by Roy Jenkins
Nor did he enjoy the business of parliamentary opposition. His forte as Prime Minister was taking the heat out of debates and convincing the House of the reasonableness of the Government’s approach. It was a technique which by its very nature was unsuited for use from the front opposition bench. He recognized his limitations, but he made little attempt to develop another technique. He was a gentle opponent to a weak Government.
Both his attitude and his easy pattern of life is well-illustrated by Tom Jones’s account of a morning in April that year. Jones was in his room in the Cabinet Offices, carrying on the routine business of a Labour Government, of which paradoxically he was throughout his life a consistent voting supporter, but enjoying none of the intimacy with MacDonald which he had achieved with each of the three preceding Prime Ministers.
I was in the middle of papers [he wrote] when Mr Stanley Baldwin was announced at the door. I was startled for a moment, as one does not have ex-Prime Ministers calling on one every day, but this was very like S.B., who began, ‘You will never come to see me, so I thought I would come to see you.’ We gossiped for half an hour in the office and then walked up to the United Universities Club and had lunch. After asking how I was getting on he told me something of the worries of a Party leader in days when there are no deep political convictions to divide men of good will. He had some troublesome followers who were clamouring for a positive policy without being able to suggest one. The one he had offered had been rejected. There was nothing for it but to await events. … He joked about having to go on making speeches without my help….15
Outside the House Baldwin forced the pace a little more. In May and June he made an important and successful series of speeches throughout the country, laying down a social reform policy for a future Conservative Government. The effect of these was temporarily marred by an interview of quite startling indiscretion which he gave to the People newspaper, then very right-wing and hardly distinguished. It was a surprising vehicle for Baldwin to choose. Probably the Conservative Central Office had arranged it. He saw an unknown reporter alone and did not check the copy. As a result the paper came out with the most terrifying remarks allegedly made by Baldwin about some of the political figures of the day, notably Beaverbrook, but also Lloyd George and others. Denials had to be issued, if only to reduce the risk of libel. The further trouble was that the ‘unknown’ journalist had caught Baldwin’s method of expression, and indeed his private views, almost perfectly. Few were much convinced by the denials, and the proprietor, editor and staff of the People were quite naturally furious at this behaviour on the part of ‘Honest Stanley’. It left a little dent in his reputation, but like most such incidents, was a quickly subsiding storm in a teacup.
All things considered, he departed for Aix in that summer of 1924 in calmer mind than in either of the two previous years. The Labour Government’s hold on office was manifestly tenuous. A third quick election was clearly a possibility. His chances of winning it with a reunited party and a substantial majority were good. So long as he did so, his leadership was not under challenge.
Parliament reassembled after only a seven-week recess on 30 September. The future of the Government was at risk over the ratification of treaties with the Soviet Union. In the event it was heavily defeated on 8 October on the issue of the Campbell Case8. The campaign was disfigured by Conservative exploitation of the forged Zinoviev letter9 and of the Bolshevik issue generally. Baldwin soiled his hands a little, but not excessively. His general note was one of chiding MacDonald for the weakness of his control over his own extremists and suggesting that what the country needed was men of practical experience, breadth of view and lack of dogmatic commitment.
His most effective performance—except that there were not at that stage a great many people who were able to listen—was his broadcast. No one really knew how the new technique should be handled. MacDonald decided, naturally but disastrously, that the obvious objective was to import into the living rooms of the wireless-owning population the soaring platform oratory which so moved his immediate audiences. The BBC broadcast him live from a mass meeting in Glasgow. He sounded ranting and inconsequential. Baldwin by contrast spoke intimately from the office of the Director-General. The result was a triumph. He had found a method of neutralising MacDonald’s most effective political quality—his inspirational personal presence.
The result of the election was also a triumph. The Conservatives increased their vote by the sensational proportion of 37 per cent. They won 419 seats, against 151 for Labour and 40 (a loss of 116) for the Liberals. Almost the only place where the Conservatives did badly was the normally impregnable Birmingham. This hardly diminished Baldwin’s sense of personal victory. He had been unopposed at Bewdley, but his two principal colleagues, the Chamberlain brothers, found their majorities uncomfortably reduced, Neville’s to the very edge of defeat.
