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Northcliffe press gave to the Army. 29 Incidentally, the War Memoirs do not affect the same kind of outrage at Repington’s leak about the BEF’s lack of ammunition in 1915, which had, in fact, been orchestrated by the ‘military party’ in the form of Sir John French and had contributed to the fall of Herbert Asquith’s government. The obvious difference between the 1915 and 1918 leaks being that, while the former was in keeping with Lloyd George’s political objectives, the latter was decidedly not. Though the War Memoirs insist that the dispute over the General Reserve was a question of ‘whether the government should submit to military direction’ and that, if the Cabinet had ‘surrendered’, a ‘military dictatorship would have been an accomplished fact’, 30 the reality was that the dispute over the General Reserve merely gave Lloyd George an excuse to oust Robertson. The latter was given the choice of remaining as CIGS with no control over the management of the General Reserve or becoming the British representative on the SWC – the very existence of which Robertson resented. With neither option palatable and with no support from Haig, Robertson found himself out-manoeuvred and therefore resigned. The charge of a conspiracy is thus an unsubstantiated attempt by Lloyd George to disguise his political manoeuvring and the same applies to the so-called ‘Maurice Debate’. The Maurice Debate was triggered by the controversy surrounding the German breakthrough on the Western Front in March 1918, specifically by Lloyd George’s denial that the breakthrough was a consequence of the failure of the government’s manpower policies. Speaking in Parliament in April 1918, Lloyd George insisted that the BEF was ‘considerably stronger on 1 January 1918 than on 1 January 1917’. 31 This statement was a deliberate lie. The Adjutant-General had recently provided Lloyd George with figures which put Haig’s fighting strength in January 1918 at 100,500 men less than in January 1917. 32 Aware of the inaccuracies in Lloyd George’s statement Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, a former Director of Military Operations at the War Office, informed the press of the truth about the BEF’s fighting strength and insisted on the need for a parliamentary investigation. The War Memoirs depict Maurice’s leak as an attempt by the opposition and ‘their military confederates’ to ‘embarrass and overthrow the government’. 33 Though it was until recently hypothesised that Maurice acted out of a desire for ‘revenge’ following his dismissal as Director of Military Operations, 34 the current historiographical consensus is that Maurice acted on his own initiative and not at the behest of the Army. There is consequently little to substantiate Lloyd George’s 29 Suttie, Rewriting the First World War , p. 158. 30 Lloyd George, War Memoirs , p. 1687. 31 John Gooch, ‘The Maurice Debate 1918’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 3, 1918-19: From War to Peace (October 1968), p. 216. 32 David Woodward, ‘Did Lloyd George Starve the British Army of Men Prior to the German Offensive of 21 March 1918?’, The Historical Journal , Vol. 27, (March 1984), p. 242. 33 Lloyd George, War Memoirs , p. 1786. 34 Gooch, ‘The Maurice Debate 1918’, p. 232.