Baldwin (3 page)

Baldwin presided over a vastly unequal society and somewhat stagnant economy disfigured by pockets of appalling poverty (but so, it must be said, did Lloyd George and Asquith
before him and MacDonald alongside him) and did so with some complacency. But his record on unemployment was incomparably better than Mrs Thatcher’s, and he witnessed no such precipitate decline of Britain’s relative wealth as occurred between 1958 and 1973.

So we come to the third issue and what became the major count against Baldwin: that he closed his eyes to the threat of Hitler, neglected his country’s defences, and was only narrowly saved by the subsequent exertions of others from being responsible for the end of a thousand years of independent British history. This was the view which, when Chamberlain’s death in late 1940 removed the protection for Baldwin of having a rival in obloquy, was well propagated by mostly left-wing journalists, ruined the latter part of Baldwin’s retirement, appeared to be endorsed in Churchill’s
The Gathering Storm,
and was inadequately refuted by G. M. Young.

Should such a refutation have been provided by a more friendly and less barren biographer? It could not have been done on the ground that Baldwin did not carry the full responsibility for defence policy. Apart from the residual responsibility which must always rest with someone who held his high position, defence was one of the subjects, together with the management of the House of Commons and India, with the supervision of which he was specifically charged and was supposed to occupy his time, even while MacDonald was still Prime Minister.

Nor could it be refuted on the ground that Baldwin was a resolute anti-appeaser and that, had he remained in office instead of handing over to Neville Chamberlain, the dictators would have been met with a stern front of British resistance. Baldwin would not have pursued appeasement with the self-righteous energy which Chamberlain devoted to it. He would not have excoriated its opponents in the way that Chamberlain did. More important, he would never have clambered three times into a small aeroplane, in September 1938, to fly twice to Bavaria and once to the Rhineland.

We would therefore have been spared both the pretence that Munich was an agreement for peace and not a surrender, and the attendant foolishness of waving a piece of paper and talking about ‘peace with honour’. Baldwin’s lethargy had indeed already brought him one bonus before he retired. In the summer of 1936, Tom Jones (see
page 144
infra
) had tried hard to persuade him to take a German holiday and see Hitler in the course of it. That was not Baldwin’s idea of a holiday, even when he was feeling more vigorous than in that summer. Assisted by Eden’s opposition, he wisely declined. The advantage of this immobility was that, unlike his old enemy Lloyd George, his old protégé Edward Halifax, and his successor Neville Chamberlain, he was never in danger of succumbing to Hitler’s meretricious charm. The disadvantage was that it made it easier for him to avert his mind from foreign disagreeable-ness.

Baldwin’s objection to Chamberlain’s foreign policy, however, stemmed almost entirely from style and not from substance. This came out clearly in his ineffective House of Lords speech on the Munich Agreement. There is no reason to think that he would have been prepared to fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938 any more than he was prepared to fight to prevent Hitler moving into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936 (for which cause, it must be said, hardly anyone wanted him to contemplate fighting).

The ‘low case’ for Munich, as opposed to the totally indefensible ‘high case’ which Chamberlain theatrically presented on his return, is that it was a necessary but inglorious delay: necessary because at that stage British forces lacked the strength to fight Germany, and the Dominions lacked the will to do so; inglorious because it involved the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. This ‘low case’ was well deployed in Iain Macleod’s
Neville Chamberlain
(1961). In part it is damaging to Chamberlain, because it is wholly incompatible with the ‘high case’, which he did not hesitate to deploy, the claim that he was a prince of peace who had brought back a brilliant and honourable
diplomatic settlement from Germany. In part, and perhaps the more important part, however, it is damaging to Baldwin. He was not responsible for the attitude of the Dominions in 1938, although it could be argued that had he talked more to their Prime Ministers about the ‘dismal subjects’ of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, and a little less about the Abdication, they might not have required the extra year of shock before they were prepared to go to war in 1939. What he was much more clearly responsible for was the relative deterioration in British arms, so sharp that while the Germans could not have fought against the British (and French) at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in early 1936, the British (and French) could not fight against the Germans in late 1938. If this was a valid excuse for temporizing at Munich, the blame must rest with Baldwin. The decisions (or non-decisions) which determined the level of British preparedness in September 1938 were taken prior to his resignation in late May 1937.

Baldwin cannot therefore be acquitted of the charge that, during the period when he was indisputably in general charge of defence policy, either as Lord President and the leader of the biggest party in the coalition or as Prime Minister, the most menacing regime in modern European history, easily eclipsing in this respect those of both Napoleon and the Kaiser, was allowed to move on to a track of military superiority. The defence that remains is that no alternative Prime Minister would have done any better. It is not by its nature a strong one. Politicians get the credit when things go well, even if accidentally, under their stewardship. It is not usual to challenge the war-winning records of Lloyd George or Churchill on the grounds that Lord Milner or Lord Woolton might have done the jobs quicker. By analogy, it is not therefore reasonable to exculpate Baldwin on the ground that on the firm evidence of their public statements a government under Attlee or Samuel (the Liberal leader) would have been still slower to rearm, and that an earlier Chamberlain premiership would
certainly not have produced a greater national resistance to the dictators. He had the responsibility. They did not.

There was of course one other ‘alternative’ Prime Minister available throughout the thirties. That was Churchill. It was not a very realistic alternative, in the sense that hardly anyone considered it remotely likely. But as he was there, the most senior (in terms of offices held) of all living politicians except for Lloyd George, eager for power, and in Downing Street within three years of Baldwin’s retirement, he cannot be wholly excluded from consideration. D. C. Somervell’s defence of Baldwin did not attempt to do so. He set himself to argue that had Churchill become Prime Minister in 1933 it would not necessarily have made all that much difference, and would certainly not have automatically prevented ‘the Unnecessary War’, as Churchill chose subsequently to call it.

Parts of Somervell’s argument are convincing, but the whole is not. An earlier Churchill Government might easily not have avoided war, might have faltered over Abyssinia and again over Spain, might not have successfully stiffened the French, might have bungled parts of the rearmament programme. But it is nonetheless impossible to believe that it would not have provided a different, more urgent, less comfortable note of leadership, which would have led to an earlier strengthening of our defences and resistance to Hitler.

At the very least the whole national tone would have been different. Baldwin always believed in letting policies flow from national moods and in helping to create such moods by the tone of his speeches. It is therefore reasonable substantially to judge his defence policy by the most memorable passages of his speeches on the subject. There are three which are preeminent. The first was on 10 November 1932, when he told the House of Commons, ‘the bomber will always get through,’ and added, ‘the only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.’
¹
The message was perfectly sensible (a good deal more so than President Reagan’s claims
for SDI), yet intangibly defeatist. It became a recipe for hopelessness rather than for action.

The second (it was the third chronologically, but as its thought was retrospective it fits more naturally into second place) was his ‘appalling frankness’ speech, again to the House of Commons. Describing the mood at the East Fulham by-election in October 1933, he said: ‘Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, does anyone think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment. I can think of nothing that would have made the loss of the [general] election from my point of view more certain.’
²

The third was in the run-up to the general election of 1935, when on 31 October he addressed the Peace Society. ‘I give you my word’, he said, ‘that there will be no great armaments.’ The phrase was well drafted to leave room for manoeuvre, but by no stretch of the imagination did it sound a clarion call for preparedness. It fitted in well with the other two speeches. The ‘pacific democracy’ was to be massaged and nudged, but not challenged. The nudging was in the right direction, but it was not heroic. It was a method of leadership for which a case can always be argued. But it is not the only method. Not only was it not Churchill’s, it was not Gladstone’s, or Lloyd George’s or Gaitskell’s. Arguably, however, it was Franklin Roosevelt’s, so it cannot be dismissed as being only that of petty politicians or leaders who are below the level of events. It did not serve Britain well in the mid-thirties. But it is not different from the way in which at least forty of the forty-eight Prime Ministers since Walpole would have behaved. Baldwin, like Asquith, was unlucky in having to engage at the end of his career with major events to the handling of which his talents were ill-suited. This engagement cannot be held to enhance his reputation. It should not be allowed to destroy it.

Baldwin’s political career is of a deceptive shape. At first sight it looks almost perfectly balanced, fitting into the inter-war decades like a bordered picture into a frame. He first joined a Cabinet in March 1921, two years and four months after the Armistice. His last day as Prime Minister was 28 May 1937, two years and three months before the start of the Second War. He assumed the highest office at fifty-five. He voluntarily relinquished it on the eve of seventy, the only man of this century to have been Prime Minister three times.
¹
He died at eighty, after a full span of the retired leisure for which he had so frequently sighed, both publicly and privately.

Yet the appearance of perfect shape is almost wholly illusory. In fact his career lacked balance. The long years of his party leadership exist almost in limbo. They grew out of little. Ministerially his experience was minimal: four years in junior office, nineteen months as a notably silent President of the Board of Trade, seven difficult and chastening months as Chancellor, and then an effort-free but unexpected arrival in 10 Downing Street. A year before there had been at least six members of the Conservative Party better known than himself. Once there, he held on to power for a long time, easily in successive periods of government, with unusual difficulty in opposition. Luckily for him, his opposition years were few,
only three of the fourteen spanned by his leadership. He prided himself, with high justification, on being a great House of Commons man, but it was only from the Treasury bench that he could lead with ease and pleasure. The quintessential House of Commons rôle of leader of the opposition he never mastered. He reserved his deadliness for dealing with opponents in his own party, and had little to spare for use against the MacDonald governments. But in office he exercised a full but lazy authority. Churchill said quite simply: ‘He was the most formidable politician I have ever known in public life.’
¹

There was however a complete and unsatisfactory finality about the end of his premiership. There was no continuing momentum of influence. Not only was the curtain rung down but the opera house was dismantled. Few consulted him. Fewer still quoted him with approval. He had handled many issues with skill and public spirit and good feeling, but he had no publicly recognized parcel of achievement which he could open from time to time and contemplate with satisfaction. As Prime Minister he had mostly been popular and happy, although bearing heavily even the limited press of public work which his economy of effort prescribed. He resented principally the returns to London after his long holidays in France and cherished periods at his house in Worcestershire. In retirement these resentments were removed. But much worse ones took their place. He was lonely, sad, even a little bitter. The eclipse, partly by his own desire, partly because of the overturning of the world in which he had governed, was too abrupt. Within a few months of his resignation he was politically dead; and the repose lost its savour as soon as it was uninterrupted by forced returns to the grindstone.

Thus the two and a half years between his resignation and the outbreak of the Second World War brought Baldwin, the epitome of a man looking forward to retirement, disappointment and anticlimax rather than satisfactory afterglow. They were however years of pleasure compared with the five which were to follow, when, with his successor Neville
Chamberlain first out of 10, Downing Street and then dead in six months, Baldwin became a target of resentment for the perils to which the nation found itself exposed.

These were only a few of the paradoxes of Baldwin’s life and character. Others found expression in his provenance and education. He was the most self-conscious countryman amongst British Prime Ministers of the past hundred years or more. The unchanging nature of English rural life was one of his more effective and frequently recurring oratorical themes. It reached its apogee in a 1924 speech to the Royal Society of St George. He spoke of: