Baldwin Read online

  BALDWIN

  ROY JENKINS

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 A Quiet Beginning

  2 The Leap to Fame

  3 An Unsettled Leadership

  4 The Perplexity of Power

  5 The Defeat of ‘Safety First’

  6 The National Government

  7 Abdication and Retirement

  Biographical Appendix

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Preface

  I wrote the first version of this biographical essay in the early seventies. It was conceived as a wing of a mansion which was to include portraits of American Presidents and of other British Prime Ministers. For reasons which I explained in the Preface to Truman, that rather grandiose plan I subsequently abandoned.

  I have however considerably altered and somewhat lengthened Baldwin. Nonetheless it obviously remains an appraisal of his character and life rather than a detailed account of all their aspects. I have however kept to a chronological narrative, except for the substantial introduction, which attempts to set his career against the major issues of his age, whether or not he engaged with them. He was the dominant politician for fifteen of the twenty-one inter-war years. By any standards he must count, with Asquith, Attlee and Macmillan, as one of a quartet of major peacetime Prime Ministers (whose term of office is complete) of this century.

  I have also added an appendix of potted biographies of many of the figures of the twenties and thirties who were associated with Baldwin. I thought of putting them as footnotes on the page, but decided that this would become oppressive. I suggest however that they are better read where the names are first flagged by a solid circle, rather than together at the end. I have not included Prime Ministers in the list of those of whom biographies are provided. I thought it otiose to explain who Churchill and Lloyd George were. As I needed a defensible frontier, this meant also excluding, perhaps less obviously, Balfour, Bonar Law, Neville Chamberlain and Eden.

  I am grateful to Patricia Smallbone and Monica Harkin for typing the manuscript, to Diana Fortescue for checking it, and to my Collins editors, first Roger Schlesinger and then Helen Fraser and Alison Wade, for turning it into a book. I am also grateful to those who critically read the typescript, most of all perhaps to Lord Bonham-Carter. I received help with reminiscence from Lady Lorna Howard (Baldwin’s second daughter), and with photographs from the 4th Earl Baldwin (Baldwin’s grandson). Neither saw nor asked to see the typescript, and therefore gave their help ‘blind’, which is particularly kind. Of those I talked to about Baldwin, I think that the late Lord Boothby, in the last year of his life, gave me the most vivid impression, illuminating particularly the period of Baldwin’s second and most important administration.

  Introduction

  It is forty years since Baldwin’s death and fifty years since he last exercised power. During these decades his reputation has mostly been low, at best quiescent. It is difficult to imagine any of his successors in the leadership of the Conservative Party in the ‘fifties, ‘sixties, or ‘seventies seeking to stir the faithful or to persuade the nation by evoking the great tradition of Baldwin to which they were heir.

  Yet he has been by no means neglected by biographers, if not particularly well served either. At the time of his death in 1947 there had been three short studies, all of them by writers of some quality: A. G. Whyte’s Stanley Baldwin. A Biographical Character Study (1928), Wickham Steed’s The Real Stanley Baldwin (1930), and Arthur Bryant’s commemorative Stanley Baldwin, written for his retirement in 1937.

  The first posthumous and only authorized biography was G. M. Young’s book of 1952, with the same simple title as Bryant’s. It has been fairly described by Lord Blake as ‘sketchy and inadequate’. It was also sufficiently unfriendly (see page 166 infra) to provoke published ripostes. The first was by D. C. Somervell, another Oxford historian and the elder brother of Baldwin’s last Attorney-General (although this was little more than coincidental). It was of pamphlet length but lacked a true pamphleteer’s style: there was too much gentlemanly rebuke and not enough polemical conviction. The second was a much more substantial pièce justificative: in 1955 A. W. Baldwin (Baldwin’s second son, later the 3rd Earl) produced My Father: the True Story. This was a spirited and skilful filial defence, agreeably written and containing much (then) new information of interest. Obviously, however, it was in neither intention nor result objective biography.

  Then, in 1960, John Raymond, a pyrotechnic literary critic, collected a series of essays of uneven quality and disparate content, under the title The Baldwin Age. Some of them had practically nothing to do with Baldwin, but Robert Blake justified his strictures of Young by showing what could be done with 12,000 words of straight biographical narrative. His essay remains not only the most succinct but also one of the most perceptive accounts of Baldwin’s career.

  Until the late 1960s however it remained the case that all the studies of Baldwin–A. W. Baldwin was on the margin of being the only exception—were notable more for their economy of scale than for the amplitude of the information they provided about their subject—perhaps as a sympathetic reaction to his own well-known economy of effort. (I am aware that in view of what I like to think of as the tautness of this book this comment may be regarded as an example of throwing stones out of glass houses.)

  In 1969, any such paucity was superabundantly corrected. It was like a November opening of the heavens after a long summer of drought. Keith Middlemas and John Barnes assembled almost every possible fact about Baldwin and put them together in a volume (Baldwin) of 1100 pages and half a million words. The difficulty here is that, with so many facts present, trying to find one is like indulging in a lucky dip from a gigantic bran-tub. Like Churchill’s pudding, this book lacks theme.

