After Lords blocked the People's Budget in 1909, Asquith called a general election in which the Unionists picked up a net 116 seats, bringing them to 2 seats short of a plurality and 64 seats short of an outright majority. Labor had 40 seats and various Irish nationalist parties had 82 seats; both groups were logical coalition parties for the Liberals, so Conservatives/Unionists would need an outright majority to form a government.
I can't find seat-by-seat results, so I have no idea how big a POD would be required to swing the election enough to give the Unionists a majority, effectively repudiating Asquith and the People's Budget and validating the decision by Lords to block it.
Alternately, the two big issues dividing the coalitions were Home Rule in Ireland and the People's Budget. I wonder if it might not have been possible for the Conservatives to trade off some form of Home Rule in order to split the Liberal coalition, losing the Liberal Unionists but gaining the Irish parties and perhaps the laissez faire wing of the Liberal party as well. Home Rule would be a bitter pill for the Conservatives to swallow, but the alternative was losing the House of Lords as a structural check and then having both Home Rule and the People's Budget pass.
The thing was that opposition to Home Rule was in general an electoral advantage for the Conservatives/Unionists as it meant they could rally working class Protestants in Lancashire, Scotland and even to some extent the West Country behind the Tory flag. Reversing their stance would probably lose the Unionists a lot of 'Orange' seats.
Passing the People's Budget would obviously have been the sensible thing to do and it would also have meant that the Liberals could not turn the general election into a 'Peers versus the People' show-down. That's a battle that the Tories and the Lords could not win. Without the fracas over the People's Budget the country might well have returned a Conservative/Unionist majority in 1911 or 1912 as the tax rises would have stirred up discontent without the wider provision of social welfare having kicked in.
I can't find seat-by-seat results, so I have no idea how big a POD would be required to swing the election enough to give the Unionists a majority, effectively repudiating Asquith and the People's Budget and validating the decision by Lords to block it.
I think there was some discontent upon the Conservative backbenches anyway due to his unconfrontational and gentlemanly style, which may be exacerbated in the short run if the People's Budget passes. He'd probably lead the party through till the next election and serve as PM if they won. Of course a Tory government during WW1 would have all kinds of interesting consequences, and you could see Balfour as ATL's Asquith - thrown out for not prosecuting the war vigorously enough, to be replaced by Bonar Law as the equivalent of Lloyd George. However, I doubt the Tories would have pussy-footed about conscription and other wartime curbs on civil liberties in the same way that the Liberals did.And if the budget passes, then there's no Home Rule crisis. Certainly when Gladstone's old seat went Tory at a by-election, dark electoral omens were in store for Asquith. Would Balfour still resign as leader? I got the impression from The Strange Death that he was tired from being unable to control his caucus due to the train wreck known as the Home Rule crisis.