by Roy Jenkins
Then, in February 1908, his father died suddenly. Two days after the funeral Stanley Baldwin was selected as candidate for Bewdley. Before the end of the month he was returned unopposed. It remained his seat for a few months short of thirty years. His majorities were not always as big as he would have liked, notably in 1923, his first election as Prime Minister, when he rashly asked for 10,000 and got 6000; but he was never in remote danger of losing the seat.
He was in his forty-first year when he entered the House of Commons, six months over the watershed which Joseph Chamberlain, thirty years before, had thought was the limit if a fully effective parliamentary career was not to be precluded. He was younger at entry than either his predecessor (Bonar Law) or his successor (Neville Chamberlain) as leader of the Conservative Party, but older, and in most cases significantly so, than any other Prime Minister, of any party, of the past two hundred years.
The House of Commons accepted him as a quiet, agreeable member of some substance, not the sort of man who would ever dominate in debate, or who would lead a school of thought, but a man who with three or four others might constitute a very effective block within his party to a course or an individual of which or whom they did not approve. Baldwin spoke very little—only five real speeches, interlaced with an occasional stray intervention, between his election in 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Until then he appeared perfectly content with his placid existence. He had two substantial houses (in London he lived at 27 Queen’s Gate until 1913, when he bought 93 Eaton Square, a still larger house with—an uncharacteristic touch for Baldwin—a more fashionable address) and plenty of money with which to run them and do anything else he wanted. He was vice-chairman of Baldwins Ltd and could get his way in the firm when he wished, without having to take full executive responsibility for what was becoming an increasingly large business. He had succeeded his father on the board of the Great Western Railway, although not in the chairmanship. He counted as a significant businessman on the Conservative benches. He had a growing circle of friends, almost entirely non-aristocratic, both in Worcestershire and in London, both inside and outside the House of Commons, and he entertained on a moderate scale. Being a backbench Member of Parliament rounded off his life rather than offering a springboard for future achievement. Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, F. E. Smith strove for the glittering prizes of politics. So, somewhat less rumbustiously, did Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain.• Asquith and Balfour enjoyed them without the striving. Baldwin at this stage appeared to contemplate neither the strife nor the prizes.
The outbreak of war made him more restless. He was forty-seven, too old for military service yet young enough to feel that something more was required of him than the life he had hitherto led. At first the main change was that he began to give away quite a lot of money, mainly to Worcestershire charities. Over a few years he disposed of about £40,000. Then he served on several Government committees of enquiry or review as well as engaging in a little more political manoeuvring than had been his habit. In the early part of the first coalition he was rather anti-Lloyd George and pro-Asquith, but by December 1916 he was ready for a change and accepted the pro-Lloyd George lead of Bonar Law, who had a little hesitantly made him his parliamentary private secretary a few months before. He was also ready for office, and was delighted when an offer came in the first few weeks of the new Government. It came in a rather strange form. Nominally he merely continued as parliamentary private secretary to Law at the Treasury. But Law was without a junior minister in the Commons. The new Financial Secretary was Sir Hardman Lever, a businessman brought in from outside politics to galvanize the Treasury. But as he was at first without a seat in Parliament and in any event left almost immediately for extended duty in the United States, he was unable either to galvanize or to discharge any of the traditional functions of his office. Quite exceptionally, therefore, Baldwin was allowed to perform as a member of the Government and spoke from the front bench from February 1917 onwards. In July the position was regularized and he was given the title and salary of Joint Financial Secretary. He was a few weeks short of his fiftieth birthday, a somewhat elderly junior minister. But for the last two years of the war he at least had something to do.
CHAPTER TWO
The Leap to Fame
Baldwin remained Financial Secretary to the Treasury for four years. He served two Chancellors, Bonar Law in war and Austen Chamberlain in peace. He preferred Law, who was less stiff, although Chamberlain’s more leisurely pace of work was better suited to Baldwin’s own practice. Both of them regarded Baldwin as an acceptable and agreeable assistant, but not as a great deal more. He spent long hours in the House of Commons and he was skilful at the quiet conduct of minor business. Although it was recorded that ‘he could read a balance sheet’ (not in fact a particularly useful attribute for the Treasury), there is no evidence that he left any imprint upon Exchequer policy. Both his Chancellors—the two most important figures in the Conservative Party—thought of him, not as a man of promise, but as a man who deserved some reward by virtue of his service. In 1920 he was offered the Governor-Generalships, first of South Africa and then of Australia, together with a peerage. He declined. His name was also mooted for the Speakership of the House of Commons. It is not clear whether he was tempted or not, but the suggestion was not pressed. They were all offices which indicated that he was held in good regard, but not considered a serious candidate for major political advancement.1
Baldwin himself, however, had already raised his sights rather higher. At the time of Chamberlain’s appointment he had written to his mother: ‘I am pretty certain that I shall be left where I am which is what I wanted, for the only promotion I should care about would be the Exchequer itself which would never be given to a minister of only two years’ experience. I anticipate that Austen will be my new chief, an appointment that will meet with a good deal of criticism.’1 Baldwin’s modesty, about which he wrote and spoke frequently, was not excessive.
The outside offices for which his name was subsequently canvassed were all posts in which Lloyd George took little interest. Baldwin, in the Coalition Government, was a moon who moved with and around the leader of the Conservative Party. With the Sun King himself he had little direct relationship. Of course he saw him occasionally, but rarely if ever alone. During 1918 they met principally at Lord Derby’s breakfasts, from which Baldwin recorded impressions and interchanges which indicate both that the Prime Minister was a near stranger to him and that he was not above a little daring toadying. On 4 March he wrote: ‘[The breakfasts] give me a good opportunity of studying that strange little genius who presides over us. He is an extraordinary compound.’ And on 15 May, the morning of the Maurice debate,2 he recorded: ‘We proceeded thus: S.B.—“You know, PM, that for ten years we have been trying to catch you deviating by an inch from the strict path of veracity and pin you down. We never succeeded. But now others think they have got you and they will find out this afternoon that they have caught you speaking the truth. They will have the shock of their lives.” The little man roared with laughter and it evidently pleased him for he went about afterwards telling the Cabinet that “he had been caught telling the truth”.’2
So indeed it might have pleased him, for as has subsequently become clear, the best that can be said about the debate, from the Prime Minister’s point of view, is that he had one facet of the truth while General Maurice had another. But what is of greater Baldwin significance is the clear indication that at this stage he had developed little of the pervading antipathy towards Lloyd George which was to be the making of his own career.
Baldwin’s most notable act as Financial Secretary was to write an anonymous letter to The Times. It appeared on 24 June 1919. It was of some length and contained a number of obiter dicta about the obvious gravity of the crisis through which the nation had passed, the less obvious but equally searching crisis which it still faced, the dangers of living in fools’ paradises and believing that there could be play without work, th
e crushing burden of debt, and the responsibilities of the wealthy classes. A voluntary levy, he decided, was the answer. The operative part of his letter ran as follows:
I have been considering this matter for nearly two years, but my mind moves slowly; I dislike publicity, and I had hoped that somebody else might lead the way. I have made as accurate an estimate as I am able of the value of my own estate, and have arrived at a total of about £580,000. I have decided to realise 20% of that amount or say £120,000 which will purchase £150,000 of the new War Loan, and present it to the Government for cancellation.
I give this portion of my estate as a thank-offering in the firm conviction that never again shall we have such a chance of giving our country that form of help which is so vital at the present time.
Yours, etc.
F.S.T.
The gesture was generous and public spirited, with an element of naïveté about it. The anonymity (not perhaps best protected by the choice of pseudonym) held just long enough
for Baldwin to be alone in the secret amongst those present when he performed his statutory Financial Secretary’s duty of witnessing the burning of the cancelled bonds, but not for much longer. And the attempt to start an avalanche of donations was a complete failure. Baldwin had aimed by his example at a debt reduction of £ 1000 million. In the result only about £½ million, including his own gift, was received.
Even more revealing of Baldwin’s personality than The Times letter and the action it announced was the note which he wrote immediately afterwards to John Davidson, who despite a twenty-two-year age gap had become and was to remain one of his closest friends:
My dear old David,
You and I and Miss Watson3 have done it with a vengeance! I don’t know what you said to The Times man, but when I opened the paper in bed (ut mea mos est) wondering whether my letter would find a place at all—well I dived under the bed clothes and went pink all over—as pink as you!
I felt like a criminal in momentary fear of detection. But—remember this, mon chou. Next time you get a letter from me and feel inclined to belittle my style, remember that the leading journal of the world calls it noble. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Bless you for all your kindness to me.
F.S.T. (Ferdinando Smike Thompson)
This was one of the most interesting letters ever written by Baldwin. It is ‘an extraordinary compound’, as he himself wrote of the Prime Minister, although the elements and the whole are as different from anything which could have emanated from Lloyd George as it is possible to imagine. Baldwin’s letter is arch. It is intimate. It is affectionate. It is sentimental. It is mock-modest. It is self-satisfied. It is funny in one place and cloying in another. It is a little embarrassing. It is the letter of a man who believed his own values were better than those of most others, but who wanted the reassurance of friendship, after which he strove a little officiously, for the fact that this was really so.
At the end of March 1921 Baldwin’s long tenure of the Financial Secretaryship came to an end. He was promoted to be President of the Board of Trade and joined the Lloyd George Coalition Cabinet. But the event which caused his promotion also undermined the stability of the Cabinet which he joined. Bonar Law had resigned through ill-health. For all his limitations, Law was an extremely effective politician. He knew how to hold the Conservative Party together, and, so long as he judged this right, to hold it loyal to Lloyd George. Austen Chamberlain, who succeeded him, had little skill in party leadership. He was aloof and wooden in dealings with his followers. His loyalty to Lloyd George and the idea of coalition was more complete than that of Law. But it was of less value. It was unconditional and therefore unrepresentative loyalty. To an increasing extent the leading Conservative members of the Cabinet, not only Chamberlain himself, but Birkenhead, Curzon and Horne (who succeeded as Chancellor), and even Balfour as well, came to represent practically nobody but themselves. Meanwhile the post-war boom gave way to mounting and menacing unemployment, while the rootless-ness of Lloyd George’s policies, both at home and abroad, became increasingly apparent to those who were undazzled by his personality.
Baldwin was good at being undazzled. Throughout his nineteen months at the Board of Trade his principal public service was that of observing the Prime Minister with an increasingly jaundiced eye. He noted ‘the disintegrating effect of Lloyd George on all with whom he had to deal’ and came to regard him as ‘a real corrupter of public life’. He saw this corruption as affecting ministers, the civil service and the House of Commons. He regarded the Prime Minister’s unfastidious use of the honours system as the most obviously shocking but by no means necessarily the most dangerous manifestation of the system. What worried him most, apart from the meretricious glitter of the whole charade, was the erosion of the proper rôle of Cabinet Ministers, both in relation to their own departments and in their right to be fully consulted on matters of collective responsibility; the Prime Minister’s indifference to the processes and opinions of the House of Commons, provided a majority would sustain him in office; and the disarray and poor morale which coalition under a dynamic chief of another party was creating in the headquarters and local organizations of the Conservative Party.
Lloyd George never appreciated the potential menace of Baldwin. He had put him in the Cabinet because, with Bonar Law gone, he needed a man from the Law stable to preserve the balance. But having put him in, he rarely consulted him on general policy issues and gave him little rôle even in industrial disputes, which were still the traditional concern of the Board of Trade. He commented patronisingly that almost the only sounds he heard from Baldwin during Cabinets were the rhythmic sucking of his pipe. He did not realize that each suck marked an extra notch of disapproval, a further step towards the precipice of his own irrevocable downfall.
Nineteen twenty-two was from the beginning an uneasy year for the Coalition. There was a continuing Conservative fear through the winter and spring months that Chamberlain and Birkenhead would be seduced by Lloyd George into agreeing to a snap election, and that the rest of the party would be confronted with a fait accompli, highly damaging whichever way they decided to play it. Then in June the honours scandal passed from the baroque to the rococo stage. With an ill-fated exuberance which only a government in its last stages could achieve, Lloyd George succeeded in assembling five nominations for peerages, four of which were alleged to be discreditable. One, Sir Joseph Robinson, who had been convicted for fraudulent share-dealing in South Africa, was sufficiently so that the Chief Whip, F. E. Guest, was charged with calling on him in his suite at the Savoy Hotel and telling him that he had no alternative but to withdraw from the list even though his name had already been published.4 Robinson lost his peerage and Lloyd George was forced to concede a Royal Commission on future honours procedure, but the damage to the Coalition could not be retrieved. The session ended with an extraordinary meeting demanded by the Conservative junior ministers in order that they might express their discontent to the Cabinet members of their own party. Austen Chamberlain stiffly told them that the meeting was unprecedented and irregular, but it was left to Birkenhead to denounce them all for impertinence, stupidity and disloyalty.
Baldwin watched in silence as the remarkable gathering ground towards its angry conclusion. He spent most of August in Worcestershire and September at Aix, which he had discovered the previous summer. During his first two weeks in France he read no English newspaper and barely glanced at a French one. But although his mind was detached from day-today events it brooded a good deal on longer-term considerations. He decided he had had enough of the Coalition. He would break with Lloyd George, and it would remain to be seen whether the victim would be himself or the Prime Minister.
The Chanak crisis,5 which erupted in late September, drove Baldwin to the newsstands of Aix for the first time. Mrs Baldwin recorded what then happened (and also provided some insight into their life at Aix):
I tried to persuade him that things couldn’t be so bad as the French paper m
ade out or he would have been wired for. The next day he went for a long walk, about 20 miles, during which he did a good deal of clear thinking in the mountains. The next day he and I went for a shorter walk and returned about 6. I was a little tired and went to my room to rest before dressing for dinner and he sat down to a game of Patience. Suddenly S. entered my room with a telegram in his hand saying: ‘It has come. I have been expecting it. There is some devilment afoot and I must get back to back up poor dear old Austen’6 …. It was decided that he should leave next day for London and that I should stop on and finish my baths and meet him in Paris.3
Baldwin reached London in time for a Cabinet on the morning of 1 October. This provided an occasion for him to develop his new-found resolve. He came out firmly for caution and against the Turkish adventure which was exciting Lloyd George, Churchill, Birkenhead and most of the other ardent Coalitionists. But this was not enough to secure a break, particularly as an armistice with Turkey was fairly quickly obtained. The more divisive issue was the old question of an election under united Coalition leadership. Chamberlain proposed this at a meeting of the Conservative ministers on 10 October. At this stage Baldwin alone dissented strongly. It was by far the most resolute action of his political life up to that point. He had nudged his way at Aix into an instinctive decision about the correct course to follow but he was agreeably shocked by his own daring in following it. Lucy Baldwin did not return to England until 12 October. Their plan for a Paris rendez-vous had collapsed. Baldwin then went to meet her at Victoria Station and walked the half mile to their Eaton Square house with her, describing, as she subsequently wrote to her husband’s mother, what had happened, in slightly breathless terms: