to life. Mr Jay is too good a historian to neglect the larger trends of the time, but too shrewd a biographer to imagine that Chamberlain represented them in a straightforward or systematic way. The ground-rule of his book is that the activities of a politician have always to be located first in the context of the political game. His pages are redolent of smoke-filled rooms and the constant jostling for position of sharp and highly polished operators. The atmosphere is perfectly captured in Lord Randolph Churchill's verdict on the contest between Chamberlain and Gladstone: 'diamond cut diamond.'

Questions of policy were necessarily enmeshed with strategies of ambition, and Chamberlain himself revelled in the arts of manipulation. Quick to recognise the electoral dividends of gunboat diplomacy, he advised his fellow radical, Sir Charles Dilke: 'Be a little jingo if you can.' Searching in vain for an issue on which to break with Gladstone, he confided: 'I cannot find a satisfactory boat to leave the ship in.' As Colonial Secretary, he was deeply implicated in the abortive Jameson Raid on the Transvaal, and threatened with exposure by a committee of inquiry. His reaction was to rig the evidence and gerrymander the committee in what Mr Jay terms 'a superb, if disgraceful, exercise in political survival'.

Another parameter of the political game was the foreshortening of time. In a world where reputations fluctuated like stock-exchange quotations, and the next Parliament was the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller had ever returned, long views were at a discount. 'In politics,' Chamberlain remarked, 'there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight.' But even the next fortnight was hazardous, and it was through miscalculating the short-term situation that Chamberlain bungled the Home Rule crisis. Chamberlain had always posed as Gladstone's lieutenant, while actually working for the day when the Grand Old Man would be shunted aside. The Grand Old Man knew this full well and kept Chamberlain at arm's length. In the Home Rule crisis - a complex episode splendidly elucidated by Mr Jay - the government of Ireland was never the decisive issue for Chamberlain. But he calculated that Home Rule would prove unpopular and Gladstone be forced to delay or retreat. Instead, Gladstone bore down relentlessly on his critics like a juggernaut, sweeping them into the ditch in a great party smash. When Chamberlain recovered consciousness he was wounded, bewildered and disorientated. Like Mr Toad after his first encounter with a motor-car, he could not understand what had hit him.

Toad was fundamentally a lovable character, caddish but weak, and affords an excuse for noting that Chamberlain was caddish but strong, an unlovable mix. Many biographers strain to communicate a deep humanity in their subject, but Mr Jay flatly admits that Chamberlain was not very nice. He exploited people, expected everyone to do his bidding, and upheld old-fashioned male supremacy. Of his third marriage (his first two wives died), Mr Jay remarks waspishly that, while in North America, 'he took his pick of the choice American marriage market.' But from another angle Mr Jay finds Chamberlain sympathetic and admirable. He applies to him a phrase of Hegel on the subject of great historical figures: 'They were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirement of the time - into what was ripe for development.' This is high praise, and Chamberlain was worthy of it.

Chamberlain took from the ethos of Birmingham the idea that getting to the top meant getting something practical done. He was creative in the classic Victorian sense, glorifying the works of industry and the improvement of material standards. As Lord Mayor of Birmingham he took a straightforward pride in schemes of lighting and sewage, and the piping of gas and water into every citizen's home. Never an original thinker or a political philosopher, he excelled at picking up the ideas of the day and converting them into a plan of action. If one of his projects failed or ran out of steam he would simply abandon it and start on something else. In 1885, his 'unauthorised programme' of old-fashioned radical measures turned out to be an electoral liability. By 1895, he had replaced it with a modernised scheme of social policy that anticipated the welfare state. Chamberlain resembled one of the inventors of the early Industrial Revolution, attempting by trial and error to find a technology that worked.

The greatest of his innovations was the Tariff Reform campaign. It may be that Chamberlain's imperialism developed out of his alliance with the Conservative Party, but it was also a genuine exercise in statecraft. At the close of the 19th century Chamberlain represented a new school of thought, conscious of the growing vulnerability of Great Britain. Her diplomatic isolation, economic decline and impoverished Armed Forces all rendered her a soft target. On the diplomatic front Chamberlain worked for an alliance with the other 'Anglo-Saxon' powers, Germany and the United States: a far-sighted scheme frustrated by the stupidity of Germany's rulers. But the Tariff Reform campaign was the great panacea, or intended to be. Four great objectives would be achieved by a single master-stroke: Imperial unity, economic recovery, revenue for the Armed Forces and social reform for the working classes.

