Baldwin (6 page)

My dear old David,

You and I and Miss Watson
³
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 made 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:

I have done something dreadful without consulting you. I do hope you won’t mind. I have been fearfully worried, but I felt that it had to come. I am resigning from the Cabinet. I shall never get a job again. I do hope you won’t mind fearfully, but I’ve said I cannot continue to serve under the G
⁷
any longer.

He then described the development of the Turkish situation and continued:

And then at a Cabinet meeting of Unionist Ministers it was decided to have the General Election and go to the country at once (without consulting any of the party) under the L.G. banner as Coalitionists. I arose and spoke and told them that I could not and would not do it. I must be free and stand as a Conservative; I could not serve under L.G. again. The rest of the Unionist Ministers were aghast and they were all apparently against me. At the next meeting of the Unionist Cabinet Ministers Boscawen
threw in his lot with me. Curzon was sympathetic, but that was all. So there it is. They will follow the G and I can’t, so it means I shall drop out of politics altogether.
⁴

Baldwin’s pessimism about the future was probably genuine, although totally misplaced. At any rate he took it sufficiently seriously to be anxious to resign and retreat to Worcestershire immediately, without waiting to see what forces might crystallize around him, and to make tentative plans for spending the winter abroad. In fact his position was very strong, and predictably so. The Coalition was not really a confluence of parties. It was Lloyd George pirouetting on the large base of the Conservative Party. And the overwhelming part of the base was tired of the dance. Baldwin had the support of the Chief Whip (Leslie Wilson)
⁸
; the Chairman of the Party (Younger
); the Chief Agent; Salisbury
and Derby, the Party’s two principal territorial magnates, although the latter as always was a little hesitant; the majority of Conservative junior ministers; a substantial but uncounted number of backbenchers; and the editor of
The Times.
⁹
As a team with which to go goat-hunting it was not quite so exiguous as he implied.