The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  When Mosley first moved over from the Tories to Labour, horrifying most of his friends, he had been impressed by MacDonald. He sucked up to the older, widowed man, paying for his car and helping with travel arrangements and hotels. Snowden and many other ordinary Labour people were jealous and suspicious. And indeed, Mosley was hardly living the life of a socialist, relaxing in Venice or on the French Riviera, enjoying comfortable country-house weekends and pursuing his private motto of the time, ‘Vote Labour, sleep Tory’. In a grey political age, his plumage made ordinary MPs gasp. One of the seemingly hundreds of women who found him irresistible talked of his ‘unparliamentary’ good looks, those of a ‘dark, passionate, Byronic gentleman-villain of the melodrama, in whose presence young ladies develop unaccountable palpitations and sedate husbands itch for their riding-whips’.117 Mosley was moving in the ‘Bright Young Things’ set of junkie-debutantes, cross-dressing peers’ sons and rich lesbians, yet he studied hard, and seemed to take his politics very seriously. He ridiculed fascists and he and his wife did the round of political meetings as keenly as any more conventional socialist figures. When MacDonald was returned to power in the second minority government of 1929, Mosley was already being talked about as the man who would follow him as Labour leader. Surrounded by some of the brightest and most impatient young minds in the party, he seemed primed for greatness – though Baldwin muttered that he was a wrong ’un and Labour would find that out for themselves.

  As it happened, MacDonald kept Mosley outside the cabinet, working on unemployment issues under a former leader of the railway workers called Jimmy Thomas, who was drunk, corrupt, lazy and unimaginative. New ideas were whirling about. Advised by Keynes, Lloyd George returned to the fray with his Orange Book, promising ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’. He called for high public borrowing to fund more house building and road construction. Some of the younger Tories, backed by the press barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere, returned to imperial preference, with a nationwide campaign for tariff walls, inside which the Bank of England could pursue deficit financing to boost the economy. There was excited talk of a new ‘Young Party’ which might bring together Churchill, radical Tories, Liberals and Labour people, including Mosley, who was bombarding the cabinet with his own plans for expansion. He wanted large-scale public borrowing, children to be kept longer at school, the retirement age to be cut and public works, including criss-crossing the country with a dozen ‘speedways’ – what we would call motorways.

  In later decades, all these would happen, the hardly controversial reforms of mainstream Tory and Labour governments. But in 1930 the drunken Thomas was uninterested and the free-trade, balanced-budget Chancellor Snowden was openly hostile. Churchill had put it well when he said that, when Snowden returned to office, ‘the Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards’. Snowden blocked everything Mosley suggested. MacDonald, more sympathetic, dithered. Mosley worked up more detailed ideas. Again, they were brutally turned down. Herbert Morrison, later one of the most creative Labour figures when he ruled London, mocked Mosley for his Lloyd George ‘roads complex’ and when Mosley resigned, Snowden called him a traitor to Labour and a ‘pocket-Mussolini’. A very obscure figure called Clement Attlee was appointed to Mosley’s old job, and the government continued to do nothing very much. Eventually Snowden’s solutions, a rise in income taxes (which he then flinched away from) and cuts in unemployment benefit, caused a mutiny in the cabinet and the collapse of the government. MacDonald and Snowden would jump ship and become part of the Tory-dominated National Government while Mosley would convert Snowden’s jeer about Mussolini into hard historical fact.

