One of the weaknesses of many political biographies is that they are so often all about politics. The authors either forget that politicians are people, and sometimes interesting people, or they assume that their private life is of neither interest nor importance. So the book becomes a record of what the politician did rather than a picture of what the man, or indeed woman, was.
There are exceptions. One of the best of these is Roy Jenkins’s biography of H. H. Asquith. Jenkins of course covers Asquith’s public life in detail, acutely if at times rather indulgently. As a politician himself he is very good on the difficult matters Asquith had to deal with — notably the Irish Question, the House of Lords, the first two years of the Great War, and the relations between the governing Liberal party and the Conservatives. His analysis of the crisis which forced Asquith out of Downing Street is masterly.
Yet there is so much more in the book than politics, in part because politicians then were not oppressed by the demands of round-the-clock news management. They had time for a life beyond politics, and Asquith, it may be said, had more time than most. He enjoyed a full social life, partly, Jenkins insists, because he was unusually capable of ‘transacting his official business with great speed, but without any suggestion of neglect’. So ‘he left himself plenty of time for his family and his friends, for a wider but by no means undiscriminating social life, for golf and bridge, for general reading, and for private letter writing.’ Many of these private letters were to young ladies, especially Venetia Stanley, with whom he was more than a little in love.
There was a lunch party at Downing Street most days of the week, with a varied, often, as he put it, ‘incongruous’, selection of guests.
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