Baldwin (8 page)

That same morning the entire Cabinet, with the exception of the Prime Minister, met in the Lord Chancellor’s room. Only Lord Novar,
the Scottish Secretary, was in favour of repudiating the Baldwin settlement. A deputation of Baldwin, the Lord Chancellor (Cave
) and the Duke of Devonshire
was appointed to wait upon Bonar Law and persuade him not to resign. Law agreed, although not with a very good grace. He had discovered that City opinion, for the interpretation of which he relied upon McKenna and which he had previously been informed was strongly against acceptance, had swung overwhelmingly in favour. The terms were endorsed at a five-minute Cabinet that afternoon.

Not surprisingly, neither Law’s relations with Baldwin nor his authority in the Government ever fully recovered from these incidents. Beaverbrook, indeed, who knew Law very well but was also addicted to dramatic interpretations, believed that the collapse of Law’s health stemmed partly from this destruction of his position as undisputed captain, maybe of ‘the second eleven’ in Churchill’s phrase, but at least of a team of
like-minded, straightforward and loyal men. And there is some indication that Baldwin, from this time forward, felt that he was dealing with a time-expired Prime Minister. He began to flex his political muscles.

The first overt expression of this came in a House of Commons speech on 16 February, replying to a Labour amendment in the debate on the Address. He ranged far wide of any possible Treasury brief or of the broadest interpretation of his Exchequer responsibilities. He replied to MacDonald and Lloyd George. He discussed the basis of the Government’s foreign policy as well as the debt settlement and unemployment. He envisaged not the possibility but the certainty of a Labour Government—‘when the Labour Party sit on these benches’. And he ended with a homily, trite or profound according to taste.

Four words, of one syllable each, are words which contain salvation for this country and for the whole world, and they are faith, hope, love and work. No Government in this country today which has not faith in the future, love for its fellow-men, and which will not work and work and work will ever bring this country through into better days and better times, or will ever bring Europe through, or the world through.
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It was the first of a whole series of his ruminative House of Commons orations, at once homespun and high-flown, which, whatever else may be thought about them, rarely failed to capture the ears of his listeners. Even more notably it was the speech, not of a subordinate minister, but of a leader, striking a new note, and invoking an enthusiastic response from a broad segment of the electorate.

Baldwin’s next major public appearance was his Budget speech in April. It was a dull Budget, but not a dull speech. Almost its only significant proposal was concerned with debt management and the creation of a new sinking fund. But the speech was brief and unplatitudinous and earned many compliments. It did nothing to impair his rising reputation. This was
important, for Bonar Law’s health was on the point of finally breaking up. On 1 May he left for a Mediterranean cruise in the vain hope that this might cause an improvement. It did not. He had cancer of the throat, and on 19 May, too ill to go to Buckingham Palace, he resigned by letter.

The drama of the succession, whether it should go to Curzon or to Baldwin, has always been treated as one of the great hair’s-breadth decisions of British constitutional history. In retrospect, however, it is difficult to see how, unless the King had shown most remarkable misjudgment, it could have been decided other than it was. No doubt there was room for argument as to whether in 1923 it was still possible to have a peer as Conservative Prime Minister. It was only twenty-one years since Salisbury had concluded his long and successful period of power, and only twenty-eight years since another peer (Rosebery) had presided (although less successfully) over a Liberal Government. And no doubt it needed Balfour’s subtle reasoning
¹²
to convince the King of this
constitutional
point, particularly as there were others—Salisbury, for example -strongly urging the claims of Curzon.

The constitutional point, however, was by no means the only one at issue. There was also the personal one. Curzon had a long record of devoted although doubtfully successful public service. He was a weak man, and in some ways a slightly ridiculous one. Davidson, who was of course a committed partisan of Baldwin’s, but a sufficiently skilful one to couch his arguments in moderate terms, probably got nearest to the nub of Curzon’s failings in a memorandum which he wrote for Stamfordham
and through him for the King. After beginning by saying that the case for either candidate was ‘very strong’ and paying a tribute to Curzon’s long experience, he continued:

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Lord Curzon, temperamentally, does not inspire complete confidence in his colleagues, either as to his judgment or as to his ultimate strength of purpose in a crisis. His methods, too, are inappropriate to harmony. The prospect of his receiving deputations as Prime Minister from the Miners’ Federation or the Triple Alliance, for example, is capable of causing alarm for the future relations between the Government and Labour -between moderate and less moderate opinion.
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Furthermore, Curzon’s behaviour over the fall of the Coalition was fresh in men’s minds and had made him a lot of enemies and few friends. He took no stand, but resigned at the last moment from the Lloyd George Cabinet so as to be ingratiatingly available to continue as Foreign Secretary in the new Government. The truth of the matter was that there were very few who wanted him as Prime Minister, independently of the House of Lords issue. The Cabinet did not, the party machine did not, the constituencies did not, at least three quarters of the Conservative members of the House of Commons did not. An exception was Salisbury, the leader of the diehards, who, like Balfour, was specially consulted by the King. Another half-exception may have been Bonar Law. He refused on grounds of health to tender any formal advice. But he saw Baldwin on the Sunday morning and told him that he had no doubt that Curzon would be chosen, although his own turn would come in due course. Then, when pressed by his principal private secretary, Colonel Waterhouse,
he reluctantly said that if he had to advise, ‘he would put Baldwin first’. Waterhouse, probably improperly, passed this information on to the Palace. Then on the Monday morning Law saw Salisbury and left him with the impression that Curzon could not be ‘passed over’. The likelihood is that he saw the decisive disadvantages of Curzon but could not quite reconcile himself to the thought of the very junior Baldwin, who had so recently
‘bounced’ and damaged him over the debt settlement, being in 10 Downing Street.

Compared with the strong forces and arguments working the other way all this counted for little. Curzon was in fact impossible. He could only have been chosen had there been no other credible candidate, and Baldwin’s performance from the date of the Carlton Club meeting forward had destroyed this possibility. The well-known story of Curzon’s Tuesday summons from Montacute
¹³
to London, of his confident and much-photographed arrival, first at Paddington Station and then at Carlton House Terrace, followed by the crushing blow delivered to him that afternoon when Stamfordham called at his house and told him Baldwin was to be Prime Minister, was not therefore a sudden snatching from his hands of the steadily earned and well-deserved prize, but more the last rather over-dramatized act of a tragi-comedy which had been played out in varying forms since his appointment as Viceroy of India in 1898.
¹⁴

Baldwin had spent the weekend partly in London and partly at Chequers. On the Saturday evening, before seeing Law on the following morning, he dined with Davidson at the Argentine Club and informed him that he would ‘rather take a single ticket to Siberia than become Prime Minister’.
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Davidson, who was used to him, did not take this seriously, and rightly so, for Baldwin’s next railway activity was to leave Chequers early on the Tuesday morning in order to catch the 8.55 from Wendover and be available to see first Stamfordham and then the King. Stamfordham asked him if he would be prepared to retain Curzon as Foreign Secretary. He said that he would welcome this, but queried whether Curzon would be willing to serve, and also indicated that he would endeavour to bring Austen Chamberlain and Horne back into the Government. These replies were highly satisfactory to the King, who summoned Baldwin to the Palace at 3.15 p.m. and charged him with the task of forming a Government.

He returned to Downing Street and asked the waiting journalists for their prayers rather than their congratulations. He was Prime Minister at fifty-five, after less than three years’ Cabinet experience. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am not a bit excited and don’t realize it in the least.’ But to Phyllis Broome, a Worcestershire neighbour, writer and walking companion, he wrote: ‘Here is the biggest job in the world and if I fail I shall share the fate of many a bigger man than I. But it’s a fine thought, isn’t it? And one may do something before one cracks up.’
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