Baldwin (30 page)

⁹
A letter purporting to be from Grigori Zinoviev, the President of the Communist International, to the British Communist Party giving them instructions for military infiltration and other measures ‘to develop the ideas of Leninism in England’. It started life in the offices of the
Daily Mail
but was widely accepted as authentic by other newspapers, by the Foreign Office and indeed by MacDonald, who was Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister. Trying to deal with the matter in the interstices of a punishing speaking tour, MacDonald handled it with great maladroitness.

¹⁰
The Ministry of Health had thirty years of somewhat misnamed life, beginning in 1919. Its responsibilities covered local government, housing and all social welfare schemes.

¹
The first parliament of the Attlee Government, from July 1945 to February 1950, was the longest.

²
There was of course money involved. He changed it again in 1935 to Lord Swinton. He was made an earl twenty years after that but, surprisingly, missed the opportunity for a third change. Born in 1884, he lived until 1972.

³
This is exemplified (although not much to Chamberlain’s credit) by a 1925 incident. ‘I had noticed,’ Chamberlain wrote in his diary after a Cabinet at which he had been expounding a departmental problem, ‘that S.B. didn’t seem to be attending to me, and presently he passed an open note across the table to Winston, who was sitting beside me. On the note was written:

MATCHES

Lent at 10.30 a.m.

Returned?

This triviality, while a very grave question was being discussed under S.B.’s chairmanship, made the most deplorable impression on me’ (David Dilks,
Neville Chamberlain,
vol. 1 1869-1929, pages 448-9).

⁴
This, as stated, was certainly unfair. Apart from anything else, Chamberlain served with Baldwin for only a little more than a third of the period. It could be the only occasion on which Baldwin
imposed
a policy of his own upon the Cabinet, but there were many other occasions, including some of considerable importance to Chamberlain’s conduct of the Foreign Office, when he steered skilfully towards one course rather than another.

⁵
David Kirkwood (1872-1955), MP for Dumbarton Burghs (1922-51). A Clydeside firebrand in his early days, a peer in 1951.

⁶
The Triple Alliance, between the miners, the railwaymen and the transport workers, had been formed in 1919 and secured some partial success in October 1920 when a threatened rail strike in support of the miners produced a compromise wage offer from Lloyd George. In April 1921, in the second stage of this continuing dispute the Alliance collapsed, not so much in betrayal (although it was so portrayed by many) as in confusion. In the mythology of the Labour movement, Friday, 15 April became ‘Black Friday’.

⁷
The Roosevelt surname alone still meant Theodore rather than Franklin. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt had used the phrase at the 1912 Republican Convention in Chicago when he announced that he was running against President Taft, his own choice as his successor in 1908, either on or against the Republican ticket. ‘Until then’, a chronicler of that conflict wrote, ‘a bull moose had simply been the huge-antlered male member of the largest deer family, of the genus
Alces Americana
but TR’s simile made it the symbol of a fighting cause’ (William Manners,
TR and Will,
pages 237-8). In the event, Roosevelt ran against the Republican ticket, as the champion of the Progressive or ‘Bull Moose’ Party, and put Woodrow Wilson in the White House by default. I think that Baldwin merely wished to say that he felt very well, and not to arouse these memories.

⁸
Baldwin’s principal private secretary got the King’s secretary out of bed at Windsor to tell him the dread news. ‘The
Daily Mail
has ceased to function,’ he announced, at once portentously and ambiguously. ‘Tell His Majesty so that he should not go off the deep end.’ At Windsor there was a greater sense of proportion. ‘We don’t take the
Daily Mail,
or the
Daily Express,
Sir Clive Wigram said sleepily, and rang off. (Tom Jones,
A Diary with Letters,
page 133
.)

⁹
He sounds like an opera character, got up for the part: ‘On his arrival at No 10 [Waterhouse] briefed him fully as to the P.M.’s symptoms and as to what we Secretaries wished should be done. S.B. himself had no idea who or what sort of specialist the doctor was. The doctor played up splendidly …’ (Jones,
A Diary with Letters,
page 64
).

¹⁰
As against approximately £300 billion in 1986.

¹
Its only memorable passage was when he took up a previous reference to the loss of the American Colonies and said that ‘If George III had been endowed with the tongue of Edmund Burke for only an hour, he might have made such a speech [as Churchill]’ (Hansard, vol. 247, col. 744, 26 Jan. 1931).

²
‘I have been overwhelmed with congratulations from all quarters’, he wrote about this to his wife, ‘(except S.B. who can’t bear the thought of making it up with the press lords and doesn’t see how it has helped his own position)’ (quoted in Iain Macleod,
Neville Chamberlain,
page 145).

¹
In Middlemas and Barnes,
Baldwin,
it is implied that MacDonald first did so, with an oddly jaunty and inappropriately phrased response to an intervention of Hoare’s: ‘Well, are you prepared to join the Board of Directors?’ (page 623)

²
The only difference, a surprising but typical example of the frailty of human memory, was that Davidson was convinced the discussion was in his own house, whereas Hoare believed it was at the Conservative Research Department in Old Queen Street.

