WINTER AND DISCONTENT: THE DECEMBER CRISES OF THE ASQUITH COALITION.
That purpose-built agglomeration of crises, the Asquith Coalition, 1915-1916, was wracked by two in particular. The first concerned the adoption of military conscription; the second resulted from short-term intrigue but reflected wider dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. The crisis of December 1915 was successfully negotiated, with only the loss of one Cabinet minister and immeasurable goodwill. The crisis of December 1916 was of a much shorter duration and destroyed the Government. December 1915 concerned a matter of principle subsumed by circumstance into expediency; December 1916 combined an incompatibility of personnel with a signal divergence of political orientation
A participant neglected by history was central to each. By remaining in the Cabinet in December 1915, Reginald McKenna enabled the Government to continue in an unreconstructed form for a further year; by emboldening the Prime Minister’s resistance to change in December 1916, he ensured the destruction of the ministry, the accession of Lloyd George, and the gelding of the Liberal Party. Both crises have been examined exhaustively, though never comparatively, and never with the Asquith-McKenna correspondence.