Baldwin (20 page)

In retrospect it looks odd that such a massive Conservative majority should have sustained such an ineffective ex-Labour Prime Minister for so long. Baldwin was crucial to this apparent paradox, both objectively and subjectively. Objectively, he was little more attractive to the Conservatives who were hostile to MacDonaldite mush than was MacDonald himself. Subjectively, Baldwin felt committed to MacDonald for several reasons. First, he thought it an unspoken part of the 1931 bargain that MacDonald should not be discarded as soon as the immediate crisis was over. Second, he regarded MacDonald’s name as a considerable asset, both at home and abroad. Certainly MacDonald’s international fame was greater than Baldwin’s, and there is some evidence that he maintained a certain touch for foreign affairs well after he had lost it domestically.

Baldwin and most Conservatives also felt that they needed MacDonald (and the guise of being a National administration which went with his name) for electoral reasons. The thirties now look the most monolithic political decade of the past 150 years.
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The National (or Conservative) majority of 425 seats in October 1931 was reduced only to the very substantial one of 247 in November 1935. It required the outbreak of war and the threatened imminence of defeat to produce the power-sharing of 1940, which led on to the power transference of 1945.

During the decade, to cautious minds at least, it did not so
appear. With only a few islands of relief the Government did very badly in by-elections from the autumn of 1933 to the spring of 1935. Swings towards the Labour Party of 20 to 25 per cent were common. On one occasion the swing went to 50 per cent. The most memorable was at Fulham, now a blood-stained political battleground, in October 1933. It was not the biggest swing, but nonetheless a Conservative majority of 14,000 in 1931 turned into a Labour majority of 5000 only two years later. ‘It was a nightmare,’ Baldwin told G. M. Young, attributing the defeat exclusively to ‘the pacifist’ issue and using it as a reason for eschewing rearmament in the early days of Hitler.

The 1931 result, of course, left a great deal of room for recoil, but even so, the average of these results, if reflected in a general election, would have produced a substantial Labour majority in the House of Commons. So far from regarding the 1935 result as a foregone conclusion, Baldwin always felt that the choice of date, intermeshed with the fostering of the suitable national mood, was one of his more considerable political challenges.
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In these circumstances MacDonald could not be treated as a cast-off glove—even had it been in Baldwin’s nature to do so. Throughout 1932 and 1933 he retained not only the position of Prime Minister but most of the prerogatives of the office as well. Baldwin acted as an unusually influential leader of the House of Commons,
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but not as more than that. And at the same time, mainly voluntarily, he devolved a considerable part of his own power to Neville Chamberlain. Baldwin concerned himself with India; with defence (in a somewhat spasmodic way); with those day-to-day issues which assume sudden importance in the life of a Government and then, almost as quickly, lose it again; and with the loose management of the Conservative
Party in the House of Commons. The formulation and coordination of the Conservative contribution to economic, industrial and social policy he left almost entirely to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The National Government in its first three years thus operated on the curious basis of the Prime Minister depending to an unusual extent on the second man in the Government, and that second man in turn depending to an equally unusual extent upon the second man in his own party. Nevertheless, some approach to a stable internal balance was achieved.

During 1934 this balance began to break up. The deterioration in MacDonald rapidly gathered momentum. Not only his eyesight and his energy, but his memory and the coherence of his mind began to fail. He lost his way in the middle of speeches. In the House of Commons he became an embarrassing joke, and in Downing Street a guarantee of indecision. He clearly could not lead the Government through a general election. This became apparent to others before it did to MacDonald himself. He was not eager to go. In this respect he was no different from greater Prime Ministers, Gladstone before him and Churchill after him, upon whom senility began to descend while they were still in office, except that with him it came when he was ten years or more younger. Eventually, however, MacDonald accepted the inevitable with a reasonable grace. On 16 May 1935 he told the King of his intention to resign.

The King then saw Baldwin on 20 May, and engaged in an active discussion of the shape of the new Cabinet. King George V always had strong views as to who was suitable for which office, and did not hesitate to express them to his Prime Ministers. On this occasion he effectively vetoed the possibility that Hoare might become Viceroy, on the ground that no Secretary of State for India had ever previously gone to Calcutta or Delhi. Hoare became Foreign Secretary instead, with disastrous results.

The changeover of Prime Minister took place quietly on the afternoon of Friday, 7 June, at the beginning of the Whitsun
weekend. While Baldwin’s succession to Bonar Law in 1923 has been almost overdiscussed, practically no attention has been given to the way in which he slipped in for the third time in 1935. Yet it is a remarkable example of the way in which a Prime Minister may in certain circumstances be appointed almost by accident. MacDonald’s assumption throughout the Government and almost up to the last moment was that Baldwin and he would retire together, and that Neville Chamberlain, with the freshness, if not of youth, at least of never having been Prime Minister before, would succeed directly.

This was probably Baldwin’s own intention earlier in the Government. It may well have been the desire of many, perhaps a majority, of the Cabinet and the Conservative backbenchers. They certainly wanted a change of style, and probably a sharper one than Baldwin was likely to provide. But they were not consulted. The Cabinet, had it wished, could of course have staged a revolt. But its collective mind was not nearly clear enough for that, and in any event, Chamberlain, embarrassed by his own self-interest, was almost the only minister who was both strong and wholly secure in his own job. So the King, who liked and was used to Baldwin, simply acted on the assumption that he was to succeed and appointed him without question or consultation. There was a certain irony in the fact that one of the first things Baldwin told the King, on taking over from the decrepit MacDonald, was that he himself needed two months’ rest.