  In 1973 it was followed by H. Montgomery Hyde’s Baldwin: the Unexpected Prime Minister. Mr Montgomery Hyde was an Ulster Unionist MP in days when the representation of the province required less single-issue dedication than is the case today and is a professional biographer who has written on subjects from Oscar Wilde to Stalin. His book (250,000 words) was shorter than Middlemas and Barnes, but is nonetheless substantial. It is the best full-length study of Baldwin. It was followed in 1976 by another biographical essay, this time by Kenneth Young, formerly editor of the Yorkshire Post, who contributed Baldwin to a publishers’ series, edited by A. J. P. Taylor, which embraced seven or eight Prime Ministers.

  Since then there has been biographical silence. This is in a way surprising, for during these ten years Baldwin has begun to swim back into fashion. In part this is a function of growing nostalgia for his period of power, even though Baldwin himself was not a very obvious art deco product. Rather more, however, it is because Mrs Thatcher’s brand of Conservative leadership has made him an object of contrasting interest in a way that Mr Macmillan’s or Mr Heath’s never did. When a new exponent of a different political style temporarily achieves notice–Mr Pym or Mr Hurd or Mr Biffen–it is now almost inevitably suggested that he might be a new Baldwin. That was emphatically not the case when Iain Macleod or Quintin Hogg illuminated the political sky. Nor even was R. A. Butler, who is now almost being amalgamated into a Baldwin/Butler tradition, much compared in his heyday with ‘honest Stanley’. That was as well, for although Baldwin gave Butler the start of his thirty-three years of ministerial office and Butler cherished Baldwin’s memory, it is difficult to think of two political careers of more contrasting shape, or two minds which worked more differently.

  Baldwin’s re-emergence into the arena of political comparison, whether or not the comparisons be accurate, does however make this a reasonable time for another look, written from a non-Conservative although not personally unsympathetic standpo
int, at his neatly shaped yet most unusual career and his attractive but not profound character.

  Baldwin had three major long-term issues with which to contend during his fifteen years as the dominant figure (for such he undoubtedly was) of British politics. These do not comprise either the sterling crisis and the formation of the National Government in 1931 or the Abdication in 1936. Both of these were important to Baldwin’s life. The first determined how he spent his last seven years of activity, the second created the prestige with which he retired, although it could not make it last for long. But they were neither of them central, ‘swell of the ocean’ issues for the nation. The three in this category were: first, the thrust to power of the organized working class, expressing itself, alternately rather than complementarily, in industrial challenge and the rise to government of the Labour Party; second, the impact, felt for the first time, of Britain’s relative industrial decline, which had begun as long previously as the 1890s, but which had been suppressed until our over-expanded and obsolescent basic industries ran into the export slump of the 1920s; and third, Mussolini’s threat to a rather flimsy world order, which quickly became subsumed in Hitler’s more massive threat to the independent existence of British (and French) democracy.

  Brooding upon these issues certainly did not dominate Baldwin’s life, although he left himself more time for thought than has any other Prime Minister since Balfour, and the general habit of his mind was ruminative rather than executive. But if they did not dominate the life of Baldwin they dominated the age of Baldwin, and his reputation in history must inevitably depend upon the view taken of his handling of them. In the early autumn of 1936 he was able to tell his Foreign Secretary, almost with the relieved exhilaration of a man who is freed of humdrum tasks by an exciting emergency, that he must not expect him to have time to spare for the Spanish Civil War and other dismal problems until ‘the King’s matter’ was settled (page 148 infra). It was difficult to sell such an order of priorities to Anthony Eden at the time and it would be impossible to sustain it today. Baldwin’s life must be described in terms of his own priorities, for they determined how he passed his time. But he must be judged in terms of the big issues of his epoch, independently of the extent to which he chose to engage with them.

  He is strongest on the first issue, the handling of the thrust to power of organized labour. In his first year as leader of the Conservative Party he had to roll with the punch of making way for the first Labour Government in British history–and one of the earliest in any bourgeois democracy. And in his third year he had to meet the unprecedented challenge of a full General Strike. The former was not in accordance with his immediate desires, for no Prime Minister could welcome giving up the office he had held for barely eight months in the wake of a severe setback at an ill-judged election. But it was in accordance with his longer term view of the desirable evolution of politics. He wanted a house-trained Labour Party to redress the balance of the party system which had been upset by the quarrels in the Liberal Party. No doubt he wanted the Labour Party to do it in a less self-confident and power-commanding way than either the Gladstonian or the Asquithian Liberal Party, but even more did he want them to do it in a way that blotted out the prospect of a centre party which could be a vehicle for the return to power of the evil genius of Lloyd George. Baldwin was as committed a two-party duopolist as Mrs Thatcher or Mr Kinnock.

  From this point of view the very weak MacDonald Government of 1924 (with only 191 seats in the House of Commons) and the fairly weak MacDonald Government of 1929 (289 seats) served his purposes well. The rigid but unradical ‘exclusivity’ of the Labour Party, which meant that they would rather take their economic policy from J. P. Morgan and Company than from the Liberal Yellow Book, neatly matched Baldwin’s 1920s view of how Britain should be governed.