The virtual destruction of the Liberal Party almost completed the political pattern which he had hoped for since the previous autumn.’… I did not think it would come so quickly,’ he told Tom Jones on 4 November. ‘The next step must be the elimination of the Communists by Labour. Then we shall have two parties, the party of the Right, and the party of the Left.’16 He had just been to the Palace to kiss hands as Prime Minister for the second time.
He turned to Cabinet-making. His position was quite different from that of 1923. He had won his own victory. He had the prospect of four years or so of uninterrupted power. He could build his own Government with few debts or commitments. And he had at his disposal almost an embarrassment rather than a shortage of political experience. He approached his task, as Austen Chamberlain noted, with a new firmness and confidence. But on the whole he discharged it badly.
He started well by making it clear to a shocked and protesting Curzon that he could not again be Foreign Secretary. In his place he put Austen Chamberlain, although a little more by accident than design, for Baldwin had offered him the choice between that and the India Office. When Chamberlain chose the senior office, Birkenhead got India.
The domestic appointments were more eccentric. Neville Chamberlain was naturally offered a return to the Treasury. With a lack of concern for place which was worthy of his father, he said he would rather be Minister of Health.10 Baldwin then inclined to Sir Samuel Hoare for the Chancellorship. Neville Chamberlain suggested Churchill. It was an extraordinary suggestion to come from a man who was normally so sensitive to Conservative Party opinion. Churchill had only recently rejoined the party. Eight months before he had fought as an independent against an official Conservative at a bye-election in the Abbey division of Westminster. Moreover he knew nothing about finance, and had no discernible claim to so senior an appointment. What was equally extraordinary was that Baldwin jumped at the idea. Ten minutes later—another leap in the dark—he offered the appointment to Churchill. Churchill, who at first thought it was the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster which was the proposition and for which he would happily have settled, accepted the greater post with tears in his eyes and an expression of grateful loyalty. ‘You have done more for me than Lloyd George ever did,’ he said.17 So, indeed, Baldwin had. He had also paid a substantial price for the pleasure, not merely of looking at the corpse of the idea of a centre party, but of stamping upon it several times over.
He made Joynson-Hicks (good on penal reform but illiberal on all else) Home Secretary, and thus firmly launched the Home Office, which had been different in the days of Harcourt, Asquith and Churchill, upon a course of dour obscurantism from which it took three or four decades to recover. His worst mistake was at the Ministry of Labour, which, foreseeably, turned out to be the crucial sector of his Government’s battlefront. He appointed Steel-Maitland, another ten-minute decision, after Horne had refused, despite the fact that he told Tom Jones he had spent eighteen months contemplating the importance of the post: ‘Neville recommended S-M. He is able enough—got all those Firsts at Oxford—but is he human enough? … He will do well admini
stering the Office, but I am frankly afraid of him in the House.’ The outcome (perhaps this would have happened whoever had been at the Ministry of Labour) was that most of the principal figures of the Government devoted a good part of their time to assisting Steel-Maitland in his job.
