Baldwin (19 page)

Davidson recorded his own position in his draft memoirs:

Earlier in the month I had been strongly against any idea of coalition…. But the situation was now so
critical, and the time for restoring confidence so short, that, very reluctantly, I agreed that each Party must sink its political programme temporarily and combine to pursue an economic policy to save the nation from bankruptcy. What influence I had with S.B. was now used to persuade him of the wisdom of this course.
⁴

Davidson had of course great opportunity for influence upon Baldwin, and he used it to the full on this occasion. In the late afternoon of 21 August, he crossed to Paris and joined Baldwin at the Ritz shortly before midnight. They talked until one. The next day he accompanied Baldwin back to London, and upon arrival took him to his house in Westminster. After dinner the leading Conservatives arrived. Davidson’s account was as follows:

The discussions at my house that evening were inconclusive. S.B. was deeply reluctant to envisage a new coalition. He had destroyed one and did not wish to form another. Neville Chamberlain became very impatient with S.B.’s attitude. He made it quite clear that he could see no other way out of the situation. S.B. agreed that if that was indeed the case it would be his duty to take part in it. It was clear, however, that he was still very worried about the whole idea.
⁵

Hoare confirmed this view of Baldwin’s state of mind.
²
Baldwin gave him the impression ‘that the last thing in the world that he wished was either a return to office or the end of his holiday…. Only if a National Government was really inevitable was he willing to take his part in it. Chamberlain and I were inclined to be impatient when we saw him so reluctant to take the only course which seemed to us possible.’
⁶

Baldwin’s reluctance had therefore to be set against a formidable
opposition which had been allowed to solidify and organize itself in his absence. He was determined at least to discuss it with his friend Geoffrey Dawson,
the editor of
The Times,
before entering into commitment. The following morning he went to Dawson’s house, thereby missing a telephone call from the King’s private secretary asking him to go to the Palace before luncheon (it is not clear why the message was not passed on). As a result the King, who was consulting the opposition leaders with MacDonald’s approval, saw Samuel before he saw Baldwin. Samuel argued strongly and persuasively in favour of a National as opposed to a purely Conservative Government, and considerably influenced a receptive King.

Baldwin did not get the King’s message until he arrived at the Travellers’ Club for lunch. He then went to the Palace at three. The King asked him if he would serve in a National Government under MacDonald. Had he been there earlier he might have been asked a less direct question. But once it was asked, his whole character and political stance gave him little alternative but to say ‘yes’. He must, in any event, have felt that the pressures were foreclosing the issue against his original instinct. The King recorded that he was ‘greatly pleased with Mr Baldwin’s readiness to meet the crisis which had arisen, and to sink Party interests for the sake of the Country.’
⁷
It is only necessary to reverse the meaning of the sentence to realize how difficult it would have been for Baldwin to have given a negative answer. Thus, against his better, earlier judgment, the decisive step was taken towards the damaging decade-long distortion of the political pattern. It came about through a mixture of chance, his own predeliction for holidays, and Neville Chamberlain’s effective, narrow-sighted determination.

There still remained the question of whether MacDonald would fill his essential part in the new arrangement. Probably, after the discussions of the Friday evening, there was not much real doubt about the outcome. But it appeared otherwise at the time. That same Sunday, in the evening, there was played out in the Cabinet Room the sad farce of waiting for the telegram of conditions for the line of credit from Morgans’ in New York, relayed through the Bank of England, and containing when it came the terms which were wanted by MacDonald and Snow-den, but which were anathema to half the Cabinet. On that the final split occurred. MacDonald said he would report to the King, and advise a Palace conference of the three party leaders for the following morning. He asked for and received the resignations of his Cabinet; it was not clear whether they included his own.

Later that night MacDonald saw the other party leaders in Downing Street. Davidson, who talked to Baldwin immediately afterwards, recorded as follows:

It was quite clear that he [MacDonald] intended to resign and that he had no intention of joining in a Coalition, even though the King had urged him to lead one. Neville, however, pressed on him the support in the country that he would bring to such an administration and the effect it would have in restoring confidence. His arguments seemed to have no effect. To every one else at the meeting it seemed quite clear that MacDonald intended to resign, and S.B. returned from it convinced that he would have to form a Government. Nor did he think this a bad thing since, as I had emphasised before, he had little love for Coalitions.
⁸

By the next morning MacDonald had changed his mind. In a half-hour audience the King’s new National Government was created. Afterwards the three leaders spent an hour and a half agreeing upon heads of terms. These stated explicitly that the Government would last only for the emergency, and that any subsequent elections would be fought not by the Government as a whole but by the parties. Over the next six weeks this decision was gradually and ineluctably reversed.