  Mosley’s first venture, the New Party, still seemed more socialist than fascist. But it was a curious mix. It had left-wing thinkers in it. It tried to attract up-and-coming Labour MPs, including the young Aneurin Bevan who refused, wondering where the money would come from (as we shall see, an important question) and predicting that it would end up as a fascist party. But other parts of the Independent Labour Party allowed joint membership and Mosley spoke eloquently, endlessly about unemployment, just as he had when a Labour minister. On the other hand, he set up a protection squad against socialist disruption, led by an England rugby player and called the ‘biff boys’; he attracted the private support of right-leaning mavericks like the Prince of Wales, the car maker William Morris and the BBC boss John Reith; and some of his adherents quietly slipped off to Munich to see how the Nazis ran their party from the Brown House. Mosley’s wonderful wife Cimmie, who had been a victorious Labour candidate and a highly effective MP, despaired of the drift towards fascism. But after a rough meeting in Glasgow, Mosley began to talk openly of the need for fascist methods: his rhetoric became wilder, as he enthused about ‘riding rough-shod’ over normal peacetime thinking. He was seen as a fascinating maverick himself who, if the crisis deepened, might soon be king-maker if not king. Churchill was among the politicians careful to stay friendly with him.

  Stanley, the Empire and the Harlots

  Unemployment kept rising, now to 3 million. In normal times this would be the Tories’ hour. But the Conservatives had problems of their own. Stanley Baldwin had been fighting his own battle with the newspaper barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook who, still on their old hobby-horse of imperial protection, had been savaging the Tory leader and threatening him with their own rival party. Protectionism was still hugely popular. Mosley’s New Party, for instance, had attracted around 5,000 members – but Beaverbrook and Rothermere’s United Empire Party, now forgotten, had twenty times as many supporters as soon as it was launched. Baldwin told a friend he was fighting with beasts, ‘and I hope to see their teeth drawn and their claws broken’. In fact he was compromising and making moves towards protection as he struggled to stay in the saddle. In a series of magnificent speeches Baldwin took on the newspaper barons, revealing Rothermere’s ‘preposterous’ and ‘insolent’ demand to have oversight of a future Tory cabinet. But he moved far enough towards the protectionist argument to risk losing old free-traders like Churchill.

  He, meanwhile, however, was on his way into that wilderness where he would famously spend the thirties, because of another policy entirely. Churchill was as much responsible as anybody for the cruel grip of nostalgia economics. But in his restless search for the next crusade, Churchill now moved away from domestic issues and towards a cause that would nearly destroy him, and rightly so. India’s long march towards independence still had years to travel, but in the early thirties there seemed a chance of an interim compromise settlement allowing substantial home rule inside the Empire while a new Indian administrative and political class grew in confidence and experience. This was above all the achievement of Mohandas Gandhi, who rose from relative obscurity to become a world icon in these years. He had led the Indian National Congress from 1921 and won huge support for his first non-violent campaigns of boycott and home-spinning of cloth in protest at British rule, but had spent much of the decade either in prison or trying to unite disparate factions. In 1928, however, the arrival of a commission on India’s future featuring not a single Indian encouraged him back to the front line with a resolution calling for a new campaign aimed at full independence. The Indian flag was raised and an Indian national day proclaimed.

  Then, in March 1930, Gandhi began his new boycott, this time against the salt tax, marching thousands of his followers nearly 250 miles to a small coastal village in Gujerat, where he would pick up his own untaxed salt and carry it back. It was a symbol, a piece of brilliant political theatre. One writer on India, Jan Morris, compared it to the Boston Tea Party. The tax on salt affected everyone. Gandhi was inviting India to ignore it. The world’s media followed him and he was celebrated, even sanctified, around the globe. Huge numbers took up his challenge and a widespread, good-humoured protest swept the country, humiliating the British Raj. Some 100,000 Indian nationalists were arrested and imprisoned, including Gandhi himself, under a
n act of 1827. Things were becoming ridiculous – the Empire was becoming ridiculous, a worldwide laughing stock – and Gandhi was soon let out by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin. Later, as Lord Halifax and foreign secretary in Chamberlain’s government, Halifax would have his reputation ruined as an appeaser, but in India a decade earlier this long, lean, devout and pessimistic man was something of a reformer. He believed self-government would come. In a further episode of unforgettable theatre, Irwin invited Gandhi to come and talk to him in his newly completed Lutyens-designed and very palatial New Delhi house. Gandhi arrived with his willow stick and shawl and entered the palace for eight discussions with Irwin, which apparently involved much laughter and a lot of non-alcoholic drinks, but which failed to produce a political breakthrough. Back in London, MacDonald’s Labour government was now in favour of self-government for India, as was Irwin. British opinion, however, was still split. And Churchill ranged himself on the other side.

