1 - All in a garden fair

Summary

… a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister's garden, and their business to cultivate the Prime Minister's mind. These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service cabinet. They are rather of the class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner, and whose spiritual home is fixed somewhere between Balliol and Heidelberg. Their function is to emerge from their huts in Downing Street, like the competitors in a Chinese examination, with answers to our thousand questions of the Sphinx.

H. W. Massingham in The Nation, 24 February 1917.

This book explores part of the curious and rather neglected world where politics and administration intersect. Its subject is the personal Secretariat set up by Lloyd George when he succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister at the end of 1916. The new body, soon known as the ‘Garden Suburb’ from its location in temporary offices in the Downing Street garden, was to be responsible for maintaining contact between the Prime Minister and the departments of government and for writing reports on matters of special concern: in short, it was to be an administrative intelligence department for Lloyd George. It was disbanded at the end of the war. There are four reasons for writing the history of this short-lived and irregular body of public servants. First, the Garden Suburb was the earliest of a number of attempts to strengthen the Prime Minister's hold over central government: its reputation, mistakes and limitations have conditioned later efforts.