by Roy Jenkins
There were five major developments in the life of his second and central government (1924-9), and this was the only one with which he was crucially concerned. The return to the gold standard in 1925 was very much Churchill’s decision at the Treasury, even though he had at first been opposed to it. The Treaty of Locarno, and the European security system created by it, was overwhelmingly Austen Chamberlain’s work at the Foreign Office. The housing and poor law reforms were even more decisively the work of his half-brother Neville at the Ministry of Health. Finally, the Statute of Westminster, which enabled the reality of Dominion independence to be combined with the dignity of the Crown, came from Balfour.
Baldwin was therefore more detached from the main policies of his government than was Asquith, and he was, in my view, a less considerable man, although not a negligible one either. He would not have had the intellectual grasp to write Asquith’s constitutional memorandum. But he had the feel to deal successfully with the General Strike, although not the sustained energy to follow this up by dealing equally well with the miners’ strike, which was both its cause and its aftermath. He dealt still more skilfully with the Abdication crisis ten years later. Like Asquith, he preferred to engage with constitutional issues more than with any other, though his lack of overseas interest (except for India and that he never visited) meant that that Statute of Westminster slipped by him almost unnoticed. He continued Asquith’s practice, interrupted by Lloyd George, of performing as Prime Minister without a surrounding circus. He would walk about London or travel by mainline train on his own.
Attlee arrived in Number 10 Downing Street eight years after Baldwin had left for the last time. Unlike either Asquith or Baldwin, he inherited a vast government machine which the war had created, and which was used to dealing with a great part of the nation’s affairs and spending a high proportion of its income. He was also the heir to a post-Baldwin Prime Ministerial habit of trying to run a large part of British foreign policy from 10 Downing Street, and believing that Britain counted for a great deal in the world. (The latter belief was pre- as well as post-Baldwin.) Attlee’s first duty in his new office was to meet the Russians and the Americans at Potsdam. Neither Asquith nor Baldwin had ever attended an international conference as Prime Minister. Attlee, a very firmly established member of the English upper-middle-class, was not rich like Baldwin, or fashionable like Asquith, but he was similar to both of them in having a natural respect for conventional values and institutions. He liked almost all institutions with which he had been connected: cricket, Haileybury, where he had been at school, Oxford (and University College in particular), the Inner Temple, Toynbee Hall, and even the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. It did not make him pompous, for his taciturnity gave him a natural talent for balloon-pricking, and it did not prevent his being the head of an effective radical government just as it had not prevented Asquith or, for that matter, Gladstone before him being in the same category.
Compared with Asquith and Baldwin, Attlee was the worst speaker, the least engaging personality, and by far the best Cabinet chairman. He developed this last quality even before he had the authority of Prime Ministership behind him. Many recorded tributes testify to the way in which he presided over the War Cabinet during Churchill’s frequent absences: rhetoric disappeared, and decisions were taken with speed and precision. Yet Attlee was not the dominating figure of his government, either publicly or privately. Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison, Bevan, and latterly Gaitskell, constituted a formidable array of ministers. I do not think that they can quite be classed with Asquith’s, partly because of the subsequent fame of Lloyd George and Churchill, but also because there was nobody in the Attlee Government to match the non-political distinction of Morley, Birrell and Haldane. That Liberal Government apart, however, they are unmatched this century and for most of the last, too. Attlee balanced them, steered them, kept them and himself afloat, but he did not exactly lead them. He was a cox and not a stroke. For his first three or four years he distributed their weight brilliantly, although latterly he failed to place Aneurin Bevan properly, which led to considerable trouble.