  There were therefore no great difficulties for him personally about MacDonald being summoned to Buckingham Palace in January 1924. What he had publicly anticipated nearly a year before had merely come to pass rather earlier than he expected or wanted. Nonetheless it must have been a considerable shock to many of those he represented—the conventional elements in a deeply class-conscious nation. The British Court and Government, while free of some of the rigidities which had recently been swept away from Vienna and St Petersburg, were still organized as the regal fount of the greatest imperial power the world had seen. Whitehall, the armed forces and the Palace had of course been recently used to seeing Lloyd George, with his parvenu classlessness, in the supreme political position, but it was nonetheless a substantial further step to see a Prime Minister who was not even a Privy Councillor because he had never held any office, and who moreover had been a pacifist in the war, leading a Government largely made up of ‘working men’ (to use that now archaic but then appropriate phrase) into positions, if not of great collective power, at least of high individual prestige. Nor probably was it made easier by the fact that he also led them, in the intervals of their being told how to behave in Cabinet by Lord Haldane and at tea by Mrs Sidney Webb, to struggle into frock coats and even levée dress.

  That Government achieved little radical reform, let alone socialism, except for some sensible foreign and housing policy changes, and lasted a bare ten months. But the fact that it had come relatively smoothly into office, passed off calmly, although leaving a legacy of some bitterness about the methods of its electoral defeat at the end, and, few doubted, had set a precedent which would be repeated, owed a great deal to Baldwin. At the beginning he was in favour of the experiment not only because it fitted in with his view of the future of party politics, but also because it was the course which involved least casting around for new combinations in a Parliament without a majority, and therefore least threatened his position as leader of the defeated party. During its course he confronted it with little factious (or fractious) opposition. And when it was over he uttered the minimum of taunts about its shortcomings.

  Against the 1929 MacDonald Government Baldwin was if anything even more restrained. This was partly because he was then so occupied with the twin challenges to his own leadership, the one about India, the other about tariff reform, that he had practically no time to spare for the Government. This lack of partisanship was however endemic with Baldwin, and was just as much a third cause as a result of his leadership troubles. Baldwin out of office was a fish out of water, but he did not resent such turns of the political wheel nearly as much as do most politicians. He liked the longer holidays, and he lacked both the messianic conviction and the self-pity which might have made him feel cheated. Partly in consequence, weak MacDonald Labour Governments were subjected to much less bitter opposition than was the strong Attlee Government of 1945. This assisted the somewhat sickly infancy of Labour in government and meant that by 1930 quite a respectable attempt at a new two-party balance had been created.

  Then, in 1931 (see pages 122-30 infra), Baldwin allowed himself to be a reluctant but nonetheless crucial party to an unnecessary upsetting of this delicate balance, to the creation of which he had devoted a substantial part of his efforts over the previous nine years. This came about through a mixture of indolence and too great a readiness to be persuaded against his own instinctive judgement by a contrary build-up of the forces of conventional wisdom. The result was the gross imbalance of British politics in the thirties, an uncomfortable four years of half-occluded power for himself, and a substantial offset to his previous well-earned reputation for influencing the broad lines of political development with wisdom and foresight.

  The industrial thrust of labour he necessarily handled differently. He was a great exponent of emollience in industrial relations, both in his recollections of what life had been like when he worked in his family firm and as a principal weapon in his House of Commons armoury. But he had no desire, comparable with his approach to the 1920s Labour Party, to share power with Herbert Smith and A. J. Cook, the miners’ leaders of the General Strike period. Nor, of course, did the Labour Party, not merely of M
acDonald but of Henderson and Clynes too, have any desire that he should do so. The General Strike was as great an embarrassment to them as it was a challenge to Baldwin. They were almost as relieved as he was when he got it over in nine days.

  Did he handle it well? On the whole, the answer is ‘yes’, provided a sharp distinction is drawn between the General Strike itself and the coal dispute, which was both the cause and the relict of the Strike, dragging on for another six miserable months after the collapse of the general challenge. Baldwin postponed the Strike for a year by a combination of subsidy and the Samuel inquiry, used the interval to make some sensible defensive preparations, faltered somewhat during the final phase of the pre-Strike negotiations, but probably not in a way that made any difference to the main sweep of events, was firm but calming during the Strike itself, and avoided the language of humiliation when he had won.

  He did however allow the Trades Disputes Bill to become law a year later. The provisions of this Act do not today appear extreme in the context of current trade union legislation discussion, but they were bitterly resented at the time and for twenty years subsequently (until repealed in 1946), and were considered by Lord Blake (writing in 1960) to stem from an undesirable ‘surrender to his own right wing’. This he attributes to ‘the state of exhausted apathy’ into which Baldwin typically fell after the main crisis was over. Whether or not this explains the Trades Disputes Act (similar legislation was nearly presented, without Baldwin’s opposition, during the Strike itself), it was certainly a fact and made Baldwin (unlike his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill) barren of resource during the long months while the coal dispute ground its way to a bitter and expensive end. The cost was a good 5 per cent of the national income, and dragons’ teeth were sown deep in what was then, by a large margin, Britain’s major industry.