When he was in the Government Mr. Hobhouse was not less economical of information in his official utterances than any of his Ministerial colleagues. Now that he is out of it he is all for full disclosure. Why had Mr. Tennant said nothing of Gallipoli or Salonika, Loos and Neuve Chapelle? Why, if we were allowed to know that three million goatskins had been provided for the Army, might we not know how many men were going to wear them? In his view the result of the East Herts election was due to the Government having kept Parliament in the dark.
At last the stage was clear for Mr. Pemberton-Billing, who, considering how long he had been kept waiting, made a creditable début. He had, it is true, no startling revelations to make, or, at any rate, did not make them. His principal point was that we must exterminate the Zeppelins, and that we had aeroplanes enough and pilots enough to do it now. He would be delighted to introduce Mr. Tennant to the men and the machines, while as for bombs he was prepared to lay them on the Table of the House. For a first performance it was quite good, even if not entirely equal to the advance-billing.
Wednesday, March 15.—I am rather surprised that none of the evening papers had the enterprise to come out to-night with a contents bill bearing the words—
"Great Attack on Portsmouth,"
for the legend would have been not only startling but unusually accurate. The House of Lords assembled this afternoon in the expectation of hearing important statements from the Earl of Derby and Earl Kitchener on the recruiting crisis. What it was at first compelled to listen to was the Earl of Portsmouth giving his views on the Anglo-Danish Agreement. With dogmatic ponderosity he declared that the Agreement was losing us the friendship of the other Scandinavian countries, that it was not preventing goods getting into Germany, and that it ought to be abrogated forthwith.
I doubt if any of the Peers present had ever heard anything like the castigation which the Marquis of Lansdowne administered. Where did the noble Earl collect the kind of information that he had seen fit to pour forth? He seemed to have swallowed a lot of stories purveyed by people who were no friends to this country. There was not a word of truth in the suggestions he had made, and the Government, far from abrogating the Agreement, intended to maintain and develop the policy on which it was based. It was a great pity that the noble earl should have identified himself with an agitation that was neither wise nor patriotic.
Lord Portsmouth's family name is Wallop; this afternoon he lived up to it.
At the present moment Lord Derby is perhaps the most prominent man in the country next to the Prime Minister. Yet he is not a member of the Government. When to-day he rose from the Opposition benches to defend his conduct as Director-General of Recruiting and inspirer of the Prime Minister's famous pledge to married men, he illustrated the anomaly by the remark that, while he was doing his best to get that pledge fulfilled, Lord Selborne, who was a member of the Government, had been telling the farmers that he (Lord Derby) did not speak with authority.
Later he did a second turn—this time in his capacity as Chairman of the Joint Air Committee. Quite the most satisfactory part of his reply was the announcement that Lord Montagu himself had consented to become a member of the Committee. It is, of course, contrary to all the traditions of the British Government to give a man a job which he understands already. But in war-time even the most sensational experiments must not be ruled out.
Thursday, March 16th.—The House of Commons is so constructed that no matter how often the party-system is expelled it will always return. In spite of the Coalition, or perhaps because of it, the old strife of Whigs and Tories has revived, though the lines of cleavage are quite different from what they were.