invited, as leader of the opposit ion from 1905 to 1911, to attend CID
meetings, as an occasional adviser, and then from 1912 as a regular
member. Thus he could criticise the Liberal government’s defence
estimates in Parliament, while helping to form the policies on which the
estimates were based. The Liberal prime minister from 1905 to 1908,
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had had experience of the defence
departments as financial secretary to the War Office from 1871 to 1874;
secretary to the Admiralty from 1882 to 1884, and secretary of state for
war in 1886 and from 1892 to 1895. He seemed to be primarily inter-
ested in reducing the defence estimat es, in line with Liberal party policy.
In 1907 he published an article in the Nation, before the second Hague
conference on disarmament that year, calling for a stop in the arma-
ments race, while stressing the purely defensive reasons why Britain
maintained the largest navy.
7
Nevertheless, it was Campbell-Bannerman
who sanctioned staff talks with France without consulting the full
Cabinet, thereby beginning the practice of excluding the more pacifi-
cally inclined members of the government from defence and foreign
policy. Campbell-Bannerman was dying by the time he resigned in April
1908, handing over to H. H. Asquith. Asquith had a barrister’s ability to
master a brief, and as prime minister he would listen patiently to
Cabinet debates until he saw an opportunity to intervene effectively, a
practice that made him seem detached and dilatory.
8
His principal
quality was his ability to hold his disparate party together.
Ministers in charge of the Admiralty and War Office were not
expected to be defence experts; instead their role was to bring political
judgement to bear on the issues presented to them by their professional
advisers. Churchill, who was first lord of the Admiralty from October
1911 to May 1915, was exceptional in having his own ideas on strategy.
King Edward VII took an active interest in the armed forces and was, in
effect, represented on the CID by Lord Esher, a courtier and con-
troversial e
´
minence grise. It was Esher who chaired a committee on the
reorganisation of the War Office in 1903, following the critical report of
the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa, of which he had
been a member. Esher’s recommendations led to the creation in Feb-
ruary 1904 of an Army Council, comprising the secretary of state for
war, along with his senior military advisers, similar to the Board of
Admiralty, and a General Staff whose head would be responsible for
three directorates: military operations, staff duties and military training.
The War Office was subsequently raised to an unprecedented level of
7
‘The Hague conference and the limitation of armaments’, Nation, 2 March 1907.
8
Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London: Collins, 1964), pp. 279, 300.
Arms, economics and British strategy20