by Roy Jenkins
The two threats to this development which he saw in that late summer of 1923 were Lloyd George and unemployment. Unemployment, which had risen beyond 2 million with the collapse of the post-war boom, had settled back to about 1 ½ million. This was much higher than pre-war figures, and there seemed little prospect, on existing policies, of any significant decline. Indeed the position of coal, still by far Britain’s largest industry, was artificially and temporarily favourable because of the French occupation of the Ruhr.
Baldwin disliked the level of unemployment both for its own sake and because he believed it worked against the evolution of a moderate Labour Party. In common with most of his contemporaries, he comprehended few methods by which governments could affect the total of demand. The best that could be done was to influence its shape in a way that gave the greatest help to the home market. This meant protection. But protection also meant an early election, for Bonar Law had given a pledge a year earlier that there would be no fundamental change in fiscal arrangements without another appeal to the country.
Lloyd George was about to go to America, but Baldwin believed that, on his return in late October, unless pre-empted, he would play the protectionist card. Certainly Lloyd George had never been a doctrinaire free-trader. Nor had he ever allowed such doctrines as had influenced him to sit too heavily upon his shoulders. And if he went protectionist while the Government havered, his attraction for the dissident Conservatives would become still stronger.
Baldwin contemplated all this at Aix, and made up his mind both to go for protection and to put at risk the first independent Conservative majority for two decades. About the time and place of this extraordinarily bold decision there seems little doubt. Baldwin confirmed it twenty years later, when he wrote to Tom Jones from the depths of his retirement: ‘I spent a lot of my holiday in 1923 walking in the hills around Aix and thought it all out by myself. I came to the decision by myself and how I drove that Cabinet to take the plunge I shall never know! I must have more push than people think….’6
By itself this statement, unequivocal though it was, could not be regarded as decisive evidence. Even the most honest of men find it surprisingly easy, through the film of time, to recall their own actions quite differently from the way in which objective evidence makes it clear they in fact occurred. And Baldwin in 1943, isolated and unpopular, might well have been tempted, as the tone of his note indeed suggests, to exaggerate his erstwhile capacity for independent decision. But the objective evidence is here on his side. And so is the subjective evidence. He had decided at Aix the year before to break one mould. His decision had been triumphantly vindicated. Now, once more, he found an uncomfortable mould setting around him. It was naturally tempting for a rather superstitious man to trust again to an intuitive judgment of his own made in much the same circumstances as in the previous year.
What is much more difficult to know is what were his motives for the decision, and what he expected to be the likely outcome. Was it the pattern of politics or the future of Britain’s trading arrangements which he wished primarily to influence? If the former, then the decision, after a nerve-testing time-lag, was a brilliant success. Within fifteen months he secured a reunited Conservative Party, which gave him the longest uninterrupted party premiership between Asquith and Attlee, the final reduction to a rump of the Liberal Party, and a brief, innocuous baptism of power for the Labour Party. The centre party was dead, Lloyd George was coralled, and the Labour front bench had become a collection of respectable Privy Councillors. It was everything for which he could have asked.
If, on the other hand, it was the freedom to use protection as a weapon against unemployment with which he was primarily concerned, the decision was a disastrous failure. It set back this possibility for nearly a decade, until after the slump had sent unemployment to twice the ‘unacceptable’ level of 1923 and the pattern of politics had once again been changed.
The difficulty in determining the motive for Baldwin’s decision is that he was himself as contradictory about this as he was clear about where and how he took it. In public he put it all on unemployment. In his October speech to the Conservative Party Conference at Plymouth, in which he announced his new position, he said:
To me, at least, the unemployment problem is the most critical problem of our country. I can fight it. I am willing to fight it. I cannot fight it without weapons…. I have come to the conclusion myself that the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market.7
No doubt at this stage and in public he could hardly have said anything else. But at the beginning of 1925, he changed the emphasis and told the Constitutional Club that it was a long-meditated move to reunite the Conservative Party. Ten years after that he put the main weight on Lloyd George, and told Tom Jones:
The Goat was in America. He was on the water when I made the speech and the Liberals did not know what to say. I had information he was going protectionist and I had to get in quick…. Dished the Goat, as otherwise he would have got the Party with Austen and F.E. [Birkenhead] and there would have been an end to the Tory Party as we know it.6
In 1943, however, Baldwin again switched back to the economic motive. ‘I wanted it’, he concluded the note already quoted, ‘because I saw no other weapon then to use in the fight against unemployment.’
