Scott’s Diary for 28-29 October 1921 starts with a visit to Lloyd George who tells him that the Tory Party (which is in Coalition with his Liberals) is very restive over the Irish negotiations and the Sinn Fein delegation are very difficult.
Lloyd George said he had “told the Sinn Feiners that he must have their reply in writing. His terms to them had been put definitely in writing and so must be their reply. He had great difficulty getting them to the point. He would talk to Griffith and find him quite reasonable. Then he went away and came back with another story. Erskine Childers was, he thought the villain of the piece. The written reply was promised for 12 o’clock that day. It was, I gathered, to deal with the fundamental issues, the de Valera telegram to the Pope having made it necessary that these should be raised at once.”
A footnote states that de Valera’s telegram had asserted the “independence of Ireland” and had repudiated allegiance to the” British King”.
Scott suggested it might be useful to Lloyd George if he (Scott) were to see Griffith and Collins, and he said he would be glad if he would do so and see him again.
Scott’s diary continues:-
“Telephoned at once to Desmond Fitzgerald, co-Secretary with Childers to the delegation, and he arranged for me to see Collins at 3.30 at Cadogan Gardens. He was still engaged at the Conference in Hans Place. There was a series of characteristic muddles, precision not being as yet an Irish characteristic , and it was close to six before Collins turned up in immense force at Cadogan Gardens, turned everybody, including an unhappy typist, out of the room with a sweep of his arms and settled down to talk for an hour and a quarter. The telephone rang at intervals when he sprang upon it fiercely as an enemy and yelled a challenge that might have split the instrument. Then Fitzgerald would appear and he relapsed into gloomy silence till the interruption was over.
In spite of these mannerisms I found him a straightforward and agreeable savage. He was intent on the question of the Government’s claim to retain the Irish ports as a naval base and I could hardly get him off the subject. (I afterwards found from Lloyd George that it was his speciality.) I pressed him on the question of allegiance but he was for giving nothing away. At last I had to point out that if he had come to negotiate on the principle of claiming everything and conceding nothing he might have spared himself the trouble and might as well pack up at once. Then he became more moderate and evolved a more constructive policy of his own. Why not have a linking of constitutions, each country swearing allegiance to its own constitution?. But where, I asked would the King come in? ‘Oh we’ll find room for the King’ he said.
Here Scott, acting as Lloyd George’s agent, argued that the British Coalition would fall apart and Parliament reject such an arrangement. Collins retorted that he knew nothing of British politics and only had to think of Ireland.
The diary Continues:-
“He went on declaiming as to the war they were making on us everywhere, in America and wherever they were in Europe, ‘Oh! if I had a hundred men in Cologne I would make the place untenable’. And for himself he did not care if it was to be war in Ireland…”
Scott reported back to Lloyd George:-
“And of course he found no help in the suggested union of constitutions, ‘I must have something quite simple, direct, unequivocal, something I can put without qualification or beating about the bush before the House of Commons’. Collins was an uneducated rather stupid man, but he liked him (as I did) and if he had him and Griffith alone to deal with could settle in five minutes.”
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