One of his strongest attributes was said to have been his capacity for laconic ministerial butchery. This may be slightly exaggerated. He despatched parliamentary under-secretaries with ease, but this was rather like shooting chickens. Of big game he was more cautious. He was probably relieved when an exhausted Dalton shot himself but he pulled no trigger on him. Arthur Greenwood he did dispose of but only when that figure had become unwilling to conduct even his morning’s business from anywhere except the ‘snuggery’ (I think it was called) of the Charing Cross Hotel. Then towards the end he dismissed Ernest Bevin from the Foreign Office. That was an extraordinary feat. Bevin was the most important Foreign Secretary of this century, by which I mean that he was the one who left the biggest imprint on British foreign policy for a generation ahead. He was a massive but by no means a wholly amiable personality. He had been the sheet-anchor of Attlee’s support throughout the life of the government. He had given his support to ‘little Clem’ against Morrison, Cripps, and Dalton. Yet when his health made him no longer capable of doing the job, out he went, miserable and complaining, and died six weeks later. This was an act of cold courage more difficult even than President Truman’s sacking of General MacArthur.
With what aspects of government policy did Attlee most concern himself? Like both Asquith and Baldwin, even though both of them had been Chancellors of the Exchequer, I do not think that he understood or was much interested in economics. But the ‘dismal science’ had become far more central to government by his day. He gave his Chancellors, and especially Cripps, a very dominant position. His Foreign Secretary had such a position by virtue of his own personality. Between Potsdam and Attlee’s visit to Washington in December 1950, when Truman had falsely suggested that he might be about to drop an atomic bomb on the Chinese in North Korea and when Bevin was too fragile to cross the Atlantic in less than five days, Attlee intervened in foreign policy no more than Asquith had done.
However, the beginning of the end of the Empire meant that there was a great range of external affairs with which a Prime Minister could concern himself without impinging on the prerogatives of even the most truculent Foreign Secretary. On relations with America, Russia and the continent of Europe, Attlee supported Bevin. On India, with a rather weak Secretary of State, he made his own policy. And determining the future of 450 million people, now 800 million, was by any standards in the major league. Perhaps the two biggest impacts on history made by Britain during the past two hundred years have been first to govern and then to leave both America and India. So Attlee ranks as a major agent of Britain’s world impact.
Internally, constitutional affairs engrossed Attlee less than they did either Asquith or Baldwin. On the other hand, he took more part in the social legislation of his government than did Asquith in the previous wave of advance in this field. The Attlee Government was also memorable for six or seven major measures of nationalization. Attlee did not much involve himself in the detail, but supported them all with commitment, even enthusiasm.
He presided over a highly interventionist government but he did not find it necessary to overwork. He once told me that being Prime Minister left him more spare time than any other job that he had done. It was partly, he said, because of living on the spot and avoiding the immensely long tube or Metropolitan Railway journeys, to which his modest suburban lifestyle condemned him, both before and after Downing Street. But his modesty should not be exaggerated. No other Prime Minister in British history was ever so richly honoured, as he noted in the little piece of doggerel which he wrote about himself:
Few thought he was even a starter
There were many who thought themselves smarter
But he ended PM, CH and OM,
An Earl and a Knight of the Garter
His reputation went steadily up and he and Macmillan were almost the only Prime Ministers who enjoyed themselves i
n retirement more than in active life. Not Lloyd George or Churchill, Rosebery, Asquith, Wilson, Eden or Heath. And I doubt whether Mrs Thatcher will be very content.
The government that Mrs Thatcher ran bore less relation to the three previous administrations I have considered than they each did to the other two. The comparison is by no means wholly to her credit. In terms of the quality of the other ministers, I think it must be regarded as the least illustrious government of the four. It is always necessary to be on one’s guard against underestimating contemporaries compared to their predecessors. It is easier to admire those on whom the gates of history have slammed shut, and there is a fairly constant tendency to see things as always going downhill: to say that the younger Pitt was not as good as his father, that Canning was not as good as Pitt, that Peel was not as good as Canning, or Gladstone as Peel, or Asquith as Gladstone. Such constant regression is biologically improbable. But even with that warning I do not think that Messrs Howe, Lawson, Parkinson, Tebbit, Baker and Hurd can be put in the same league as the Asquith, Baldwin or Attlee lists as outstanding political personalities, nor can they match the Asquith list as men of distinction outside politics.
