Baldwin (10 page)

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,’
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he wrote to his brother after a visit to the new Prime Minister at Chequers.
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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.
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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.
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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.

The two threats to this development which he saw in that late summer of 1923 were Lloyd George and unemployment. Unemployment, which had risen beyond 2 million with the collapse of the post-war boom, had settled back to about 1 ½ million. This was much higher than pre-war figures, and there seemed little prospect, on existing policies, of any significant decline. Indeed the position of coal, still by far Britain’s largest industry, was artificially and temporarily favourable because of the French occupation of the Ruhr.

Baldwin disliked the level of unemployment both for its own sake and because he believed it worked against the evolution of a moderate Labour Party. In common with most of his contemporaries, he comprehended few methods by which governments could affect the total of demand. The best that could be done was to influence its shape in a way that gave the greatest help to the home market. This meant protection. But protection also meant an early election, for Bonar Law had given a pledge a year earlier that there would be no fundamental change in fiscal arrangements without another appeal to the country.

Lloyd George was about to go to America, but Baldwin believed that, on his return in late October, unless pre-empted, he would play the protectionist card. Certainly Lloyd George had never been a doctrinaire free-trader. Nor had he ever allowed such doctrines as had influenced him to sit too heavily upon his shoulders. And if he went protectionist while the Government havered, his attraction for the dissident Conservatives would become still stronger.

Baldwin contemplated all this at Aix, and made up his mind both to go for protection and to put at risk the first independent
Conservative majority for two decades. About the time and place of this extraordinarily bold decision there seems little doubt. Baldwin confirmed it twenty years later, when he wrote to Tom Jones from the depths of his retirement: ‘I spent a lot of my holiday in 1923 walking in the hills around Aix and thought it all out by myself. I came to the decision by myself and how I drove that Cabinet to take the plunge I shall never know! I must have more push than people think….’
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By itself this statement, unequivocal though it was, could not be regarded as decisive evidence. Even the most honest of men find it surprisingly easy, through the film of time, to recall their own actions quite differently from the way in which objective evidence makes it clear they in fact occurred. And Baldwin in 1943, isolated and unpopular, might well have been tempted, as the tone of his note indeed suggests, to exaggerate his erstwhile capacity for independent decision. But the objective evidence is here on his side. And so is the subjective evidence. He had decided at Aix the year before to break one mould. His decision had been triumphantly vindicated. Now, once more, he found an uncomfortable mould setting around him. It was naturally tempting for a rather superstitious man to trust again to an intuitive judgment of his own made in much the same circumstances as in the previous year.

What is much more difficult to know is what were his motives for the decision, and what he expected to be the likely outcome. Was it the pattern of politics or the future of Britain’s trading arrangements which he wished primarily to influence? If the former, then the decision, after a nerve-testing time-lag, was a brilliant success. Within fifteen months he secured a reunited Conservative Party, which gave him the longest uninterrupted party premiership between Asquith and Attlee, the final reduction to a rump of the Liberal Party, and a brief, innocuous baptism of power for the Labour Party. The centre party was dead, Lloyd George was coralled, and the Labour front bench had become a collection of respectable Privy Councillors. It was everything for which he could have asked.

If, on the other hand, it was the freedom to use protection as a weapon against unemployment with which he was primarily concerned, the decision was a disastrous failure. It set back this possibility for nearly a decade, until after the slump had sent unemployment to twice the ‘unacceptable’ level of 1923 and the pattern of politics had once again been changed.

The difficulty in determining the motive for Baldwin’s decision is that he was himself as contradictory about this as he was clear about where and how he took it. In public he put it all on unemployment. In his October speech to the Conservative Party Conference at Plymouth, in which he announced his new position, he said:

To me, at least, the unemployment problem is the most critical problem of our country. I can fight it. I am willing to fight it. I cannot fight it without weapons…. I have come to the conclusion myself that the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market.
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No doubt at this stage and in public he could hardly have said anything else. But at the beginning of 1925, he changed the emphasis and told the Constitutional Club that it was a long-meditated move to reunite the Conservative Party. Ten years after that he put the main weight on Lloyd George, and told Tom Jones:

The Goat was in America. He was on the water when I made the speech and the Liberals did not know what to say. I had information he was going protectionist and I had to get in quick…. Dished the Goat, as otherwise he would have got the Party with Austen and F.E. [Birkenhead] and there would have been an end to the Tory Party as we know it.
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In 1943, however, Baldwin again switched back to the economic motive. ‘I wanted it’, he concluded the note already
quoted, ‘because I saw no other weapon then to use in the fight against unemployment.’