Baldwin’s other error was not to include Balfour. That magnificent old cat of British politics was seventy-six. But as he was brought in six months later when Curzon died, age was hardly a reason for excluding him from an office without portfolio in 1924. Hankey, the Secretary of the Cabinet, thought it was because he gave Baldwin ‘a certain sense of gaucherie and inferiority’.18
So Balfour did to many people. But Baldwin had less occasion to feel it than most. He may have constructed his Cabinet a little amiss, but he had constructed his power-base superbly. After an uneasy eighteen months he was in a stronger position than any Conservative leader since Lord Salisbury.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Perplexity of Power
Baldwin’s second premiership lasted four and a half years. It was the second longest period of party power, uninterrupted by either an election or a change of leadership, of this century.1 It was also a government of great stability of men in offices. Baldwin was perhaps the last Prime Minister to treat his Cabinet colleagues, as Gladstone had done, as members of a college of cardinals. Once nominated, he had to live with them. He would no more have thought of behaving as Harold Macmillan did in 1962, and dismissing nearly a half of them as though they were junior executives in an ailing company, than it would have occurred to him to divorce his wife and marry one of his walking companions. Nor did he shuffle them around, as an almost annual political gymkhana, in the way that Harold Wilson did. Once a minister in the main Baldwin Government, you were there, and in the same office, for the duration. Only death or impending death (Curzon and Cave), acute shortage of money and the need to seek the sustenance of the City (Birkenhead), a policy resignation (Cecil of Chelwood), or appointment as Viceroy of India (Edward Wood, later Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax) produced changes. For the rest, the only variety was provided by the decision of the President of the Board of Trade, somewhat eccentrically as it now appears, to change his name from Lloyd-Greame to Cunliffe-Lister.2
This did not mean that there were no undulations in Baldwin’s relations with his Cabinet. With the exception of Bridgeman, the First Lord of the Admiralty, it is doubtful whether he was on close personal terms with any of them. Neville Chamberlain, the Minister of Health, would probably, and with justice, have been his choice as the most efficient minister. There was a close working partnership between them, in governments and in opposition, for fifteen years, but it was untinted by much mutual affection or even comprehension. Chamberlain was constantly irritated by Baldwin’s whimsical and indolent manner.3 He forgave it only because of his party loyalty and his equally constant recognition, honest, reluctant, surprised, of the value to the Conservative Party of Baldwin’s unique position in the country.
The Cabinet member of whom Baldwin’s opinion rose most rapidly was Birkenhead. He trusted him on India, but also used him on the most sensitive domestic issues. When Birkenhead left office in 1928, Baldwin accepted his resignation with a reluctance which was convincing because honestly expressed: ‘We shall part, on my side at least, with a feeling of personal regret which I could not have believed possible four years ago.’1 Birkenhead, who had written after the victory of 1924 of ‘the tragedy that so great an Army should have so uninspiring a Commander in Chief’ and was usually more sparing with his admiration than with his criticism, allowed some balancing increase of his own regard for Baldwin to occur. But it stopped well short of friendship. He would hardly have been a natural companion for the Prime Minister, Mrs Baldwin and Tom Jones during a quiet evening of patience in the Long Gallery at Chequers.
The same was substantially true of Churchill. But he and the Prime Minister saw each other frequently, although rarely on social occasions. The Chancellor’s headquarters were then Queen Anne’s Throne Room in what is now the Cabinet Office, and the nearest route to it from 11 Downing Street lay through the connecting doors of number 10. It became the Chancellor’s habit to interrupt his morning procession to work for a few minutes of Cabinet Room conversation with the Prime Minister. It was a habit which helped to avoid any major personal quarrels between them until after the demise of the Government. This was despite the fact that Churchill, amazingly for a new and over-rewarded recruit to the Conservative Party who twelve years before had nearly broken up the Asquith Cabinet with his demand for a larger navy, began his Chancellorship by presenting an importunate demand to the Admiralty ministers (who were Baldwin’s closest friends in the Government -Davidson was the junior minister) for a slashing of the cruiser replacement programme. A major Cabinet dispute rumbled on for nearly a year. Resignations, both of ministers and of admirals but not of the Chancellor, were threatened. Eventually there was a settlement which leant in the Admiralty direction. Churchill had shown himself as kaleidoscopic as he was departmentally combative. He brought with him into the Treasury few old prejudices beyond the self-confidence of his conviction that whatever he believed in at a particular time was right.
The two most senior members of the Government were Balfour (who joined as Lord President after Curzon’s death) and Austen Chamberlain. Both had been leaders of the Conservative Party. With neither did Baldwin establish very easy relations. Balfour’s charm was too subtle and serpentine for him. And with Austen Chamberlain there was always the old difficulty of a stiff man who had once been so much his senior. Baldwin gave him his head as Foreign Secretary and supported him well. It required the full backing of the Prime Minister to get the Locarno Treaty through the Cabinet. But no intimacy was ever established. This was more for personal reasons than because of Baldwin’s alleged lack of interest in foreign affairs. He ran them, admittedly, on a loose rein. He devoted very little of his time to seeing foreigners. He hardly talked to any, except for the waiters in the hotel at Aix-les-Bains. He was also full of the widespread English anti-American prejudice of the 1920s, and he found French diplomatic life a little too rich, both politically and gastronomically, for his stomach. He never made the seventy-mile journey from Aix to Geneva, which was then the centre of the international world. It was rather as though Attlee or Macmillan had spent post-war autumn holidays at Saratoga Springs while eschewing any contact with the United Nations in New York. But Baldwin would move to see Austen Chamberlain, provided it was not to Geneva. ‘Whatever you do, I will support you,’ he wrote in 1927, ‘and if you want to have a talk I will meet you at Annecy at lunch any day you care to name….’2
Yet, such were the curious contradictions of his character that Baldwin always remained closely in touch with the work of the Foreign Office. Austen Chamberlain, the second man in the Government, went rarely to Chequers and never to Astley. Sir William Tyrrell, one of the less distinguished of the chain of Foreign Office permanent under-secretaries, stayed at Chequers almost once a month, and occasionally at Astley. With a more interfering Prime Minister and a more suspicious Foreign Secretary it would not have been a happy arrangement.
By the end of his Government Baldwin was anxious to make a whole series of Cabinet changes. A number of ministers, including Austen Chamberlain, were manifestly tired or worse. Baldwin contemplated the happy idea of asking everyone who was older than himself to go. This would remove Balfour, Salisbury, Joynson-Hicks, Cushendun and Bridgeman, but also Austen Chamberlain, of whom he felt he could not dispose. Churchill had been long enough at the Treasury, and could perhaps go to the India Office. Neville Chamberlain must clearly be persuaded to accept promotion and another, longer, spell at the Treasury. Steel-Maitland could at last be moved from the Ministry of Labour, which had in many ways been the key departmental post of the administration, and in which he had throughout been ill-regarded but undisturbed. But perhaps the changes were better postponed until after the election. The country might prefer a tired to an unfamiliar te
am. So, at any rate, Baldwin decided. The election came first and the changes were never made.
Baldwin’s practice of dedicated delegation was not confined to foreign affairs. The great events of his administration were the return to the gold standard, the Treaty of Locarno, the General Strike, the Imperial Conference of 1926 which led on to the Statute of Westminster, and the measures originating in the Ministry of Health for the reform of local government and the extension of social security.
With only one of these five major developments was Baldwin centrally concerned. The return to gold was Churchill’s decision, even though, within the Treasury, he at first was hard to convince. Baldwin then made no demur against the Chancellor’s recommendation; there would have been a greater chance of his demurring had the decision gone the other way, not because of his views but because of his admiration and affection for Montagu Norman, the intellectually certain Governor of the Bank of England.
Locarno was primarily Austen Chamberlain’s work, and the Ministry of Health reforms perhaps even more decisively that of Neville Chamberlain. The elegant formula which enabled the dignity of the Crown to be combined with the reality of Dominion independence came from Balfour. Only in the case of the General Strike and the events which surrounded it did the participation of the Prime Minister match his degree of ultimate responsibility. His full involvement here was as inevitable as it was appropriate. Industrial relations, as the subject today would be described, was an area in which he instinctively felt himself at home. The combination of his gentle business experience, his belief in the politics of personal relationships and his patience in waiting for a desired outcome were unusual and valuable qualities. They were admirably suited to a problem of framework or atmosphere. But that was by no means the core of his problem. This was the harder, more practical issue of the future of the coal industry. It employed over a million men. Its product was of overwhelming importance to the fuel needs of the nation. It was also geared, particularly in certain districts, to a large export trade. For this trade the industry had failed to maintain its pre-war competitiveness. There had been big profits before and during the war, but little investment or improvement of method. The collieries were run by one of the most obscurantist bodies of employers in the country, known collectively and appropriately as ‘the owners’. They had built up the industry on cheap labour, and their only answer to the challenge of foreign competition was to attempt to cut back the limited improvements in wages and hours which had been secured during and immediately after the war.
