Robert Harris’ new novel is a fictionalised imagining of British wartime prime minster H.H. Asquith’s affair with a 26-year-old aristocrat.
It’s 1914 and Herbert Henry Asquith, a brilliant Balliol-educated classicist and barrister, son of a Yorkshire wool merchant, and father of seven, was in his seventh year as prime minister. Two years earlier, a few weeks after a cruise to Sicily with his daughter Violet and her friends, the 61-year-old PM declared his love for one of the friends, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley.
Since January 1914, Asquith had faced the suffrage movement, coal miners, the issue of Irish home rule and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet, there was always time to write to Venetia, for dinner parties, bridge and brandy, country house weekends as Edwardian England lingered into the reign of George V.
Asquith declared 1914 an “annus mirabilis”. “Without you, I must often have failed, and more than once have gone down. You have sustained and enriched every day of my life ... Will you be the same in 1915?” Well, yes. Was it coincidence that the empire’s fortunes in the Dardanelles seemed to founder with Asquith’s affair? In fact, it was during the critical cabinet meeting with Churchill at his bombastic, persuasive fire-brand best that the government committed the Allies to Gallipoli while a distracted Asquith was writing passionately to Venetia.
For those readers not familiar with this cleverly captured post-Edwardian world, it seems unfair to share how exactly the small picture in this bigger picture ends. It is, after all, a novel. But one is struck by contemporary parallels. A recent, libidinous PM in love with a clever younger woman at a time of global crisis while across the Atlantic, another global leader overtaken by age is forced from office.
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