298 He Offers Us Peerages [ I 9 I ° 



between the parties. He thinks the King will promise the guarantees. 

 Churchill is already drawing up his list of peers to be created, should 

 it be necessary, and he offered Beauclerk and me to give us each a 

 peerage when the time came on the sole condition of voting the Veto ; 

 after which we might do what we liked. ' I can do it for you if you 

 will take it,' he said, and he proposed it again at dinner, and I said I 

 would think it over. He also offered to get Barker a seat at the next 

 General Elections. None of us took it very seriously, though Barker 

 would, I have no doubt, make an excellent M.P. He is a Fabian, and 

 a man of much political intelligence, besides being an excellent fellow 

 and man of the world. At dinner the conversation was more brilliant 

 than ever. We discussed Morley's character, and Kitchener's a propos 

 of his possible succession to Minto as Viceroy of India. Churchill 

 hates Kitchener, who, he told us, once prevented his entering the 

 Egyptian Service, and was always rude to him, he does not know with 

 what reason ; and we also discussed Curzon. Churchill has a won- 

 derful memory, which extends to scraps of poetry and fragments of 

 speeches of a hundred years ago. He is also a great and very rapid 

 reader of books. He told us he wrote his life of his father mostly in 

 the House of Commons, and while busy with all sorts of other work. 



" 4th April. — Our party broke up this morning, Winston having a 

 Cabinet to attend, where he doubtless will lay before his fellow con- 

 spirators what he has learned of the Irish plans from me, and persuade 

 Asquith to make the public declaration of getting guarantees from the 

 King, which he told me Asquith should give. 



" yth April. — A rumour of our Irish negotiations has got into print 

 through the London correspondent of the ' Irish Times.' It is singu- 

 larly exact, and would seem to show that Asquith and Churchill have 

 come to terms with Redmond on the basis of Asquith's engaging him- 

 self publicly to resign at once if the King refuses guarantees, and not 

 to stay in office over a new General Election. This, I feel pretty sure, 

 will meet the Irish requirements. 



" 14th April. — O'Brien has blurted out that Lloyd George, when they 

 had their Conference, promised to remit all the obnoxious taxes in the 

 Budget as far as Ireland was concerned, and Lloyd George has given 

 him the lie ; nevertheless, I have no doubt the thing is true, as Churchill 

 told me almost as much when he was here. 



" 15th April. — We have won a complete victory in Egypt, the Suez 

 Canal Convention having been rejected by the General Assembly, and 

 our Government having withdrawn from it in consequence. At the 

 same time, there has been a new affirmation made by our people of 

 ' England's right to the Soudan ' in joint Sovereignty with the Khedive. 

 By the terms of the Convention of 1899 England's right to occupy the 

 Soudan is concurrent with her occupation of Egypt, and lapses when 