Chamberlain's last great enterprise was, on balance, a failure, like so many of his other projects. Only as Lord Mayor of Birmingham did he achieve undiluted success. 'Of course I shall be Prime Minister,' he boasted in 1887. But he never was, nor did he reach the Home Office, the Treasury or the Foreign Office. At every turn he met his match in a formidable prime minister determined to keep him under control: first Gladstone, then Salisbury, then Balfour. But resistance to Chamberlain ran deeper than this. Chamberlain was always temperamentally a moderniser, but the natural modernising class of the 19th century, the middle class, was fragmented and compromised. Chamberlain's whole life was a discovery of this fact. In his youth he burnt his fingers over republicanism. As Radical Joe he found that the middle classes were much less angry than he wanted them to be. Finally he took on the huge vested interests of free trade and lost. The genius of Chamberlain lay in his capacity to tap and mobilise hitherto unexploited sources of energy and enthusiasm. But the restless forces were never as strong in Britain as the laws of inertia and the politics of Sleepy Hollow. Contemplating the fate of Joseph Chamberlain, we can only speculate whether the working classes will let down Citizen Benn as badly as the middle classes let down Radical Joe.

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A century ago Joseph Chamberlain was the Tony Benn of his time, the bogeyman of moderate and conservative opinion. The point is familiar to historians of the period, but never easy to convey. Why, after all, should the upper classes have been scared of a Liberal? Were the Liberals not a .

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The 'unnecessary war' in the mind of this author and Winston Churchill

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A Case History: Britain, Empire Decline, and the Origins of WW1: Or, Might the Lessons of the Boer War have 'Saved the Day'?

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A Case History: Britain, Empire Decline, and the Origins of WW1: Or, Might the Lessons of the Boer War have 'Saved the Day'?

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One example considering success of 1906-15

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Varied views of the two PMs can be seen in this review

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A good analysis of the difference between myth and interpreatation

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Boris Johnson calls for Tristram Hunt's resignation, Hunt finds Michael Gove's views shocking, Gove slams leftwing historians who produce history to "belittle Britain and its leaders". What next? Duels at dawn as the combatants hurl history books at each other and demolish each others' myths? Who could have imagined that nearly a hundred years since the outbreak of the first world war it would be rousing such passions?

The trouble in this debate about the first world war is that one person's myth is another one's incontrovertible truth. Either the generals were all donkeys or they were sensible men doing their best. The war was either a colossal mistake or a struggle for important principles. Such polarisation may make for a good spectacle but it doesn't do what history should - and that is help us to understand the past in all its complexity.

Can I suggest that we start by keeping in mind that there is a key difference between myths, which can be disproved by looking at the evidence, and interpretations, which take the evidence into account? Myths about the war that historians have helped to put to rest are, for instance, that all Europeans welcomed war with cheering and flowers. We now know that across the continent, the public mood was much more a mix of apprehension, resignation, fear or, in some cases, exhilaration that the storm so long anticipated had finally broken.

Another myth: that the generals on both sides were heartless effete aristocrats who sipped champagne behind the lines while they pondered, unsuccessfully, the challenges of modern industrial war. Historians such as Gary Sheffield and John Terraine have shown that the generals were well aware of the challenges; the technology was simply not there - or not until late in the war - to overcome them. Nor were they all from the upper classes. General Erich Ludendorff, one of the most successful of the German generals, was middle class, while General Arthur Currie, arguably the most competent of the British empire's generals, was an unsuccessful insurance salesman.

Interpretations are of another order. People can take the same evidence about an event and come up with widely different views of what it meant. In December 1912, at a time of considerable tension in Europe as a result of a war in the Balkans, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany summoned his favourite military advisers to his palace at Potsdam to talk about the situation and what Germany's chances were if a wider war broke out. Nothing was decided and his chancellor, Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, was furious that he had not been consulted.