A small Cabinet of ten—four Conservatives, four former Labour ministers and two Liberals—was quickly set up.
Baldwin became Lord President of the Council and number three in the Cabinet list (Sankey,
the Lord Chancellor, was above him). The only
douceur
which he asked for and obtained was 11 Downing Street. ‘It was very comfortable,’ he surprisingly recorded, ‘and I could always keep my eye on the Prime Minister.’
⁹
More to the point was that it was some compensation for the lower salary. His three Conservative colleagues were Hoare, Cunliffe-Lister and Neville Chamberlain. The last, the real architect of the Government, accepted tenth place in his old post of Minister of Health. After the autumn election, however, he succeeded Snowden as Chancellor, and remained at the Treasury, manifestly the second man in the Conservative Party, for longer than anyone since Lloyd George. His brother Austen, affronted by the lack of respect paid to his seniority, reluctantly accepted the Admiralty outside the Cabinet. Churchill was left out altogether.

Despite these demotions and exclusions there was little trouble with the Conservative Party over the actions which its leaders had taken, inevitably without much consultation. The party was delighted to have got its hands back on to the levers of power and to have smashed the Labour Party in the process. There were a few growls from Amery, who had also been excluded, but not much more. A party meeting carried unanimously a resolution of approval.

There then followed the abandonment of the gold standard, which the Government had been formed to preserve, several weeks of parliamentary rancour, and a dissolution on 7 October for an election on 27 October. The Government had failed to agree on a programme: Baldwin was for protection; Samuel was against it; and MacDonald asked for ‘a doctor’s mandate’. But they had agreed, contrary to all the intention and undertakings of August, to stick together and to crush the organizationally solid but bewildered and leader-bereft Labour Party by the ruthless exploitation of popular fear. The campaign was far from glorious, audiences were sullen rather than enthusiastic, but the result sensational. At the 1931 election
the Labour Party retained only one in six of the seats they had won in 1929. The supporters of the Government totalled 556, of whom 472 were Conservatives. It was the largest Conservative Party which the House of Commons has ever seen. It compared with 338 Conservative members of the 1918 Coalition Parliament and 396 after the 1983 general election. But the result left Baldwin in essentially the position that he had found so objectionable when held by Austen Chamberlain in 1922. He was the leader of by far the largest party, yet he felt committed by the Buckingham Palace arrangement to another Prime Minister. There was however one important difference. Ramsay MacDonald, unlike Lloyd George, was hardly ‘that very terrible thing—a dynamic force’. He was soon to become a pathetic old man.

Baldwin himself was also ageing. He was sixty-five in August 1932, the first summer of the National Government, and celebrated his birthday in the midst of the wearisome bargaining of the Ottawa Imperial Preference Conference. He was leading a delegation of remarkable size: no less than seven members of the Cabinet made the six-week trip. Despite this support Baldwin found the heat, the ceremonial and the oratory oppressive, and the atmosphere uninspiring. He often talked about the Empire, but its reality (save only perhaps for India, which he never visited) did not inspire him. He was glad to escape from Ottawa to Aix. Tom Jones found him getting deaf in 1932, and thought this resulted in his missing remarks to an extent which affected his political judgment. Otherwise his physical condition held up remarkably well. During his Aix holiday he could still walk for three or four (and occasionally even for six) hours a day. In England he was much less energetic.

There was no question of MacDonald following Bonar Law’s example and giving him Chequers.
³
He was as addicted to
its Chiltern charms as was Baldwin himself. They both, to an extent not subsequently equalled until the era of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, regarded it as the most agreeable perquisite of the premiership. Baldwin thought Astley was too far to go for weekends, and he was too poor at that stage to rent a Home Counties house. Nor did he much approve of subjecting himself to the nervous exhaustion of house parties as other peoples’ guest. (A few years later he was to complain about Eden wearing himself out by this frivolity.) He was therefore reduced to spending most of his weekends during the session in what were then the fairly cramped quarters of 11 Downing Street and what, then as more recently, was its unrestful and unrefreshing atmosphere.

Despite this deprivation, and despite the fact that the difference in their age was only a year, he survived the early and mid-1930s much better than did MacDonald. Even so, it took ‘Ramshackle Mac’ (a
sobriquet
bestowed by his friend Lady Londonderry) a few years after 1931 to achieve the full splendour of his hopelessness. Samuel, who had sharply critical judgment, thought that he presided well over the Cabinet in the first year of the Government, prepared himself carefully for its meetings and prevented ‘knots or tangles … from being drawn tight’.
¹⁰

Baldwin was an important but fairly silent auxiliary to MacDonald. The composition of the Cabinet, when it returned to a normal size after the 1931 election, was eleven Conservatives, five Liberals and four former Labour ministers. After the Ottawa Agreements provoked the resignation of Snowden and the free trade Liberals in September 1932, the ratio shifted to 12:3:3. In these circumstances the leader of the Conservative Party naturally enjoyed a general influence in the Government greater than normally belongs to anyone other than the Prime Minister. But it would be a mistake to believe that from the beginning Baldwin exercised all the power and merely allowed MacDonald to sit in impotent glory in 10 Downing Street. On ministerial appointments, for instance, while he made
MacDonald change his intentions in a number of cases, he did not do so without occasional complaint from the Prime Minister, and continuing give and take between the two leaders. Any National Labour figure (they had great scarcity value) was absolutely safe in his office. Sankey (the Lord Chancellor) and J. H. Thomas survived longer than would have been likely had they been Conservatives.