by Roy Jenkins
Furthermore, Curzon’s behaviour over the fall of the Coalition was fresh in men’s minds and had made him a lot of enemies and few friends. He took no stand, but resigned at the last moment from the Lloyd George Cabinet so as to be ingratiatingly available to continue as Foreign Secretary in the new Government. The truth of the matter was that there were very few who wanted him as Prime Minister, independently of the House of Lords issue. The Cabinet did not, the party machine did not, the constituencies did not, at least three quarters of the Conservative members of the House of Commons did not. An exception was Salisbury, the leader of the diehards, who, like Balfour, was specially consulted by the King. Another half-exception may have been Bonar Law. He refused on grounds of health to tender any formal advice. But he saw Baldwin on the Sunday morning and told him that he had no doubt that Curzon would be chosen, although his own turn would come in due course. Then, when pressed by his principal private secretary, Colonel Waterhouse, he reluctantly said that if he had to advise, ‘he would put Baldwin first’. Waterhouse, probably improperly, passed this information on to the Palace. Then on the Monday morning Law saw Salisbury and left him with the impression that Curzon could not be ‘passed over’. The likelihood is that he saw the decisive disadvantages of Curzon but could not quite reconcile himself to the thought of the very junior Baldwin, who had so recently ‘bounced’ and damaged him over the debt settlement, being in 10 Downing Street.
Compared with the strong forces and arguments working the other way all this counted for little. Curzon was in fact impossible. He could only have been chosen had there been no other credible candidate, and Baldwin’s performance from the date of the Carlton Club meeting forward had destroyed this possibility. The well-known story of Curzon’s Tuesday summons from Montacute13 to London, of his confident and much-photographed arrival, first at Paddington Station and then at Carlton House Terrace, followed by the crushing blow delivered to him that afternoon when Stamfordham called at his house and told him Baldwin was to be Prime Minister, was not therefore a sudden snatching from his hands of the steadily earned and well-deserved prize, but more the last rather over-dramatized act of a tragi-comedy which had been played out in varying forms since his appointment as Viceroy of India in 1898.14
Baldwin had spent the weekend partly in London and partly at Chequers. On the Saturday evening, before seeing Law on the following morning, he dined with Davidson at the Argentine Club and informed him that he would ‘rather take a single ticket to Siberia than become Prime Minister’.8 Davidson, who was used to him, did not take this seriously, and rightly so, for Baldwin’s next railway activity was to leave Chequers early on the Tuesday morning in order to catch the 8.55 from Wendover and be available to see first Stamfordham and then the King. Stamfordham asked him if he would be prepared to retain Curzon as Foreign Secretary. He said that he would welcome this, but queried whether Curzon would be willing to serve, and also indicated that he would endeavour to bring Austen Chamberlain and Horne back into the Government. These replies were highly satisfactory to the King, who summoned Baldwin to the Palace at 3.15 p.m. and charged him with the task of forming a Government.
He returned to Downing Street and asked the waiting journalists for their prayers rather than their congratulations. He was Prime Minister at fifty-five, after less than three years’ Cabinet experience. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am not a bit excited and don’t realize it in the least.’ But to Phyllis Broome, a Worcestershire neighbour, writer and walking companion, he wrote: ‘Here is the biggest job in the world and if I fail I shall share the fate of many a bigger man than I. But it’s a fine thought, isn’t it? And one may do something before one cracks up.’9
CHAPTER THREE
An Unsettled Leadership
Baldwin of course did not ‘crack up’ for many years to come. He held the leadership of the Conservative Party, to which he was unanimously elected (proposed by Curzon) immediately following his accession to the premiership, until 1937, a longer period than any of his predecessors since Salisbury, and a longer period too than any but one (Churchill) of his seven successors has since attained.
Yet the suggestion of ‘crack-up’ was not wholly fanciful. A bucolic English gentleman ‘by election’, in G. M. Young’s phrase, he was always very highly strung. He was full of minor nervous habits: an eye-twitch, a frequent snapping of the thumbs and fingers when reading or in conversation, a flicking of the tongue before starting a speech, and, in a rather different category, an addiction to putting objects, particularly books, but matches, pipes, paper knives and almost anything else as well, to his nostrils and audibly sniffing at them.
More importantly, he had a metabolism which reacted strongly to crisis. He performed well but not easily during periods of strain. He then slept badly and became more silent and withdrawn than was his habit. But his power of decisionmaking improved, and his gift of calming, persuasive oratory rose to its heights. After such a period he was left exhausted, sometimes near to nervous prostration. But a long holiday would revive him quickly: if he had the prospect of a month of freedom he would began to feel well after a week or so.
As a result he was good at crises provided they did not occur frequently. He enjoyed the aftermath of a successful battle. He did not want the next one to start soon. He had no desire to defeat boredom by provoking political excitement and keeping himself constantly at a stretch. He was mostly happy without an excessive amount of work, and when it was not there he did not invent it. It is not altogether easy to understand his methods of discharging business. The charge of simple laziness can be dismissed. Had this been his dominating characteristic, he could not possibly have retained his position through the vicissitudes and challenges of a decade and a half. Nor was he like Asquith, whose urbane liberal gravitas he greatly admired, and who, of all the leading politicians he knew, was probably the one he would have most wished to emulate. Asquith worked with unusual speed and intellectual certainty. He operated, in Churchill’s view, like a great judge. He listened to the pleadings. He absorbed the arguments. He gave his verdict. And then he closed the court and turned his mind and his emotions to the pleasures of the day, literary or social.
Baldwin had no comparable speed, no comparable rational processes. Tom Jones, one of his most intimate associates and normally a very shrewd observer, at first thought him very slow. ‘Bonar Law would do as much work in an hour as S.B. in four or five,’ he wrote in November 1923.1 He also noted that Baldwin would rather walk and gossip, or withdraw for a Sunday evening to sit alone with Mrs Baldwin, than work on Cabinet papers or even a speech. What he did not realise at that stage was that it was meaningless to compare Baldwin’s speed with that of Bonar Law, for Baldwin did not work at all in Law’s sense. Law was a highly efficient, rather unimaginative, detailed administrator, given political force by a strong sense of partisan combativeness. He worked on paper, and derived a sense of duty fulfilled as he proceeded through his Cabinet boxes. He ran a Department of State with the detailed application which he had devoted to making his way in Glasgow business.
Baldwin never attempted to do this. He was not afraid of overall responsibility. Indeed, for the first three months of his premiership he performed a feat which had seemed remarkable even when Gladstone had last done it forty years before and retained the Chancellorship as well as being First Lord of the Treasury. But it was all done on a light rein and with the minimum of paperwork. He did not even pretend to a crushing burden of work, only enough to complain comfortably about. ‘The work goes on, one week like another, and pretty incessant until Friday night, and then the break which gives one time to get one’s breath again,’ he wrote to his mother two months after becoming Prime Minister. ‘So far … it is not too heavy…. When you are at the beck and call of everyone for 14 hours a day for four days and for 8 hours on the fifth day each week you want a short space in which you relax and do just what you like.’2 All subsequent Prime Ministers would, I think, have regarded a sixty-four-hour week which cl
osed at 5 p.m. on Friday as a semi-holiday.
He was able to achieve this amount of leisure because he did not intervene much in the work of the Departments. Partly as a reaction against the restless interference of Lloyd George, he believed in giving his ministers the maximum freedom. He was always available for consultation, but rarely forced it upon them.
He devoted a lot of time to the personal relationships of politics and to conducting them in a mollifying, unhurried way. This took priority over the reading of briefs, the annotation of Cabinet papers, or the swift making of minor decisions. This was not a question of either niceness or laziness. It was a question of how he believed he could best attain his major political purposes. This practice extended far beyond the circle of his Cabinet colleagues. It led him to spend endless hours in the House of Commons, far more than any Prime Minister for many years before, far more than any of his successors. Sometimes he would merely sit on the Government bench, half listening to some minor debate, half wrapping his mind round the backgrounds and appearances of different members. Then he would use this information to chat knowledgeably and sympathetically to them in the lobbies or the smoking room, often concentrating as much upon the opposition as upon his own supporters.1 Sometimes he just sat. ‘What can you do’, an exasperated colleague once complained, ‘with a leader who sits in the smoking room reading the Strand Magazine?’3
The interesting point is not the seeming indolence but the subject matter and the venue. Asquith would never have chosen the Strand Magazine or the House of Commons as a place in which to read. He would have read more reconditely but equally haphazardly in some more private precinct. Churchill in office would never have wasted time in the smoking room without an audience. Lloyd George would never have wasted time there at all, but he might have chosen the Strand Magazine had he been left waiting upon a railway platform. Neville Chamberlain would never have read haphazardly. Ramsay MacDonald would never have exposed himself so apparently free from the burdens of state.
Yet it is doubtful whether Baldwin was in fact wasting time. He was most likely not even reading the Strand, but sniffing it and with it the atmosphere around him. He was also probably ruminating, feeling his way, nudging towards a variety of decisions which he had to make. This was a technique which made it peculiarly difficult to say when he was working and when he was not. It made his work pattern not merely different from but the opposite to that of Asquith. With him the courts were rarely wholly open and never, except occasionally at Aix, wholly shut. His desk application was poor, but his recreations were semi-political. This was true of his walks, of his quiet dinners at the Davidsons’ or in the Travellers’ Club, of his afternoons of reading or letter-writing. He was contemptuous of those who could think and talk of nothing but party politics and political careers, but his own talk (and presumably his own thought) was much about the penumbra of government and the idiosyncrasies of politicians. Lloyd George, in particular, was an unfailing source of repellent fascination to him.
An inordinate proportion of his time was devoted to speech preparation and delivery. This was not because he was over-meticulous with individual words or phrases. Indeed, in the House of Commons and even in his highly expert use of the new medium of broadcasting, he often eschewed a manuscript and spoke from relatively sketchy notes. But he devoted a great deal of prior thought to the mood which he wished to create.2 It was in this way that he made many of his policy decisions. A major speech had to be delivered. He wished its effect to be that of edging his audience and the nation in a particular direction. Accordingly, any policy announced had to be compatible with the objective. Any specific proposals, however, almost always followed from the mood and the words used to assist it, rather than first being sharply worked out, and then sustained by ex post argument. Baldwin was not in the highest category of orators. He had a good speaking voice, he was persuasive, he could mostly secure the attention of his opponents. He rarely opened new vistas and he rarely inspired his supporters. It was more that he carried them reluctantly with him. Yet to an exceptional extent the turning points of his career were marked not by actions but by speeches. He was right to devote a lot of attention to them.
These turning points apart, he was also an addictive non-political speaker. He could seldom resist an invitation to address a learned society, a university, a county or regional association, a professional body, indeed any gathering of apparently public-spirited gentlemen brought together for non-commercial purposes. These speeches had to be rich in literary illusion and ruminative aphorism. The words had to be carefully chosen so as to be at once simple and evocative. He must not be cleverly cynical like Lloyd George, or abrasive like Birkenhead, or pompous like Curzon or even olympianly cold like Balfour. He must speak from the heart. And there are few effects which require more time or effort to achieve. Even with the devoted and skilful help of Tom Jones, these excursions into literature and the borderlands of philosophy cut heavily into his working days.
It follows almost necessarily from this pattern of life and work that Baldwin’s main decisions were taken by highly intuitive methods and often in unorthodox places. He was far from proceeding by relentless ratiocination after the careful assembly and study of all the available evidence upon the Cabinet table. He did not necessarily avoid decisions. On the contrary, in the early part of his leadership at least, he was arguably too precipitous. ‘He takes a leap in the dark,’ was one of Birkenhead’s unfriendly complaints, ‘looks round, and takes another.’4
In the first autumn of his premiership he not merely took a leap in the dark but decided upon an expedition into the profound obscurity of political outer space. That year he had less time at Aix than usual. He did not leave London until 25 August, and he was back in Paris by 18 September for the only attempt which he ever made, as head of government, to negotiate direct with a foreign statesman. Twenty-four hours of Monsieur Poincaré was more than enough for him. Thereafter he decided that this was a job for Foreign Secretaries. It was left to Neville Chamberlain, fifteen months after Baldwin’s retirement, to revive Prime Ministerial diplomacy at Berchtesgaden.
That summer at Aix was not only brief but troubled. The past year, since his previous sojourn at the Hôtel Splendide, had been by far the most spectacular of his life. He had gone home to face crisis and, as he persuaded himself, subsequent obscurity. In fact he had broken the most famous statesman of Europe, and within six months succeeded to Lloyd George’s place if not to his fame. He had already imposed his personality upon the country in a way that Bonar Law in eleven years of intermittent Conservative leadership had never succeeded in doing. But he had not moulded the politics of Britain into a form which he thought he could control. His Cabinet was not his own but an inheritance from Law. The only appointment of significance which he had made himself was that of Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor, and that had been done only two days before the beginning of his holiday. Until then he had, like Law before him, been waiting for McKenna. The hold of that secondary Liberal figure upon successive Conservative leaders is one of the least easily explicable features of the politics of the early 1920s. Baldwin’s real need was to reunite the Conservative Party. The Exchequer was the only great plum at his disposal for this purpose. Why he should have dangled it for three months before an undistinguished ex-Chancellor of another party who did not even possess a seat in Parliament defies explanation.
The superficial justification was that he was frightened of the emergence of a centre party, and thought he must try to pre-empt this. But the danger of a centre party came not from McKenna but from the Unionist ex-Coalitionists, led by Austen Chamberlain, who had twice previously been Chancellor, and who, if he was to be brought back into the fold, would clearly require some substantial offer. Instead of the Exchequer, Baldwin had offered him the embassy to Washington, which Chamberlain had rejected with anger. ‘The discourtesy shown to me, down to the last detail … was not expected and I profoundly resent it,’5 he wrote to his brother after a visi
t to the new Prime Minister at Chequers.3 It was one of Baldwin’s rare failures in human relationships. There were understandable complications. He had been Chamberlain’s junior minister, and the rapid reversal of position, combined with Chamberlain’s habitual stiffness of manner, probably made his touch less sure than usual. In addition, Chamberlain was not willing to join the Government without Birkenhead, and Birkenhead was strongly disapproved of by the Conservative rank and file, both in the House and in the country, and particularly by those somewhat prim and self-righteous parts of it in which lay Baldwin’s greatest strength.
After three months of office Baldwin was not very happy either with his Cabinet or with the state of his party. His pleasure that Curzon had agreed to serve under him had quickly evaporated. He had got the weakest of the Coalitionists, and the one whose health was beginning to fail. In addition Curzon fairly soon reverted to his habit of complaining about the way in which he was treated by his Prime Minister.4 Altogether Baldwin, like most Prime Ministers who succeed a member of their own party during a Parliament, felt that he would be happier and stronger if he could make his own Cabinet afresh, and yet was inhibited from so doing.
More importantly, he felt uneasy with the pattern of politics. What Baldwin wanted was a reversion to the firm two-party system of his youth, but with the Labour Party securely established as a great party of state and the Liberal Party tucked up in the history books. He wanted Asquith on a pedestal and Lloyd George in an isolation hospital. He was much clearer in this view than any of his Conservative contemporaries. He had been almost the first to express his belief in the certainty of a future Labour Government.5 He wanted a reunited Conservative Party, with himself firmly in the saddle, sharing power on a somewhat unequal basis with a Labour Party purged of its extremists by the occasional responsibilities of office. He wanted no instability in the middle.