To some substantial extent this goes with the dominant position within the government of the recent Prime Minister. She certainly did not leave ministers as secure in their offices as did Gladstone or Baldwin. She was not as addicted to the annual gymkhana of a reshuffle, almost for its own sake, as was Wilson. But she none the less wrought great changes of personnel in her eleven and a half years. It is remarkable that there was no member of the Cabinet, other than herself, who survived throughout her term. In addition, her changes had far more of a general purpose than did those of Asquith or Attlee. They were not primarily made on grounds of competence. They were steadily directed to shifting the balance of ideology, or perhaps even more of amenability, within the Cabinet.
As a result of these various factors, she must be counted the most dominating Prime Minister within her government of any of the four. Her control over the House of Commons I would regard as much more dependent upon the serried majorities she had behind her than upon any special parliamentary skill. Her combative belief in her own rightness ensured that she was rarely discomfited and never overwhelmed. But she brought no special qualities of persuasiveness or debating skill that enabled her to move minds where others would have failed. Even an unsuccessful Prime Minister like Eden had, in my view, more capacity to do this than she had. And the serried majorities were a direct function of having a split opposition with a voting system designed for only two parties. She never exercised any special command over a medium of communication as Baldwin did in the early days of broadcasting, and for much of her fifteen and a half years as Conservative leader, before and after 1979, she was personally below rather than above her party’s poll rating.
Her stamp upon every aspect of her government’s policy, on the other hand, was incomparably greater than that of any of my other three Prime Ministers. There was no question of her reserving herself for major constitutional issues. Indeed, I doubt that she had much sense of what was a constitutional issue and what was not. There was no departmental minister who was able to sustain an area of prerogative. It was impossible to imagine her being asked for advice, and saying to Geoffrey Howe, as Baldwin said to Austen Chamberlain, ‘but you are Foreign Secretary’. She was equally interfering in the military, economic, industrial, social security, Commonwealth and law and order aspects of the government’s policy. She sought no respite from politics, in the sense that did Asquith, Baldwin and Attlee. Her impact was bound to be greater by virtue of her determination and longevity in office. She reduced the influence of the Cabinet: if she had improved Britain’s influence, that might have been taken as having been a fair exchange, but any improvement in this respect was distinctly temporary.
Over the nearly a century I have been considering, the scope of government obviously increased enormously. Public expenditure rose from approximately £170 million, perhaps £5 billion in present-day values, to about nine hundred times that in money terms and thirty times it in real terms. Great new departments, like Health, Social Security and the Environment, sprang up with an entirely different pattern of ministerial duties from anything remotely prevailing before 1914. The essential role of the Prime Minister did not change as much as this might lead one to believe. The function of a conductor is not greatly altered by introducing new instruments into the orchestra. The style is much more a product of a man or a woman than it is of the epoch. President Reagan at least showed that modern government need not be too strenuous. Mr Major would no doubt like to achieve a reversion to the calmer habits, if not of Asquith at least of Attlee, but that requires an authority which has so far eluded him.
What has changed permanently, however, is the necessary involvement of the head of the government of this or any other comparable country in external affairs. The interdependent world, not to mention the European Community, has changed that for ever. The calm insularity of Asquith and Baldwin, even to some extent that of Attlee, must equally have permanently disappeared.
An Oxford View of Cambridge
(With Some Reflections on Oxford and Other Universities)
This is a lightly edited version of the 1988 Rede Lecture delivered in the Senate House at Cambridge on 10 May of that year.
The Last time a Chancellor of Oxford delivered a Rede Lecture was when Curzon gave it in 1913. In many ways he was a rasher man than I am, as he showed in India and then at Oxford, where in his first year as Chancellor he moved in, asserted his undoubted right to preside over the Hebdomadal Council, and generally set about ruling the university and not merely reigning over it. As in Calcutta and Delhi, his Oxford assertiveness ended in a mixture of achievement and chagrin.