Davidson, who was probably the closest of Baldwin’s confidents at the time and who also had the advantage of being present at Aix, was equally muddled in his explanations. This may have been because, according to Jones, he attracted most of the blame. In addition he was peculiarly dissatisfied with the outcome of the election, which led to his losing his own, nominally safe, Conservative seat. He put forward the unconvincing view that an election was never part of the plan. Baldwin merely intended to fly a policy kite at Plymouth. Davidson gave the reasons for the kite-flying as partly Lloyd George and partly unemployment.
There is, of course, no reason why Baldwin should have been influenced by one motive to the exclusion of others. It is reasonable, indeed usual, to hope that several consequences will flow from a chosen course of action. But it is desirable to know, in one’s own mind at least, what is the primary objective. One disadvantage of intuitive decision-making, or of ‘leaps in the dark’ if Birkenhead’s phraseology is preferred, is that it is not always clear what they are intended to achieve.
The decision once taken, however, Baldwin proceeded to implement it with force and speed. The process illustrated the powers resident in even an untried and hitherto hesitant Prime Minister. There was certain to be a good deal of opposition in the Cabinet. There was indeed something bizarre about the idea that protection was the way to unite the Conservative Party. The issue had been a principal if intermittent source of internal dispute and disruption for the past twenty years. But it ought at least to inspire both the Chamberlains and some others as well.
Baldwin told his Chancellor during the first weekend of October, and then proceeded to consult in ones or twos with other members of the Cabinet, the traditional free traders -Salisbury, Derby, Devonshire and Novar—as well as the natural protectionists—Amery and Hoare. He did not meet with much enthusiasm, except from Neville Chamberlain and Amery, but his methods were fairly successful in avoiding the organization of any hostile cabal. The notable exception to his process of consultation was the Foreign Secretary. Curzon did not have any very fixed position on the issue, but he was naturally furious when he discovered the extent of his exclusion. He talked about ‘the arbitrary fiat of one weak and ignorant man’. But his influence was in sharp decline, which was no doubt the reason why Baldwin, despite his talk earlier that year about Curzon’s ‘streak of pure gold’, treated him as he did.
The Cabinet did not collectively consider the matter until 22 October, only three days before Baldwin’s speech at Plymouth. This, with the path smoothed by prior discussion, had the predictable effect of strengthening the Prime Minister’s position. He had to speak. He could not be expected to do so against his o
wn beliefs. The best that could be done was to find a formula which, compatibly with this, gave something to the minority. It took the form of Baldwin agreeing only to speak for himself and of leaving open the question of an election. Concentration upon the working out of this formula had the effect of almost wholly avoiding any serious consideration of the central issue. ‘However the discussion happily turned very soon on to the question of procedure,’ Amery recorded, ‘and the desirability, in which we all concurred, of the statement being so framed as to avoid our being pushed into a general election this autumn.’8 It was an almost perfect example of how, provided his colleagues have no desire to humiliate him, a Prime Minister can get his way against the better judgment of most of them.
In fact the limitations which Baldwin accepted on this occasion were almost meaningless. Although there is some doubt as to whether or not he appreciated this, he could not commit himself without in practice committing his party—unless he was to be replaced. And as the Conservative Party was already on its third leader within thirteen months, this did not begin to be likely. So far as the avoidance of an election commitment was concerned, this would have been sensible from any point of view. There was no possible reason why he should have wished at that stage to foreclose his options between December and January, or January and the spring. And he could accept the limitation in the knowledge that, when it comes to the point, one of the clearest prerogatives of a Prime Minister is that of choosing the date of an election.
