The PM and his daughter in love with the same girl
MY DARLING MR ASQUITH by Stefan Buczacki (Cato & Clarke £28.99)
On FEBRUARY 25, 1915, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith decided he wouldn’t bother saying goodbye to his son who was going to fight in France. He had far more pressing business.
He went to the London Hospital to see a woman called Venetia Stanley, 35 years his junior. It wasn’t that Asquith particularly wanted to talk to Venetia; he just wanted to see her wearing a nurse’s uniform.
However inured we may think we’ve become to politicians behaving badly — and idiotically — the story of Asquith’s infatuation with Venetia Stanley still takes a lot of beating. She was just 19 when they met, he was 54, and Asquith became helplessly smitten. He wrote her letters full of excruciating doggerel.
To make things even more complicated, Venetia only had eyes for Asquith’s daughter, Violet.
While there’s no proof that they had a physical relationship, Venetia and Violet constantly professed undying love for one another, as well as sending each other little presents. ‘I’ve sent you a tiny and very humble gift which you must wear always (in your bath and in your bed),’ wrote Violet, ‘and if you think it too ugly you may tuck it in under your combies.’
So who was Venetia Stanley, the object of not only the Prime Minister’s affections, but his daughter’s, too? On the surface, she came from an impeccably conventional aristocratic family. Peer a little more closely, though, and what emerges is anything but conventional.
It seems quite possible that Venetia’s uncle may also have been her father. Certainly there were lots of rumours to that effect and her mother was known to have had an affair with her husband’s brother. Despite Venetia possessing what one friend of hers called ‘a gruff baritone voice’, Asquith thought her the most alluring woman he’d ever met.
Soon his letters were arriving ever more frequently — there are suggestions he even wrote to her under the table during Cabinet meetings. Along with his dreadful poems, he passed on a raft of top secret information about military tactics, thus making Venetia far better informed about the state of the War than most of his ministers.
But what exactly went on when there was no one else around? not a lot, it seems. While Venetia may have encouraged Asquith’s attentions — or at least done nothing to quell them — she had no intention of surrendering her virginity.
When Venetia announced her engagement to an extremely drippy man called Edwin Montagu — Secretary of State for India — the Prime Minister was heartbroken.
However, he didn’t repine for long, swiftly transferring his attentions to Venetia’s younger sister, Sylvia. Initially flattered, Sylvia soon discovered that if she was alone with Asquith, ‘it was safest to sit either side
of the fire . . . or to make sure there was a table between them.’
Not that she was the only object of his attentions. By today’s standards, Asquith was a serial groper. One woman recalled an incident when ‘the Prime Minister had his head jammed down in to my shoulder and all my fingers in his mouth’.
Meanwhile Venetia had settled down to what quickly became marital monotony with the dreary Edwin.
As Buczacki, whose prose sometimes veers towards the deepest shades of purple, puts it: ‘Marriage had given her a first taste for the ripe fruits of sexuality, but she soon realised there were much finer and sweeter flavours to be harvested elsewhere.’
It wasn’t long before Venetia was harvesting away like crazy — one chapter here is all-too-aptly titled Conjugal Carnage.
Her daughter Judy was almost certainly the product of an extramarital affair, and Venetia had flings with the newspaper baron Max Aitken and the banker Victor Rothschild.
When Edwin died in 1924, Venetia literally took to the air, buying herself an airplane and whizzing around the Middle East with yet another of her lovers. By now some of her old friends, appalled by all this conjugal carnage, had given her up as a bad lot.
But not Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, who had always been fond of Venetia — she’d been a bridesmaid at their wedding. During World War II they regularly invited her to their weekend retreat at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire.
Her death in 1948 left obituary writers facing a tricky dilemma — whether to make any reference to the racier elements of Venetia’s life, or to ignore them altogether.
Steering a careful path through this minefield, The Times observed with exquisite tact: ‘Though a great blow, her husband’s death did not spell obscurity to his beautiful and accomplished widow . . .’