That year he did not get it. His main task was to prepare for and win a general election. This was complicated but not necessarily made more difficult by a summer and early autumn dominated by the build-up of the dispute between Italy and Abyssinia, the first issue since 1918 to make the threat of European war vivid to the British people. At the end of June the result of the Peace Ballot had been announced. Conducted by the League of Nations Union, this was the most massive private poll ever carried out. Eleven and a half million people
voted, the overwhelming majority in favour of collective security, although three million of those who supported economic sanctions against an aggressor jibbed at military ones.

Baldwin thought the questions somewhat unrealistically phrased, but he nonetheless realized that many of those organizing and participating in the ballot were part of that middle, public-spirited opinion which he always regarded as an important part of his natural constituency. Furthermore, the attachment to collective security, particularly at a time when an actual aggressor had appeared over the horizon, seemed an improvement on the almost nihilistic pacifism of 1933 and 1934. Altogether he sensed what Asquith would have called ‘a favourable curve’. He saw the opportunity to play the peace card and the moderate rearmament card at the same time, fortified by the prospect that in times of trouble the public would prefer to vote for an established Government rather than a peculiarly unknown opposition. He encouraged Hoare to give a strong lead at Geneva (although at the same time telling him: ‘Keep us out of war; we are not ready for it’
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), and ruminating, again at Aix, moved increasingly towards an autumn election.

He made no announcement until 19 October, and perhaps did not even close his own mind until no more than a week earlier, but on 3 October, the same day that the Italian attack was eventually launched, he went to Bournemouth and for the first time in seven years addressed the Conservative Party Conference.
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It was an obvious pre-election speech, skilfully directed both to his immediate audience and to the less committed outside public. ‘Spoke for an hour and had a good ovation,’ Tom Jones wrote. ‘Denounced the isolationists, reconciled the Party to the League by supporting rearmament, and reconciled the pacifists to rearmament by supporting the Covenant.’
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A month later, with polling day only two weeks away,
Baldwin took the lucky chance of a long-standing ‘non-political’ engagement to address the Peace Society in the Guildhall and used the occasion to tilt the balance in a still more pacific direction. It was one of the last of his evocative flights of homespun philosophy. There was a lot of ‘this dear, dear land of ours’, of ‘the level evening sun over an English meadow’, of ‘the rooks tumbling noisily home into the elms’, but there was also a good ringing pledge in which the ambiguity, although present, was neither obvious nor too clever by half. ‘I give you my word’, he said, ‘that there will be no great armaments.’ A correspondent of
The Times
thought it was ‘like the first hearing of a great symphony’, and Harold Laski, never one to be outdone in either flattery or hyperbole, wrote to Baldwin that it was ‘the greatest speech a Prime Minister has ever made’.
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Discounting such judgments of the moment, it is clear that Baldwin fought skilfully, and certain that he fought successfully. It was his tenth general election, his fifth as party leader, and as successful as any. He was unopposed at Bewdley, and in the country as a whole, while losing a hundred seats (the minimum which could be expected after 1931), he still secured the second biggest majority of the century. He had a few weeks to bask in the glow of this last electoral achievement, weeks that were only a little marred by the unpleasantness of Cabinet changes
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and the difficulties of moving towards a decision on the application of the oil sanction against Italy.

Then, in the middle weeks of December, Baldwin’s reputation took the sharpest plunge, to its lowest point, of his whole active career. The Foreign Secretary he had appointed only six months previously, had for some weeks been as exhausted in
health as he had become weak on Italian sanctions. Baldwin noticed the former, but not, so he claimed, the latter development. He was delighted that Hoare planned to get away for a holiday in Switzerland. He was always very sympathetic to anyone’s need for a holiday. Then it was arranged that Hoare should on the way spend a day or so in Paris talking to Laval, who was temporarily Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister of France. The talks were clearly to be more than an exchange of courtesies, for Vansittart,
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Hoare’s permanent under-secretary, was to be present for them. Even so, they caused Baldwin no particular concern, despite a half-warning from Anthony Eden, who was then a second Cabinet minister in the Foreign Office. A combination of holiday habits and of the location of the League in Geneva meant that staging visits to the Quai d’Orsay by British ministers were part of the normal diplomatic pattern of the twenties and thirties. In any event Baldwin believed in leaving foreign affairs to the Foreign Secretary. He satisfied himself with a few words of hurried consultation during a House of Commons debate. Hoare left for Paris on Friday, 6 December, neither authorized to negotiate nor told not to.

During the next two days the Hoare-Laval Pact was concocted. There was only a French text of the document, but it was initialled by the two ministers, and therefore involved a substantial degree of commitment on both their parts. In effect it provided for the dismemberment of Abyssinia and the giving to Mussolini of about half of what he had set himself to achieve by conquest. It leaked into the French press by the morning of Monday, 9 December.

Hoare’s behaviour after concluding the agreement was very strange. He telephoned a Sunday request to London for a Monday Cabinet, sent the proposals back overnight by a Foreign Office official, and left for Switzerland. When Eden, at Baldwin’s request, had telephoned him in Paris on the Sunday evening, he was resting and was pronounced unavailable. Vansittart was equally unavailable, but they joined in sending a
message that they were both ‘well satisfied with the day’s work’. With that Baldwin had to be content until almost the Monday noon. It was in a sense the just reward of his method of conducting foreign policy. Ten years earlier a cartoon by David Low
had depicted him as rejecting an appeal for advice by Austen Chamberlain (soon to reappear on the stage of Baldwin’s life) and saying, ’But
you
are Foreign Secretary.’ Now another Foreign Secretary, much junior, much more Baldwin’s protegé, whether through intention or exhaustion, was acting on this precept with avidity.