  Perhaps nothing Churchill said has worn as badly as his infuriated description of Gandhi’s visit to the Viceroy. He told his constituency association in London that he found it ‘alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace . . . to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor’. Later, he is said to have added that he’d like to see Gandhi bound, laid in the dust outside Delhi and trampled upon by the Viceroy, riding an elephant. Joke or not, the comments ooze an almost physical loathing of Gandhi which betray Churchill’s emotional failure of imagination. Irwin was much nearer the mark when he compared Gandhi to Christ: invited to admit his irritating character, he replied that ‘some people found our Lord very tiresome’.118 When in March 1931 MacDonald’s government invited Gandhi to London to be the Indian National Congress’s sole representative at round-table talks, he arrived in his loincloth and became a huge popular hero. He was mobbed in the streets, met celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, was cheered by huge crowds when he visited Lancashire cotton workers to explain his Indian cotton policies, and was even invited (somewhat against George V’s better judgement) to tea at Buckingham Palace. Memorably, when he left the encounter and was asked by journalists whether he really felt properly dressed for such an encounter, Gandhi replied that it had been fine: ‘The King had on enough for both of us.’

  For the next four years the Empire dominated Churchill’s political life and much of the newspapers’ political coverage. In 1924 the country had been briefly transfixed by the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Britain celebrated Empire Day, when streets were bedecked with Union Jacks; the monarch was still officially the King-Emperor; there was a scheme to link the Empire with a fleet of airships. (This ended in March 1930 when, on her maiden cruise from Bedfordshire to Karachi, the airship R101, the largest flying craft ever built in Britain, crashed in northern France killing all but six of her fifty-four crew and passengers.) The world was already moving on from European empires. The rising powers were the red and black dictatorships and the vibrant democracy of America. By entering the struggle to keep India British, Churchill was throwing himself into years of wearisome, pointless and often very boring politics in which he acted as the champion of pampered Indian princelings and foaming Home Counties racialists. Churchill never drank as much as he liked to pretend, but nostalgia was for him a far more dangerous and addictive intoxicant than anything bottled.

  On this, Baldwin was a better guide to reality than Churchill. He had the courage to set himself against the Indian nostalgists, just as he stood against the worst excesses of newspaper-magnate self-importance. ‘Empire’ – whether as diehard opposition to Indian self-government or the good old cause of protection – was the banner under which Beaverbrook and Rothermere tried to upend the Conservative Party. The spirit behind this attempted newspaper putsch was perhaps Northcliffe’s, even though that great, self-tortured genius was long dead. He had died in 1922, quite mad, possibly the result of a blood infection, in a specially built hut on top of the Duke of Devonshire’s house in London’s grand Carlton Gardens. He could not bear being inside and the roof of his own house next door was thought too weak for the hut. There, with a revolver to ward off possible assassins and filled with religious manias (though concerned that God might be a homosexual), the original great press magnate had experienced a terrible last few days. At one point, newspaperman to the last, he had telephoned the duty night editor at the Daily Mail to whisper, ‘They say that I am mad: send your best man to cover the story.’ Yet Northcliffe’s spirit long survived his physical death. There was the popular, aggressive, take-no-prisoners journalism, of course. But there was also his belief that as a press lord he could run the country at least as effectively as any politician – and that in some sense, he had the right to. He had challenged the wartime government, twice, and believed he had put in Lloyd George as prime minister. He had loomed over the Express owner Beaverbrook in the Canadian’s most impressionable early years in London, giving him a sense of how press tyrants could behave. He had loomed, too, over his brother Harold, now Lord Rothermere and back in charge of the Mail and most of the Northcliffe empire (though not The Times). But what mattered most was that the pair of them had embraced in old Northcliffe’s cold shadow. Rothermere, having lost two sons in the war, lonely and gloomy, had become thick with silver-tongued Max Beaverbrook. They exchanged thoughts and, what was worse, shares too; so that the two great rival empires of popular newspaper were tightly interlinked, a most dangerous thing.

