Baldwin (12 page)

The virtual destruction of the Liberal Party almost completed the political pattern which he had hoped for since the previous autumn.’… I did not think it would come so quickly,’ he told Tom Jones on 4 November. ‘The next step must be the elimination of the Communists by Labour. Then we shall have two
parties, the party of the Right, and the party of the Left.’
¹⁶
He had just been to the Palace to kiss hands as Prime Minister for the second time.

He turned to Cabinet-making. His position was quite different from that of 1923. He had won his own victory. He had the prospect of four years or so of uninterrupted power. He could build his own Government with few debts or commitments. And he had at his disposal almost an embarrassment rather than a shortage of political experience. He approached his task, as Austen Chamberlain noted, with a new firmness and confidence. But on the whole he discharged it badly.

He started well by making it clear to a shocked and protesting Curzon that he could not again be Foreign Secretary. In his place he put Austen Chamberlain, although a little more by accident than design, for Baldwin had offered him the choice between that and the India Office. When Chamberlain chose the senior office, Birkenhead got India.

The domestic appointments were more eccentric. Neville Chamberlain was naturally offered a return to the Treasury. With a lack of concern for place which was worthy of his father, he said he would rather be Minister of Health.
¹⁰
Baldwin then inclined to Sir Samuel Hoare for the Chancellorship. Neville Chamberlain suggested Churchill. It was an extraordinary suggestion to come from a man who was normally so sensitive to Conservative Party opinion. Churchill had only recently rejoined the party. Eight months before he had fought as an independent against an official Conservative at a bye-election in the Abbey division of Westminster. Moreover he knew nothing about finance, and had no discernible claim to so senior an appointment. What was equally extraordinary was that Baldwin jumped at the idea. Ten minutes later—another leap in the dark—he offered the appointment to Churchill. Churchill, who at first thought it was the Chancellorship of the
Duchy of Lancaster which was the proposition and for which he would happily have settled, accepted the greater post with tears in his eyes and an expression of grateful loyalty. ‘You have done more for me than Lloyd George ever did,’ he said.
¹⁷
So, indeed, Baldwin had. He had also paid a substantial price for the pleasure, not merely of looking at the corpse of the idea of a centre party, but of stamping upon it several times over.

He made Joynson-Hicks
(good on penal reform but illiberal on all else) Home Secretary, and thus firmly launched the Home Office, which had been different in the days of Harcourt, Asquith and Churchill, upon a course of dour obscurantism from which it took three or four decades to recover. His worst mistake was at the Ministry of Labour, which, foreseeably, turned out to be the crucial sector of his Government’s battlefront. He appointed Steel-Maitland,
another ten-minute decision, after Horne had refused, despite the fact that he told Tom Jones he had spent eighteen months contemplating the importance of the post: ‘Neville recommended S-M. He is able enough—got all those Firsts at Oxford—but is he human enough? … He will do well administering the Office, but I am frankly afraid of him in the House.’ The outcome (perhaps this would have happened whoever had been at the Ministry of Labour) was that most of the principal figures of the Government devoted a good part of their time to assisting Steel-Maitland in his job.

Baldwin’s other error was not to include Balfour. That magnificent old cat of British politics was seventy-six. But as he was brought in six months later when Curzon died, age was hardly a reason for excluding him from an office without portfolio in 1924. Hankey,
the Secretary of the Cabinet, thought it was because he gave Baldwin ‘a certain sense of
gaucherie
and inferiority’.
¹⁸

So Balfour did to many people. But Baldwin had less occasion to feel it than most. He may have constructed his Cabinet a little amiss, but he had constructed his power-base superbly. After an uneasy eighteen months he was in a stronger position than any Conservative leader since Lord Salisbury.

Baldwin’s second premiership lasted four and a half years. It was the second longest period of party power, uninterrupted by either an election or a change of leadership, of this century.
¹
It was also a government of great stability of men in offices. Baldwin was perhaps the last Prime Minister to treat his Cabinet colleagues, as Gladstone had done, as members of a college of cardinals. Once nominated, he had to live with them. He would no more have thought of behaving as Harold Macmillan did in 1962, and dismissing nearly a half of them as though they were junior executives in an ailing company, than it would have occurred to him to divorce his wife and marry one of his walking companions. Nor did he shuffle them around, as an almost annual political gymkhana, in the way that Harold Wilson did. Once a minister in the main Baldwin Government, you were there, and in the same office, for the duration. Only death or impending death (Curzon and Cave), acute shortage of money and the need to seek the sustenance of the City (Birkenhead), a policy resignation (Cecil of Chelwood
), or appointment as Viceroy of India (Edward Wood, later Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax
) produced changes. For the rest, the only variety was provided by the decision of the President of the Board of Trade, somewhat eccentrically as it now appears, to change his name from Lloyd-Greame to Cunliffe-Lister.
2

This did not mean that there were no undulations in Baldwin’s relations with his Cabinet. With the exception of Bridgeman,
the First Lord of the Admiralty, it is doubtful whether he was on close personal terms with any of them. Neville Chamberlain, the Minister of Health, would probably, and with justice, have been his choice as the most efficient minister. There was a close working partnership between them, in governments and in opposition, for fifteen years, but it was untinted by much mutual affection or even comprehension. Chamberlain was constantly irritated by Baldwin’s whimsical and indolent manner.
³
He forgave it only because of his party loyalty and his equally constant recognition, honest, reluctant, surprised, of the value to the Conservative Party of Baldwin’s unique position in the country.

The Cabinet member of whom Baldwin’s opinion rose most rapidly was Birkenhead. He trusted him on India, but also used him on the most sensitive domestic issues. When Birkenhead left office in 1928, Baldwin accepted his resignation with a reluctance which was convincing because honestly expressed: ‘We shall part, on my side at least, with a feeling of personal regret which I could not have believed possible four years ago.’
¹
Birkenhead, who had written after the victory of 1924 of ‘the tragedy that so great an Army should have so uninspiring a Commander in Chief’ and was usually more sparing with his admiration than with his criticism, allowed some balancing increase of his own regard for Baldwin to occur. But it stopped well short of friendship. He would hardly have been a natural companion for the Prime Minister, Mrs Baldwin and Tom
Jones during a quiet evening of patience in the Long Gallery at Chequers.

The same was substantially true of Churchill. But he and the Prime Minister saw each other frequently, although rarely on social occasions. The Chancellor’s headquarters were then Queen Anne’s Throne Room in what is now the Cabinet Office, and the nearest route to it from 11 Downing Street lay through the connecting doors of number 10. It became the Chancellor’s habit to interrupt his morning procession to work for a few minutes of Cabinet Room conversation with the Prime Minister. It was a habit which helped to avoid any major personal quarrels between them until after the demise of the Government. This was despite the fact that Churchill, amazingly for a new and over-rewarded recruit to the Conservative Party who twelve years before had nearly broken up the Asquith Cabinet with his demand for a larger navy, began his Chancellorship by presenting an importunate demand to the Admiralty ministers (who were Baldwin’s closest friends in the Government -Davidson was the junior minister) for a slashing of the cruiser replacement programme. A major Cabinet dispute rumbled on for nearly a year. Resignations, both of ministers and of admirals but not of the Chancellor, were threatened. Eventually there was a settlement which leant in the Admiralty direction. Churchill had shown himself as kaleidoscopic as he was departmentally combative. He brought with him into the Treasury few old prejudices beyond the self-confidence of his conviction that whatever he believed in at a particular time was right.