³
Even had the Prime Minister been prepared to renounce it, the terms of the bequest would have given the second refusal to Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Prime Minister can offer 11 Downing Street to any minister he likes. He is more restricted in the case of Chequers.

⁴
Its subsequent rival in this respect, the 1950s, was equally dominated by governments of one party, but they were throughout opposed by numerically strong Labour oppositions, which was not the case in the 1930s.

⁵
By rashly reflecting upon this view in a 1936 House of Commons speech (see
pages 159
-60
infra
) he gave his reputation one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds of political history.

⁶
He did not in name occupy this position. Until Churchill no Prime Minister (unless in the Lords) delegated the title. Since Churchill, so rapidly can constitutional habits change, no Prime Minister has thought of not doing so.

⁷
It was also the last occasion on which he discharged this unwelcome duty. In 1936 the task was delegated to Neville Chamberlain.

⁸
The main difficulty came from the dropping of Londonderry (7th Marquess of, 1878-1949) whom Baldwin had moved in June from the Air Ministry to the leadership of the House of Lords. He was a heavy liability on a variety of grounds, and Baldwin was determined to be rid of him. He went with the worst of grace. Such was the lavishness of Londonderry House entertaining (particularly the great eve of the session receptions) that Birkenhead had described him as ‘catering his way into the Cabinet’. Once he was out he dropped some of the catering (there was no eve-of-the-session party in December 1935) and devoted himself to writing long letters of reproach to Baldwin.

⁹
It is very difficult for opposition leaders to strike the right note to entice Government supporters. Twenty years later, at the time of Suez, Gaitskell was held to have minimized the Conservative revolt, not by impugning Eden’s honour, but by offering too direct an appeal to the dissidents. The best parliamentary course, when Government revolts are simmering, might be for opposition spokesmen to say nothing, but that would hardly be compatible with their position in the country, or with their providing a lobby into which the dissidents might be enticed. The reality often is that those who have threatened to revolt are looking with considerable eagerness for an excuse to change their minds.

¹⁰
Hoare came back in June as First Lord of the Admiralty.

¹¹
He went first to Gregynog, the Montgomeryshire house of the Davies family (see note on Tom Jones,
infra),
and then to Blickling, the Norfolk house of the 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882–1940), formerly as Philip Kerr a member of Milner’s South African ‘Kindergarten’ and then of Lloyd George’s ‘garden suburb’ secretariat, currently a close associate of Waldorf (2nd Viscount) and Nancy Astor, and hence a core member of the ‘Cliveden Set’. When he died at the end of 1940 (perhaps because Nancy Astor had converted him from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science and turned him against doctors) he was British Ambassador in Washington.

¹
‘You know what they are saying,’ Anthony Eden reported that he had said. ‘No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris’ (Eden,
Facing the Dictators,
p. 317). Kenneth Rose’s
King George
V casts doubt on the authenticity of this remark.

²
Even without an unprecedented impending crisis, a month was an unusually long interval between Prime Ministerial audiences.

³
The point arose because of the latent powers of a legal luminary known as the King’s Proctor. Lady Donaldson’s
Edward VIII
contains the following neat explanation: ‘As the law stood at the time the fact that two people both wished to divorce each other was an absolute bar to their being able to do so. Thus if it could be proved that the divorce was arranged ‘collusively’ between the two parties, the application would fail’ (page 238). A decree
nisi
could also be set aside on the intervention of the King’s Proctor during the period before it became absolute. (See also
page 153
infra.
)

⁴
The King might perhaps at this point have paraphrased Baldwin’s own remark about successors to Neville Chamberlain six years earlier (see page 118
supra
).

⁵
It was not that he had an inflated view of the assiduity of their consultations. ‘But how they do it I don’t know,’ he told G. M. Young. ‘I suppose they talk to the stationmaster’ (Young,
Stanley Baldwin,
page 242).

⁶
The King’s account is that he said: ‘I know that you and Mrs Baldwin do not approve of what I am doing, but I belong to a different generation;’ and that Baldwin replied: ‘Sir, it is quite true that there are no two people amongst your subjects who are more grieved at what has happened than we are, but you must always remember that there are no two people who hope more sincerely that you may find happiness where you believe it to be found’ (
A King’s Story,
page 402).

⁷
Middlemas and Barnes, 1969, and Montgomery Hyde, 1973.

⁸
By announcing a National Defence Contribution which was a tax not on profits as such but on their increase. He united Keynes and Montagu Norman against him. His proposal was withdrawn on the day he kissed hands.

⁹
Despite this anti-climax the Baldwins went back to Aix in the summer of 1938 for what turned out to be the last of seventeen visits. They also spent a month at the old Riviera resort of Beaulieu in each of the two last winters of peacetime.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © Roy Jenkins 1987

First published in Great Britain by William Collins 1987

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ISBN: 9781448200689
eISBN: 9781448202003

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