Baldwin (21 page)

Baldwin was uneasy about the reaction to the so-called pact, and became more so as a violent storm of influential criticism burst over his head. The editor of
The Times,
most of the bishops (even Lang
of Canterbury), and the whole of the liberal establishment were horrified at the sell-out. But there is no evidence that Baldwin rejected the agreement on its own merits. At Cabinets on 9, 10 and 11 December he cautiously defended it on the ground that Hoare must have known more than they did, and defended also the continuation of Hoare’s holiday, although this by then had become more of a matter of nursing than of recreation, for he had fallen on the ice and broken his nose in two places.

Baldwin had also to defend the pact in the House of Commons on 10 December. It was one of the worst-judged and least successful speeches of his life. No doubt in the circumstances success was impossible. Baldwin ought therefore to have had the self-discipline to mumble through an unmemorable failure. Instead he was led astray by the recollection of past triumphs. He raised the stakes when he could not win. He tried to repeat one of his dramatic and opinion-moving orations. ‘My lips are not yet unsealed, but if these troubles were over and I could make a full case I guarantee there is not a man that would go into the lobby against us.’
¹⁴
It was a ridiculous exaggeration and opinions were not moved. Worse still, ‘sealed lips’ became one of the political catch-phrases of the thirties. He had imprinted his failure on the public memory.

On 16 December Hoare returned to London, but was not well enough to leave his own house. That evening Baldwin called on him and told him, ‘We all stand together.’
¹⁵
The next day Neville Chamberlain called and rehearsed with him the defence which Hoare proposed to make to the House of Commons on Thursday, the 19th. At Cabinet on the Wednesday morning the Chancellor reported what the Foreign Secretary (still confined to his house) proposed to say. The members of the Cabinet said they would not have it. If Hoare did not resign, they would. Halifax, Baldwin’s most trusted colleague, delivered the
coup degrace.
The moral standing of the Government, he argued, was on trial before the world. If Hoare did not go, the Prime Minister would lose his personal position and ‘one of our national anchors would have dragged’.
¹⁶

This was decisive for Baldwin. He would sacrifice many things for a friend, but not his public reputation. He said little more to the Cabinet than that ‘it was a worse situation in the House of Commons than he had ever known’, but he got Chamberlain (a great man for doing the dirty jobs) to see Hoare again and present him with an impossible ultimatum. Either he abandoned his defence of his own conduct in favour of a complete recantation, or he had to go. When Hoare had decided on resignation, Baldwin himself (accompanied by Eden) went to see him and amiably asked him how he felt. ‘I wish I were dead,’ was Hoare’s discouraging response.
¹⁷

Even with the resignation in his pocket, Baldwin was still facing a nasty prospect in the House of Commons. The Labour Party had put down a vote of censure and there was much rumbling on the Tory backbenches. Austen Chamberlain, it was thought, might lead a substantial group into the lobby against the Government. Baldwin saw Chamberlain and said, ‘Austen, when Sam has gone I shall want to talk to you about the Foreign Office.’
¹⁸
Chamberlain, at seventy-two, could still be excited by the hint of a return to his old department. Once again, in Birkenhead’s phrase, he played the game, and once again he lost it. In the House the following day he seized on the
excuse that Attlee had impugned the Prime Minister’s honour
⁹
and called off his revolt. Then Baldwin saw him again and told him that were it not for his age and his health (neither of which had greatly changed in the preceding forty-eight hours), he would have offered him the vacancy, but as it was it had better go to Eden. Chamberlain, Baldwin suggested, might consider joining as a minister without portfolio.

Austen Chamberlain not merely declined, but did not subsequently forgive Baldwin. Ten days later he wrote to his sister saying that he had been asked to write an essay about Baldwin, but that he had refused, for he wished neither to lie nor to publish the truth, which he then proceeded to outline:

And we know him as self-centred, selfish and idle, yet one of the shrewdest politicians, but without a constructive idea in his head and with an amazing ignorance of Indian and foreign affairs and of the real values of political life. ‘Sly, Sir, devilishly sly!’ would be my chapter heading, and egotism and idleness the principal characteristics that I should assign to him.
¹⁹

When Chamberlain died, fifteen months later, Baldwin delivered one of the finest examples of his House of Commons
éloge
style. Characteristically he was reminded by the life of the old politician, product of Edgbaston, long-term resident of South Kensington, of the rhythms of the English countryside. With a still greater capacity for self-deception, he assured the House that Austen Chamberlain never had an unkind thought about any man.

The scars of the Hoare-Laval fiasco remained visible on
Baldwin for most of the next year. The incident, and his own weak, almost contemptible handling of it came near to making his third premiership seem to himself and others an ill-judged prolongation of power, a disastrous epilogue to the rest of his career. Throughout the remainder of the 1935-6 session he was exhausted, depressed and bereft of any reserve of prestige. Jones found him ‘very low’ in February. That same month, bowing to pressure, he agreed to appoint a Minister for the Coordination of Defence. Guilty, and with some cause, he wanted to bring Hoare back, but was persuaded it was too soon.
¹⁰
When he was then slow in announcing a name, Churchill enjoyed himself with the
mot
that ‘Baldwin has to find a man of inferior ability to himself, and this Herculean task requires time for its accomplishment.’ Eventually the appointment of the Attorney-General (Thomas Inskip
) was announced and received with a mixture of ridicule and dismay.

That spring Baldwin became manifestly deafer. He often could not hear questions in the House of Commons and had to have them repeated to him by Margesson,
his Chief Whip. When he made a successful speech to the Conservative backbench committee it was a matter of surprised comment. His most popular decision of 1936 was to fix the date of his own retirement, which was to be in May 1937.

In June, with eleven months still to go, he was told by his doctor that his state of nervous exhaustion was such that if he did not immediately take a week’s rest at Chequers (which with Parliament sitting inevitably involved a public announcement) he would not survive without collapse until the end of July. During this enforced week, even the faithful and normally encouraging Davidson wrote to tell him that ‘Every mongrel is yapping, believing that a very tired fox has gone to ground at Chequers, with no fight left in him.’
²⁰
He got back for July, but only to complain of ‘the day-to-day badgering’ to which he was subjected in the House of Commons. It sounded more like
MacDonald than the old parliamentary master. He was pressed to reduce the size of the Cabinet, but hopelessly excused himself to Jones: ‘I have told Neville he may be able to do something. I cannot… I am too tired for any fresh effort.’
²¹

At the beginning of August he left for a two and a half months’ rest at sequestered Welsh and English houses.
¹¹
He was too exhausted even to go to Aix. His one piece of good fortune that summer was that he resisted (for the second time) strong pressure from Jones for a meeting with Hitler. Lethargy had its advantages. His premiership appeared not so much to be running out as running down. Few believed that when he came back in the autumn he would be able to do more than coast gently and desultorily along for another six months. As it happened, the reality turned out to be quite different. There was a last turn-up for Baldwin’s book.

King George V died on 20 January 1936. Although the quietness of his end was made memorable by Reith’s BBC announcement that ‘the King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close’, there had been no long-term illness during which an early change of reign had been accepted and prepared for. The King was only just over seventy, and he had been well enough to make one of his ‘bluff Englishman’s’ jokes about the Hoare
débâcle
,
¹
to spend his usual Christmas and New Year in the Norfolk countryside, and to deliver his Christmas broadcast from there. He did not see Baldwin after he became ill, although he held a Privy Council on the morning of the day of his death.

Had the pattern of the King’s demise been different, so too might have been the whole shape of the end of Baldwin’s premiership. It is now clear that the King had the gravest doubts about the general suitability of his heir for the Throne, and that these doubts went far enough to turn his mind towards the desirability of getting his second son to succeed instead. His thoughts were matched by those of Baldwin and of the other senior ministers. From the beginning they had a solid lack of confidence in King Edward VIII. ‘S.B. is distinctly nervous about him,’ Jones recorded on the first day of the new reign.
¹
And at the Accession Council that same afternoon, Baldwin told Attlee, to whom he was not close, that he doubted
whether the King would ‘stay the course’. It was not merely Mrs Simpson, although ministers were already well-informed about his relationship with her, if not his marital intentions. It was his general attitude of irresponsibility, selfishness, and dislike for any of the functions of kingship other than easy popularity and personal privilege. Nor were these feelings of unease confined to Baldwin. Neville Chamberlain, always more censorious and more practical, produced a detailed memorandum, early in the reign, suggesting that the Government should submit to the new King a general programme for the improvement of tone, including the wearing of darker suits.

A meeting of minds between the old King and his Prime Minister (fortified by the support of Chamberlain, Baldwin’s clear successor) might not therefore have been difficult to achieve. But it would have required a conversation between them in circumstances when the subject of an imminent new reign could naturally have been discussed. And a remaining obstacle to firm dealing with the Prince of Wales would have been Baldwin’s deep-rooted distaste for grasping nettles which were not pushed into his hands. Perhaps it would have been necessary, in order to eliminate the reign of King Edward VIII, not merely for King George V to have lived a few months under the sentence of death, but for Neville Chamberlain, never one for tolerant inactivity whatever his other faults, to have succeeded MacDonald in 1935. Neither of these events occurred. Baldwin was therefore left reluctantly with the responsibility, in his own words, ‘of having to take charge of the Prince as King’.
²
This was a substantial cause of his low spirits during much of 1936. He thought there was trouble ahead, but he was disinclined to do anything about it before he had to. He noted gloomily that when he dined with the King in May the Simpsons were both present, and that when another semi-political dinner party was given in July Mrs Simpson was announced in the Court Circular as being present alone without her husband. The movement was unfavourable but the position not yet critical.