4 - Foreign affairs

Summary

From the end of 1916…I was almost as close to the center of world affairs as it was possible for a man to be.

Philip Kerr in The Prevention of War (New Haven, 1923), p. 8.

The real issue we are going to have to decide in the next few weeks is whether we are going to stand by Serbia or throw her to the wolves.

Philip Kerr, 1 June 1917.

I think you are all mad.

Lord Robert Cecil's reply, 1 June 1917.

Of all its activities, the Garden Suburb's intervention in foreign affairs has been the most misunderstood. This is largely because Kerr, after the end of the war and after the dissolution of the Secretariat, accompanied Lloyd George to the Paris Peace Conference and became associated thereafter, in the minds of affronted contemporaries, with his master's personal and controversial style of diplomacy. During the war, however, Lloyd George's entourage did not contain a second Foreign Office, and there is no justification for attributing to the Garden Suburb part of the responsibility for the erosion of Foreign Office influence over foreign policy during the war. Instead, the Garden Suburb was concerned with foreign affairs in two ways: Kerr developed an interpretation of the diplomacy of war which was used in Lloyd George's public speeches, and Kerr and David Davies took an episodic but pertinacious interest in certain aspects of foreign affairs which resembles in style and purpose the work done by their colleagues in domestic matters.