So was it, as some, including the German historian Fritz Fischer, have argued, a war council that demonstrates Germany's leadership was determined on a war of conquest, or was it - as I am inclined to think - yet another example of the kaiser shooting off his mouth? Wilhelm often sounded belligerent, yet when it came down to it, usually opted for peace. His own beloved army officers took to calling him William the Timid, something that stung and may have made him determined in 1914 not to back down. We have to accept, in my view, that both interpretations are valid and it may be impossible ever to determine which is most plausible.

History is all about disagreements and both schoolchildren and the public should be made aware that the first world war from beginning to end is the subject of much debate. Let us embrace that, rather than fearing it. Encouraging discussion of the past can only enhance and deepen our understanding. This year we will be talking a lot about the origins of the war and who or what was responsible. Unlike the second world war, we do not have a clear consensus on how it started and we never will. Yes, we can assign more or less responsibility - I blame Austria-Hungary and Germany for their mad determination to destroy Serbia knowing that a general war might result - but there is still plenty of room for disagreement. We need to look beyond individual players or states and take into account the overall context. There was a dangerous mood in Europe by 1914 that war was an option - that it was probably inevitable. (It helped, of course, that many in the military assumed, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that a future war would be short and decisive.)

Indeed, many believed that conflict was deeply engrained in human society, and that nations that survived did so because they were prepared to struggle. Gove has accused the Germans of adhering to such social Darwinist ideas, but he should know that these were widespread across Europe, and that one of their fullest enunciations came from Herbert Spencer, an Englishman.

We should also be careful not to attribute ideas and motives retrospectively in order to suit our own needs. Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, has said that the battle of Vimy, where Canadian troops carried a crucial ridge in the face of a strong German defence, showed Canadians' "unwavering commitment to defending peace and freedom". I doubt soldiers at the time would have put it like that. My Canadian grandfather and his cousins were fighting for the mother country. I also doubt that the British soldiers thought that they were defending, as Gove claims, "the western liberal international order". Like my ancestors and, it should be remembered, soldiers on all sides, they were fighting for their country, and their own families and friends.

What is so dispiriting is how our memories of a catastrophic and monumental event in modern history are being dragged into current political debates. It will be a great pity and a waste if we don't take the occasion of the anniversaries this year as a time for understanding and for sharing an experience that affected all of Europe, and indeed much of the world, including my own country, Canada. Let us respect the dead, who are so frequently summoned into the debates, by trying to understand what happened, and not use them to score cheap points.
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The first world war centenary should be about shared understanding, not political point-scoring | Margaret MacMillan

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Boris Johnson calls for Tristram Hunt's resignation, Hunt finds Michael Gove's views shocking, Gove slams leftwing historians who produce history to "belittle Britain and its leaders". What next? Duels at dawn as the combatants hurl history books at each other and demolish each others' myths?

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A commentary on how politicans now and in the past have seen WW1

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They were never going to be able to contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.

Hostility to the war, the education secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.

Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law" and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at "anti-militarists".

This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.

It's not just that 40% of men and all women in Britain were denied the vote in 1914 - unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage - or that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.

Every single one of the main warring states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials enforced the export of food in British-ruled India, slaughtered resisters in their tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.

Britain was supposed to have gone to war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" - which had itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is now Namibia in the same period.

As to international law, Britain's disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a few years before. London refused to reply. The answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes "slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".

In reality, it wasn't just the seed of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights, laying the ground for future disasters in the process.

Gove and his fellow war apologists worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war itself that was most depraved.

Fortunately, the revisionists lost the argument among the public long ago - just as Gove has largely lost his battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the future as much as the past - and so long as imperial conflict is discredited, future foreign military interventions and occupations will be difficult to sell.

For the rest of us, this year's anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster. It also contains a warning about the threat from the rise and fall of great powers. China is no imperial Germany, but the US - allied with Japan - is a declining global power in a region in which it is tightening its military grip. It's not 1914, but the dangers are clear.

* This article was amended on 14 January 2014. It originally stated that in 1914, most men did not have the vote. This has now been corrected.
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First world war: an imperial bloodbath that's a warning, not a noble cause | Seumas Milne

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They were never going to be able to contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars".