by Roy Jenkins
This would at best have been a major irritant for an embattled leader of the opposition. But it became worse than that. Neville Chamberlain was the most likely alternative leader. He, it was rightly thought, would provide the drive and the partisan bitterness which were lacking in Baldwin’s style. On the whole he was loyal to Baldwin, whom he liked to describe, with a degree of exaggeration, as his friend as well as his leader. But he was ambitious, in addition to being sixty, and he did not wish to hang about indefinitely under an ineffective leader. Furthermore, despite a vast difference in temperament, he was surprisingly close to Beaverbrook in this period, both in view and in personal dealings. Most of the anti-Baldwin rebels looked to him as their natural leader, and he was unanxious to alienate their support, which, wherever he showed signs of excessive caution or loyalty, began to move towards substitutes. Rothermere was in favour of Beaverbrook himself, and Hailsham and Robert Horne (a surprising revival as he had been out of office since the Coalition) also emerged as occasional possibilities; pace 1923, no one seemed inclined to disqualify peers. The tariff issue was therefore full of danger for Baldwin, not so much because of its content as because it could be exploited by those who wished to build up discontent against the spirit of ‘Safety first’.
This discontent was fortified by Baldwin’s third trouble–his attitude to India. Irwin, one of his closest political friends and the Viceroy whom he had himself appointed, declared in October 1929 in favour of Dominion status as the ultimate goal. Baldwin was determined to support him. This was partly because of personal regard and partly because he saw that the moment for choice in India had come. Irwin, or any Viceroy, had by the end of the twenties only two possibilities before him: either to follow, for as long as British willpower and resources lasted, an unending road of remorseless repression, or to parley, more or less as an equal, with Gandhi and his adjutants with a view to guiding the country, maybe fairly slowly but nonetheless unrelentingly, towards self-government. Baldwin and Irwin both believed in accommodation and not in confrontation. They were Conservatives in the sense that the Halifax of 1633-95 (no relation of Irwin’s), who proudly bore the titles both of marquess and of ‘trimmer’, was a Conservative.
The policy they embraced was however anathema to many Conservatives, who rightly saw in it the beginning of the end of British rule in India. There was some considerable overlapping with those who were harrying Baldwin by their support of the Empire Crusade, but it was by no means complete. The most notable maverick was Churchill, who retained most of his old free trade views, but was implacably opposed to progress in India. In January 1931 he left the Shadow Cabinet on the issue and did not return to communion with the official Conservative leadership until after the outbreak of war in 1939.
These two areas of dispute sustained and fortified each other throughout the eighteen months of Baldwin’s unease. If one was quiet, the other was active. He always had a battle pending on one front and quite often on two at the same time. He was mostly on the defensive and, towards the end, he came as near as possible to resignation, but throughout he gave remarkably little ground on either issue. His first choice was to remain leader on his own terms, his second to go, and his third, last, and unacceptable one was to cling to the position on the terms of others. By virtue of this settled view he managed to live tolerably through the period, to risk his fate in a number of bold throws, and to emerge at the end with his dignity unimpaired and his power enhanced. He liked to believe that he never sought conflict. To Beaverbrook, however, he appeared in a different light. ‘He always won,’ Beaverbrook said, ‘he always beat me–the toughest and most unscrupulous politician you could find–cold, merciless in his dislikes.’4
During the successive rounds of these twin controversies Baldwin used with remarkable freedom the House of Commons as well as public platforms to carry on the debate within his own party. The first exchange came at the beginning of November 1929. At a Shadow Cabinet meeting he found that the Viceroy’s declaration was strongly opposed by his three most senior colleagues, Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead and Churchill. The next morning the Daily Mail launched a vicious attack upon him, injudiciously using false facts as well as offering opinions. That afternoon in the Chamber the article was referred to in a question exchange. Baldwin rose briefly and magisterially: ‘It is sufficient for me at the moment to say that every statement of fact and every implication of fact in that article is untrue, and in my opinion gravely injurious to the public interest, not only in the country but throughout the Empire.’
A few days later there was a major debate on the Irwin declaration. Baldwin, with a glowering Churchill beside him and uncertain followers behind him, took the opportunity to pay a notable tribute to the Viceroy and to end it on a curious note, half petulant, half menacing: ‘I will only add that if ever the day comes when the party which I lead ceases to attract to itself men of the calibre of Edward Wood, then I have finished with my party.’4 He then launched into one of his ruminative orations, reflecting on the evolution of our relations with India, hardly engaging with the Government at all, but indirectly committing himself to full support for the movement towards self-government. The informed diehards were affronted, but the majority of the Conservative Members felt that the level of the occasion had been raised, and cheered appreciatively. For the moment he was on top on India.
There then followed a winter of rather confused but relatively quiet negotiation, manoeuvre, and attempt at compromise on the tariff issue. Relations even with Beaverbrook were still nominally bland and Baldwin was endeavouring to hold everybody together by steering a middle course between Amery and Churchill, who within the Shadow Cabinet respectively represented the two extremes. In a March speech at the Hotel Cecil he laid down a plan of submitting food taxes - the most controversial item—to a referendum. It offended nobody but like most policies which achieve that result, it did not greatly please anyone either. Baldwin’s spring campaign went rather flat. Several Conservative candidates in by-elections–egged on by Beaverbrook – went well beyond the official policy and as a result got little official support. In the meantime discontent with the Central Office–which was mostly an excuse for discontent with the leadership–continued to mount. In April Neville Chamberlain had told Davidson he must give up his post as party Chairman. Weak for once, Baldwin accepted this, and let his henchman resign on 29 May. After casting around a little, he appointed Chamberlain himself in Davidson’s place.
Baldwin then counterattacked by calling a party meeting - MPs and candidates but no peers—at the Caxton Hall for 24 June. There he delivered the first of his attacks upon the press lords: ‘There is nothing more curious in modern evolution than the effect of an enormous fortune rapidly made and the control of newspapers of your own. The three most striking cases are Mr Hearst in America, Lord Rothermere in England and Lord Beaverbrook….’ He turned on Rothermere in particular, citing his tergiversations and saying contemptuously, ‘You cannot take your politics from a man like that.’ Then he quoted a letter which Rothermere had been foolish enough to write:
‘I cannot make it too abundantly clear that, under no circumstances whatsoever, will I support Mr Baldwin unless I know exactly what his policy is going to be, unless I have complete guarantees that such policy will be carried out if his party achieves office, and unless I am acquainted with the names of at least eight or ten of his most prominent colleagues in the next Ministry.’
Now there are terms [Baldwin continued] that your leader would have to accept, and when sent for by the King would have to say: ‘Sire, these names are not necessarily my choice, but they have the support of Lord Rothermere.’ A more preposterous and insolent demand was never made on the leader of any political party. I repudiate it with contempt and I will fight that attempt at domination to the end.
Baldwin did not confine himself to Rothermere:
‘We are told that unless we make peace with these noblemen, candidates are to be run all over the country. The Lloyd Geor
ge candidates at the last election smelt; these will stink. The challenge has been issued. … I accept, as I accepted the challenge of the T.U.C. … I am all for peace. I like the other man to begin the fight and then I am ready. When I fight I go on to the end, as I did in 1926.’
The vote at the meeting was not very satisfactory–about 150 to 80 against an anti-leadership amendment—but Baldwin’s riposte to provocation met with a wide response. He was tumultuously cheered in the House of Commons that afternoon, although a good part of the enthusiasm came from the Labour benches.
This at least got him through to another summer holiday, but while he was away there was a further worsening. The Empire Crusade ran its first independent candidate at the Bromley by-election. This candidate did respectably rather than brilliantly. He was third, but only 3000 behind the winner and almost put in the Liberal in what should have been one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. Nor did this rebellion have the effect of rallying the Conservative faithful. On the contrary, it led to a significant wave of resignations by constituency officers and cancelled subscriptions, particularly in the South of England. And it was to be followed in October by a second and still more menacing contest in another safe seat, South Paddington.
As a result of all this, Baldwin found himself back in the Caxton Hall by 30 October. He deliberately chose the day to coincide with the Paddington election. If he was to have two bad results he might as well let them merge. If, on the other hand, the party meeting were to go well for him, it would be a helpful antidote to a bad by-election. And if both went well, he might acquire a momentum of success. In fact, as he probably expected, the Caxton Hall meeting went excellently and Paddington went very badly. Beaverbrook’s candidate beat the official Conservative in a straight fight.
This Caxton Hall meeting was more serious than the previous one. It was a full meeting of MPs and peers, and assembled to determine the future of the leadership. Baldwin encouraged it to do so—by inviting an unacceptable resolution, by promoting a secret ballot, and letting it be known that he would resign if defeated. He arrived in a top hat and morning coat, already a somewhat archaic form of working dress, and said to the waiting cameraman: ‘Photograph me now, gentlemen, it may be the last time you will see me.’
He made only a brief speech to the meeting, described by Bridgeman to Davidson (who was in the Argentine) as ‘a good opening—plain and dignified—and with fewer mannerisms than have recently been apparent, and no apparent nervousness’. Baldwin then immediately left the meeting with what he self-mockingly described as ’hauteur’. The debate dragged on in his absence and he had to wait nearly three hours for the result. It gave him a majority of 462 to 116.