So it proved to be on this occasion. The real restriction of his freedom arose not so much from the restraints of his colleagues as from the fact that his Plymouth speech inevitably created an election atmosphere which he found difficult to control. In the early days of November the members of the Cabinet fell to arguing not whether there should be an election at all upon the issue, but exactly when it should take place. They fell into three groups: at once, January, and April. These groups did not coincide with any previous line-up on the merits of the protectionist issue. The confusion, fortified by a fear on the part of some members that they were going to be asked to make way for Austen Chamberlain and Birkenhead, gave Baldwin almost complete freedom.
On 12 November he decided in favour of an election on 6 December. That afternoon he saw the King, who tried to dissuade him, but, as King George V recorded it: ‘He assured me that it was absolutely necessary for him to appeal to the Country as he had gone so far that it was not possible for him to change his mind.’9 So much for the need of a Prime Minister to obtain the Sovereign’s ‘permission’ for a dissolution of Parliament. The King rather shrewdly asked whether Baldwin had the support of his colleagues in the House of Lords. Baldwin turned the question by saying that ‘several of them were, perhaps, too Conservative and did not want a change.’ None of them pushed their opposition to the point of resignation, although there was a good deal of muttering and discussion. Negotiations to bring Austen Chamberlain and Birkenhead into the Government broke down.
The King also asked whether the election would not reunite the Liberal Party. ‘Yes,’ said Baldwin, ‘and no bad thing either.’ That was not the unity of which he was frightened. Lloyd George had already boxed the compass by declaring himself an ‘unrepentant and convinced free trader’; Baldwin’s policy, he said, was ‘unutterable folly’. He and Asquith even appeared together on the same platform.
Throughout the campaign Baldwin believed he was going to win. So did his party agents. On 4 December, the Conservative Central Office predicted a majority of 87. He set off cheerfully for a final phase in Worcestershire, saying complacently, ‘I don’t want any bands here when I come back.’10 There was no danger of embarrassing musical honours. The Government found itself not in a majority of 87 but in a minority of 92. The Conservatives remained the largest party, with 257 seats, but Labour and Liberal combined were 349. The Liberal gains were bigger, but Labour, with 191 seats, remained the second largest party. Baldwin returned to Downing Street as a defeated Prime Minister. The policy which he had put before the country had been decisively rejected. There could be no question of his continuing in office. Almost any other arrangement was possible. There could be a switch to another Conservative Prime Minister, who, uninvolved in the protection débâcle, might hope for at any rate some Liberal support. There could be a ‘non-party’ Government under a venerable statesman of broad appeal: Grey’s name was mentioned. There could be an Asquith Government with Conservative support and possibly participation; but this would make a charade of the issue on which the election had been fought. There could be an Asquith Government with Labour support and participation; but this ran directly counter to the whole Labour belief in independence, and would in any event mean the greater opposition party accepting the leadership of the lesser one. Or there could be a straight MacDonald Government, with Liberal support but without Liberal participation.
Of all these possibilities the first was the one which would have been most damaging to Baldwin. It would have meant humiliation, and the end, without much chance of resurrection, of one of the shortest-lived and most disastrous party leaderships in British political history. Baldwin might have precipitated this had he resigned immediately. At first he thought he should. There was a good deal of plotting in the Cabinet, and amongst the dissident ex-Coalitionists. Balfour hovered on the edge of the plot. Then he pronounced himself in favour of Baldwin remaining in office to meet Parliament. This had the advantage of giving a Christmas respite of six weeks. It was perfectly proper constitutionally. There was a confused position and Baldwin was entitled to continue until the oppositions could show that they could and would defeat him in the House of Commons. It also had the advantage of avoiding any suddenness in the Baldwins’ departure from Chequers and 10 Downing Street. After a day or two of hesitation, Baldwin decided on this course.
