Baldwin (16 page)

In those days few ministers thought it necessary to attend their own counts, and Baldwin had his vigil in the No. 10 secretaries’ room enlivened by the presence of Churchill: ‘The P.M. [sat] with narrow slips of paper on which he inscribed the three lists as they arrived. At [another] desk sat Winston doing similar lists in red ink, sipping whisky and soda, getting redder and redder, rising and going out often to glare at the machine himself, hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge.’ Baldwin took the defeat less aggressively: but ‘he found it hard to reconcile the results with the reception on tour.’
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The result was not a disaster, but it was a severe setback for the Conservatives. They dropped 150 seats. The main effect of the strong Liberal campaign was to put Labour candidates in on minority votes. The Liberals themselves secured only 59 seats. The Labour Party won 287, the Government 261. Baldwin’s first problem was whether to resign at once, or, as in 1923, to wait and meet Parliament. The situation was different, because the Conservatives had then been the largest party, whereas they were now 26 seats behind the Labour Party. There was nevertheless strong pressure for hanging on. This was the view of the two Chamberlains, of the Chief Whip (Eyres-Monsell
), and, at first, of Churchill. Baldwin retired to Chequers, hesitated, and then decided otherwise. He thought that to remain would look ‘unsporting’ and would count against him the next time. He resigned on 4 June, five days after the poll.

The transition was then less abrupt than has since become the habit. On 14 June Baldwin was still living in 10 Downing Street, MacDonald having helpfully retired for a post-election holiday at Lossiemouth. Baldwin had some considerable difficulty about finding another place to live. His relative impoverishment had proceeded rapidly during the twenties.
Baldwins Ltd’s shares were only at 3/6. The loss of his Prime Minister’s salary was a serious matter, and he refused to take either to journalism or the City, as he had criticized Lloyd George for one and Sir Robert Horne for the other. He talked about selling Astley and although it was probably little more than talk, he was forced to run it extremely economically, and could not think of another London house on the scale of Eaton Square. Eventually he took a short lease on a much smaller house in Upper Brook Street.

His main summer objective, as usual, was to get through to his holiday. This he accomplished satisfactorily. The defeat, as was natural, led to a good deal of rumbling, particularly against the Conservative Central Office, where Davidson, the Chairman since 1927, was far too much Baldwin’s own man to be a satisfactory lightning conductor. But at first these rumblings were mainly subterranean. A Central Council meeting on 2 July passed off with some display of enthusiasm, and gave Baldwin a unanimous vote of confidence. His own speech was skilful in detail, but highly defensive in concept. He was in France for six weeks in August and September and then had another two or three weeks staying with friends in the North of England and Scotland. He did not make a settled return to London until 20 October. Then, for the eighteen months until March 1931, he experienced one of the roughest passages which has been the lot of any party leader this century.

The trouble was three-fold. First, he had no taste and little ability for the harrying of a government. He constantly ignored Bolingbroke’s maxim that Members of Parliament are like hounds that grow fond of the leader ‘who shows them game and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.’
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Indeed, at Sheffield in May 1930 he almost erected the contrary view into a principle:

I hold the view very strongly–and I know I have been criticised for it–that when a government has not got great experience, is a minority government, it is essential
if you can possibly support it that it should be able to speak with a strong voice to the countries of the world.

As a result the MacDonald Government, despite its many faults and vicissitudes, was left almost miraculously free from strong and sustained attack by its principal opponent. All Baldwin’s notable speeches of this period, both in the House and in the country, were devoted to troubles within his own party. When occasionally he rather wearily turned on the Government, the reaction was one of surprise more than of dismay.

Second, he was subjected to a sustained attack by the two principal popular newspaper proprietors of the day, Beaverbrook
and Rothermere
. The point nominally at issue was the one which had spasmodically rent the Conservative Party for the past three decades–the tariff question. The intricacies of this had almost defied analysis since the early years of the century when Balfour had deliberately muddied the waters. Safeguarding, retaliation, imperial preference, protection for industry but not for agriculture, all created a web of almost infinite complexity. It was very difficult to remember who had been for what at which particular period. Indeed it can be argued that none of this greatly mattered. The issue flared up when the party was doing badly for other reasons, and subsided when it was not.

It was the classic recipe for embarrassing a leader. And the two press lords, and some others, certainly wished to embarrass Baldwin. Had the issue been treated seriously he ought to have been more than usually invulnerable upon it. No one had risked more for tariff reform than he had in 1923. But Rothermere and Beaverbrook were not principally interested in the issue for its own sake. Rothermere, indeed, hardly cared about it at all. He hated Baldwin and that was enough. Beaverbrook had some genuine concern, and was less consistently anti-Baldwin. But he loved mischief, and he rarely considered whether his schemes made sense. He committed himself to a
singularly foolish plan for Empire Free Trade. It was singularly foolish because it obviously could not work without reciprocity, and no Dominion leader, not even his erstwhile friend Bennett of Canada, was willing to throw their markets open to British goods. Rothermere, a much bigger newspaper owner, supported Beaverbrook in uneasy alliance. The Empire Crusade was designed to cause the maximum trouble for the Conservative leadership. Its promoters took the extreme step of running independent Conservative candidates in by-elections. They won one, in South Paddington, and cost official Conservative candidates the seat in several more, often driving them into third place.

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.’
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