April 8th marks the centenary of the start of the Asquith government and one of the 20th century’s longest premierships. That this has gone unremarked may reflect the reserved character of Herbert Henry Asquith himself. But the neglect is not solely the result of an unassuming prime minister, or the Attlee government would be the least remembered in history. It also reflects the ambivalence with which liberals look back on a government which, for all its success in launching the modern welfare state, was in much else a saga of missed chances and, in Irish and European policy, of catastrophic mismanagement that undermined the liberalism Asquith’s Liberal party existed to advance.

Asquith’s accession to the premiership followed the death of Henry Campbell-Bannerman, victor of the great 1906 Liberal landslide. Asquith’s positive qualities were those of the avuncular, mildly progressive chairman, judge and advocate. In particular, having appointed Lloyd George as chancellor, he stood solidly behind his firebrand reformer as controversy raged over the “people’s budget” of 1909 and its subsequent rejection by the House of Lords. Lloyd George was the force behind virtually the entire “new liberal” programme after 1908; Asquith’s contribution was to keep his chancellor’s schemes within achievable bounds, soothing the concerns of Edward VII and George V, while sustaining a parliamentary and electoral coalition behind progressive reform.

By 1910, the year of two narrowly successful election victories for the Liberals, Asquith’s imperturbable solidity and measured but sonorous parliamentary oratory, in the face of a raucous Tory opposition, had established a hold on the political middle ground which was to continue until the government collapsed in December 1916 and Lloyd George ascended to the premiership. Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law said, in rueful admiration, “Asquith drunk can make a better speech than any of us sober.” This was just as well, for abstinence was not an Asquithian virtue (”it would be impossible to imagine anyone who was more obviously enjoying life,” wrote Lytton Strachey after one house-party encounter. “There was a look of a Roman emperor about him.”) Yet as a No 10/11 partnership for reform, the Asquith/Lloyd George combination is comparable to Thatcher/Lawson in the 1980s and Blair/Brown after 1997, and its greatest achievements—the people’s budget, with its old age pensions, and unemployment and sickness insurance—laid the foundations for the welfare state.

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