The plot then fell away. There was a good deal of continued muttering, but no real alternative Conservative leader available. In the meantime, opinion began to move towards the last of the possibilities—and the one which suited Baldwin the best—a minority Labour Government. Asquith pronounced that this was the right course, and that was decisive, particularly as Baldwin agreed with him. The great experiment would take place with MacDonald able to count upon less than a third of the members of the House of Commons. He could hardly be more circumscribed. The traditional parties could hardly feel safer.
As these matters became settled, Baldwin’s mood became almost euphoric. He went off happily for Christmas in Worcestershire:
We had snow from London to the Cotswolds and then it turned soft [he wrote to the Davidsons]. Yesterday was a jewel for beauty. Transparently clear, all the country in a deep russet dress, long, vividly bright, horizontal sunshine casting long shadows in the morning; a dull midday and then a divine evening. I wrote sixty-two letters of thanks…. This is a time for hanging out signals to our friends.11
As his impending defeat in the House of Commons approached, he became still more cheerful. On the evening when he was to undergo the experience, unique for a Prime Minister of this century, of winding up a debate with the certain knowledge of defeat at the end of his speech, Tom Jones saw him in his room behind the Speaker’s chair. ‘I have not felt so well for a long time,’ he told the ever-comforting Jones, ‘and shall be tempted to be very vulgar in my speech.’12 His ‘vulgarity’ did not extend much further than a quotation from Dryden, but he spoke with gusto and good humour. The Government went down by 71 votes and after a short Cabinet on the next morning (22 January 1924) he drove to Buckingham Palace and resigned. MacDonald took office the same afternoon.
Baldwin had two immediate tasks to perform in opposition. He had to make it clear that he had learnt his lesson on tariff reform, and to do this in a way as compatible as possible with the dignity of an ex-Prime Minister. Derby, with the support of Salvidge,7 his Liverpool henchman, was making this difficult by trying to conduct a growling inquest into the whole election strategy. Baldwin lanced this boil fairly quickly and
quietly by an announcement to a party meeting on 11 February: ‘I do not feel justified in advising the party again to submit the proposal for a general tariff to the country except on the clear evidence that on this matter public opinion is disposed to reconsider its judgment of two months ago.’ It was a little circumlocutory, but it is never wise for a politican to use ringing words to announce a retreat.
His second task was to bring Austen Chamberlain back into full communion. This was easier in opposition than in government. No policy orthodoxy had to be imposed and no places had to be found for clients of the former leader who wished to be junior ministers. There was only the perennial problem of Birkenhead. ‘If Birkenhead stood alone,’ Baldwin self-righteously pronounced, ‘I would not touch him with a barge-pole.’13 But Birkenhead did not stand alone. Austen Chamberlain, despite his limitations, was an ally of a staunchness rarely seen in politics. Baldwin had a reconciliation dinner with Austen at Neville Chamberlain’s house on 4 February. He made an offer to Austen, and authorized him to convey one to Birkenhead. Both were accepted. Sir Robert Home also joined the Shadow Cabinet. ‘So reunion has come at last, thanks, I think I may say, to me,’ Neville Chamberlain wrote to his sister.14
Thanks to whoever it was, Baldwin by the spring of 1924 was making surprisingly good progress toward the political objectives which he had set himself the previous autumn. His morale was moderately high, but no more. He had private troubles, associated both with his eldest son and with a shortage of money. Baldwins Ltd had paid no dividend for several years running. His income was less than a half of what it had been before 1914, and he was losing capital too. The value of the firm’s shares, which had been 50/- when he made his generous ‘F.S.T.’ gesture, fell steadily from 1920 onwards until they reached 3/6 in 1927 and then went down to 1/8 in 1931. Of course he had some other assets, but the collapse of the central part of his fortune did not make for buoyancy.