That, even with the loss of Paddington, ought to have been that on the tariff issue for some time. But within a fortnight the Indian Round Table Conference had opened in London, and the second fissiparous issue had filled any gap left by the temporary subsidence of the first. Churchill began his campaign on 12 December before the Royal Empire Society with an onslaught on Dominion Status as ‘a hideous act of self-mutilation astounding to every nation in the world’; continued it for a more general audience by personally hiring the Free Trade Hall in Manchester; and moved inexorably towards his Shadow Cabinet resignation at the end of January. This was precipitated by a House of Commons debate, marked by calculating and outrageous invective by Churchill, and by a less than usually effective speech from Baldwin.1 Even Hoare (later to be Baldwin’s most loyal lieutenant on India) complained of its clumsiness, and Neville Chamberlain was even more critical.
In February an Empire Crusade candidate beat the official Conservative into third place at East Islington, and left Labour holding what ought to have been a very vulnerable seat for the Government. Then Robert Topping, the Conservative Chief Agent, drew up and presented to Chamberlain a memorandum saying that ‘from practically all quarters’ he heard the view that the leader ought to go. This document, which was rich in wounding phrases, was by no means unwelcome to Chamberlain, particularly as it ended with a fairly clear hint that he ought to be the new leader. He then behaved somewhat unctuously, showing it to half the Shadow Cabinet in order to get their advice as to whether or not he ought to worry Baldwin with it. Eventually he sent it to Baldwin immediately after the latter had received a further damaging and depressing blow. The St George’s Division of Westminster had fallen vacant in early February. It was an overwhelmingly Conservative seat, made up in large part of Mayfair and Belgravia. But it was also very favourable ground for Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who already had an organization in the field. When they adopted a candidate—one Sir Ernest Petter—the official Conservative candidate, Colonel Moore-Brabazon,• at once withdrew. The gallant colonel did not wish to defend his leader. This was not only humiliating but also very awkward for Baldwin. It was not going to be easy to get any other candidate, and it was at the same time impossible to let the seat go by default.
This was Baldwin’s position when he received the Topping memorandum. Cunliffe-Lister brought it, together with the news that the Chief Whip had sounded out his principal colleagues upon it and that they all thought he ought to resign. Baldwin, with his wife, then saw Davidson, and although ‘still a little stunned’ they both talked in terms of an immediate and complete withdrawal to Astley. That afternoon (it was all on a Sunday) he saw Chamberlain, and having directly asked him whether he agreed with the others and having received an affirmative answer, told him to call a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet for the following day at which he would say goodbye.
The same evening Davidson dined with Bridgeman. The latter, contrary to the expressed view of the Chief Whip, was aghast at the prospect of resignation. Together they went to see Baldwin after dinner and persuaded him, apparently without great difficulty, to go out, if he had to, with a bang and not a whimper. Why not resign Bewdley and fight St George’s himself? Baldwin rallied with enthusiasm. He summoned Chamberlain to see him again first thing the next morning and told him his new plan. It was then Chamberlain’s turn to be aghast. He remonstrated strongly against the plan to fight St George’s. ‘Think of the effect upon your successor,’ he tactlessly argued. Baldwin, for the moment, had had enough of Chamberlain. ‘I don’t give a damn about my successor, Neville,’ he said and ended the conversation.6
In fact he did not fight the bye-election. Duff Cooper, an improbable standard-bearer, for he had acclaimed the victory of the independent candidate in Paddington and his wife was a close friend of Beaverbook, offered himself as a knightly substitute; and Baldwin, who did not want to sever his connection with Bewdley, accepted gratefully. But he still regarded the result as crucial and in no way retreated from his new-found determination to fight. He got the pending Indian debate brought foward a week to 12 March and took little counsel about the form of his speech, although receiving plenty of advice from his colleagues to strike a conciliatory note.
He did nothing of the sort. He sharply reminded his party that ‘The Empire of today is not the Empire of the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria’; he had some effective fun at Churchill’s expense; he strongly defended the ‘Delhi Pact’ between Irwin and Gandhi; and he ended on a note of clear challenge:
If there are those in our party who approach this subject in a niggling, grudging spirit, who would have to have forced out of their reluctant hands one concession after another, if they be a majority, in God’s name let them choose a man to lead them. If they are in a minority, then let them at least refrain from throwing difficulties in the way of those who have undertaken an almost superhuman task, on the successful fulfilment of which depends the well being, the prosperity and the duration of the whole British Empire.7
The speech was a triumph. The 1929 Parliament was hardly the most glorious in our history, but it was still one in which it was possible to face a major issue on its merits, and to debate with one’s own party without producing mindless noise or mockery from the other side, and by so doing to create an impact upon the gen
eral body of the House which improved -and in this instance strikingly improved—the position of the speaker with his own party. But Baldwin still had St George’s to face—polling day was a week later, and Baldwin spoke twice in the interval, once at the Queen’s Hall, and again the following night at the Constitutional Club. The first speech was much the more important: it was indeed one of the most memorable of inter-war political orations. It contained some routine passages but the central message was a sustained attack upon the two press lords:
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. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context….
