Asquith

Asquith is one of the most crucial and controversial of all modern Prime Ministers. He was opposed with a bitterness and a violence that English politicians have not subsequently known. Yet he enjoyed eight and a half years of unbroken power, a period unequalled since Lord Liverpool in the 1820's. His Government was perhaps the most brilliant in our history: Churchill and Lloyd George, Haldane and Morley, Rufus Isaacs and John Simon, Augustine Birrell and Edward Grey were amongst its members. Asquith held them all together with an easy authority. Calm, unruffled, dignified he seemed politically indestructable. Yet his fall in December 1916 was sudden and final. A fantastic portrait by a master politcal biographer.