In Cambridge, however, he behaved more circumspectly than I have boldly undertaken to do. His lecture was on Modern Parliamentary Eloquence. I would now find that a difficult subject. However, it would have been a much safer subject here to have lectured upon than my Oxonian view of Cambridge. When I first suggested it to the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge I think he was apprehensive. My understanding of his fears increased when, a little later, I told a distinguished Oxford historian of somewhat polemical temperament who recently retired from a seven-year spell as a Cambridge Head of House, that I was committed to this subject in this place. ‘If by chance,’ Lord Dacre said con amore, ‘you feel at all unwell as the occasion approaches, do not hesitate to send for me as a substitute. There is no subject on which I would rather talk before an audience in the Cambridge Senate House, if necessary unprepared. I could do it spontaneously.’ But I feel reasonably well, and intend to devote myself not to polemics or even to Oxford flippancy (of which more later) but to looking at the interaction of our two universities upon each other and to a glance at their relationship to others at home and abroad.
Exploring the history of Oxford and Cambridge for the purposes of this lecture I have been struck by the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the two universities. Over eight centuries they have greatly influenced and cross-fertilized each other. They have been more pacers than rivals. At times one has gone ahead (indeed it could, I suppose, be argued that in the Middle Ages Oxford was fairly consistently so) but the other has then caught up or overtaken, frequently building on a development initiated in the first one. The result has been an historical relationship a great deal more fluctuating and interesting than the average course of the sporting event for which we are best known in the world. During these fluctuations certain differences of style and even ethos have developed. About them one can generalize with mild amusement and a modicum of accuracy. But the similarities have remained much greater than the differences. Increased influence and prestige for one has usually meant the same, perhaps after a time-lag, for the other and neither has ever significantly gained from the other’s misfortune.
We are clearly both federal universities, with great power and individuality residing
in the colleges. I do not think such a degree of decentralization exists in any other geographically concentrated university in the world. California, yes, even London, but they are not concentrated geographically, and certainly not Harvard or Yale, which are. Harvard houses are merely dormitories with resonant names. Yale has colleges, but they are concerned only with living and not with teaching. Oxford and Cambridge are both highly collegiate universities, some would say Oxford marginally more so than Cambridge, in spite of the longer-term and more full-time nature of the Oxford Vice-Chancellorship (until 1991 when Cambridge accomplished a leap-frog in this respect), because the colleges in Oxford appoint many of those who are subsequently paid by the university. This being so, however, it is surprising that the history of both of them contradicts the normal pattern of federations, where, as in America, Switzerland, Australia, the component states came first and the federal authority was very much an afterthought. In Cambridge as in Oxford, on the other hand, the university was there nearly a century before the first colleges and it was not indeed until a good three hundred years after the beginning of the universities that the colleges came into their full insolent authority.
This was for the very good reason that the most lordly of them did not exist. Cambridge towards the end of the fifteenth century was a university almost as old as Harvard is today, was rapidly catching up on Oxford both in numbers and fame, but was still without Trinity (except in vestigial form) or St John’s, as well of course as the late sixteenth-century trio of Caius, Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex, and with King’s looking no more than a muddy building site alongside a gaunt and roofless shell which was to become the chapel. Yet it was undoubtedly a much better period for Cambridge than for Oxford, where the mid-fifteenth-century foundation of Magdalen and All Souls did nothing to arrest a half-century of decline. Erasmus was at Queens’ (Cambridge) for some time around 1510, and much though he complained about his living conditions and the climate, although I cannot think that he had been used to much better in his Low Countries, his presence was both an indication of Cambridge’s rising prestige and a formative influence on teaching developments. Just as the college as a community for living was an Oxford idea, stemming essentially from Merton, which spread to Cambridge at the beginning of the fourteenth century, so the college as an institution for teaching was a Cambridge idea which spread to Oxford at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