Davidson, who was probably the closest of Baldwin’s confidents at the time and who also had the advantage of being present at Aix, was equally muddled in his explanations. This may have been because, according to Jones, he attracted most of the blame. In addition he was peculiarly dissatisfied with the outcome of the election, which led to his losing his own, nominally safe, Conservative seat. He put forward the unconvincing view that an election was never part of the plan. Baldwin merely intended to fly a policy kite at Plymouth. Davidson gave the reasons for the kite-flying as partly Lloyd George and partly unemployment.

There is, of course, no reason why Baldwin should have been influenced by one motive to the exclusion of others. It is reasonable, indeed usual, to hope that several consequences will flow from a chosen course of action. But it is desirable to know, in one’s own mind at least, what is the primary objective. One disadvantage of intuitive decision-making, or of ‘leaps in the dark’ if Birkenhead’s phraseology is preferred, is that it is not always clear what they are intended to achieve.

The decision once taken, however, Baldwin proceeded to implement it with force and speed. The process illustrated the powers resident in even an untried and hitherto hesitant Prime Minister. There was certain to be a good deal of opposition in the Cabinet. There was indeed something bizarre about the idea that protection was the way to unite the Conservative Party. The issue had been a principal if intermittent source of internal dispute and disruption for the past twenty years. But it ought at least to inspire both the Chamberlains and some others as well.

Baldwin told his Chancellor during the first weekend of October, and then proceeded to consult in ones or twos with other members of the Cabinet, the traditional free traders -Salisbury, Derby, Devonshire and Novar—as well as the natural protectionists—Amery
and Hoare.
He did not meet with
much enthusiasm, except from Neville Chamberlain and Amery, but his methods were fairly successful in avoiding the organization of any hostile cabal. The notable exception to his process of consultation was the Foreign Secretary. Curzon did not have any very fixed position on the issue, but he was naturally furious when he discovered the extent of his exclusion. He talked about ‘the arbitrary fiat of one weak and ignorant man’. But his influence was in sharp decline, which was no doubt the reason why Baldwin, despite his talk earlier that year about Curzon’s ‘streak of pure gold’, treated him as he did.

The Cabinet did not collectively consider the matter until 22 October, only three days before Baldwin’s speech at Plymouth. This, with the path smoothed by prior discussion, had the predictable effect of strengthening the Prime Minister’s position. He had to speak. He could not be expected to do so against his own beliefs. The best that could be done was to find a formula which, compatibly with this, gave something to the minority. It took the form of Baldwin agreeing only to speak for himself and of leaving open the question of an election. Concentration upon the working out of this formula had the effect of almost wholly avoiding any serious consideration of the central issue. ‘However the discussion happily turned very soon on to the question of procedure,’ Amery recorded, ‘and the desirability, in which we all concurred, of the statement being so framed as to avoid our being pushed into a general election this autumn.’
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It was an almost perfect example of how, provided his colleagues have no desire to humiliate him, a Prime Minister can get his way against the better judgment of most of them.

In fact the limitations which Baldwin accepted on this occasion were almost meaningless. Although there is some doubt as to whether or not he appreciated this, he could not commit himself without in practice committing his party—unless he was to be replaced. And as the Conservative Party was already on its third leader within thirteen months, this did not begin to
be likely. So far as the avoidance of an election commitment was concerned, this would have been sensible from any point of view. There was no possible reason why he should have wished at that stage to foreclose his options between December and January, or January and the spring. And he could accept the limitation in the knowledge that, when it comes to the point, one of the clearest prerogatives of a Prime Minister is that of choosing the date of an election.