Asquith showed off secret files to his mistress
FORMER prime minister Herbert Asquith was a little blase about Britain’s security secrets. He would apparently show intelligence files to his mistress, then tear them up and throw them from his car.
Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew told how Asquith used intelligence files to show off to his mistress, the aristocrat Venetia Stanley, who was 40 years his junior.
Speaking at the Chalke Valley Histhe tory Festival, Professor Andrew said that unearthed correspondence revealed that Asquith – who led Britain into the First World War – had showed Miss Stanley ‘carbon copies of the latest intelligence’ in his car.
After she read it, ‘what he would do is tear it into pieces,’ Professor Andrew said. ‘Then he would put them into little
‘He threw them from car’
paper balls – the most secret information available in Britain at the time – and he would toss them out the window.
‘She would say, in effect, “You shouldn’t have done that.” And he would say, “I just did.”’
The historian said that the week after the PM disposed of the papers this way for the first time, Scotland Yard came round with ‘a little cardboard box which contained the little paper balls’.
But when questioned, Asquith feigned innocence and told them he had no idea how they had ended up there.
Professor Andrew told festival goers how figures including the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill had used intelligence to their advantage, while others such as Asquith – the great-grandfather of actress Helena Bonham-Carter – were far more relaxed about it. He said: ‘[Asquith] would be the first to admit, he was a very bright fellow – but he wasn’t least bit interested in intelligence.’ The former Liberal prime minister, in office from 1908 to 1916, wrote increasingly frequently to Miss Stanley between 1910 and 1915, even during cabinet meetings.
He is said to have sought her advice on military strategy during the First World War and dealing with his colleagues.
It appears the trust he placed in her may also have led him to divulge some of the nation’s biggest secrets. Professor Andrew said: ‘Although he wasn’t interested in top secret intelligence himself, he used to show it to Venetia to impress her. She was A: impressed and B: shocked.’
He said with a double first in classics from Oxford University, Asquith may have been ‘the cleverest of British prime ministers of the 20th century, [but] almost certainly the biggest idiot’.