  Baldwin was up against two men who despised him and who were casting around for alternative national leaders. One would alight on Churchill, the other on Mosley. Rothermere had already intervened in British politics with the publication of the 1924 faked Zinoviev letter which had helped turn out Ramsay MacDonald first time round. Now he blamed Baldwin for letting in Labour a second time. He had a deep fear of communism and had invested both rhetorical support and some money in Hungary, perhaps as a bulwark (not a good judgement, given what was to come) – enough so to be invited to become Hungary’s king. He was wise enough to decline that, though as we shall see his political judgement generally was as bad as it is possible to be. Beaverbrook, the unreliable and irrepressible imperialist, threw his Daily Express wholly into the campaign to destroy Baldwin. The paper’s famous Crusader figure dates from this time. At by-elections and day by day it savaged Baldwin with something of Northcliffe’s old fire, though with none of his wit. Rothermere for his part created much mirth by openly declaring that Beaverbrook was the man to lead the Tory Party and then the nation in Baldwin’s stead.

  Churchill’s resignation over India in January 1931 made Baldwin’s position even shakier and Beaverbrook and Rothermere came remarkably close to toppling the prime minister. Their United Empire Party had two good by-election performances. At the second, in Islington, Labour was able to seize the seat from the divided Conservatives. Tory morale began to shiver and shake. There was another by-election pending, this time in the St George’s Division of Westminster, a constituency which covered some of the richest property in Britain. The Empire Crusaders were standing again. The official Tory candidate panicked and withdrew, saying he could not honestly make the case for Baldwin. The party’s chief agent suggested Baldwin should stand down. Neville Chamberlain, whose father had started the imperial preference campaign thirty years before and who was now eyeing the leadership for himself, took this proposal to Baldwin with Uriah Heep apologies. Over a Sunday afternoon, the Tory leader seemed to have reconciled himself to going. But with the encouragement of friends his mood turned and he resolved to fight. Perhaps he himself would fight the Mayfair by-election? He told Chamberlain, who was horrified and blurted out that he should think of the effect on his successor. Baldwin eyed him coldly: ‘I don’t give a damn about my successor, Neville.’

  In fact it was another MP, the socialite ex-diplomat and diarist Duff Cooper, who fought the
by-election for Baldwin. Before he did, however, Baldwin delivered the only speech for which he is really famous – one so powerful and pointed that even people who do not follow politics have vaguely heard of it. He was responding to yet another attack in the Daily Mail signed by ‘the editor’ which alleged that Baldwin had squandered his father’s fortune and was therefore not fit to lead the country. At London’s Queen’s Hall Baldwin directly turned on his tormentors. ‘The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men,’ he said. Then he turned to the anonymous article about his father’s fortune and his incapacity: ‘The first part of the statement is a lie and the second part of the statement by its implications is untrue. The paragraph could only have been written by a cad.’ He could sue for libel but he would not. ‘I should get an apology and heavy damages. The first is of no value, and the second I would not touch with a bargepole.’ His cousin Rudyard Kipling is thought to have composed the final, famous shot: ‘What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ There was a tremendous ovation. Against all predictions, Cooper beat the Empire Crusader by 6,000 votes and Baldwin’s position was secure. The press putsch had failed. Newspaper owners would mount ferocious campaigns against politicians in the future, again and again. But they would never again try to become players as Beaverbrook and Rothermere had in 1931. It was an important moment for British parliamentary democracy.