Portraits and Miniatures (20 page)

Stanley Baldwin came to the Prime Ministership in a totally different way. Asquith's was the calmest, the most certain, assured ascent this century, with the possible exception of Neville Chamberlain. But Chamberlain was twelve years older than Asquith at accession and for this, amongst other reasons, he will be seen in history as an appendage to the age of Baldwin, while Asquith, almost independently of merit, relegated his predecessor, Campbell-Bannerman, to being a prefix to the age of Asquith. Baldwin, in contrast to Asquith, came out of the woodwork a bare six months before he was in Number 10 Downing Street. Until then there were at least six Conservative politicians who were much better known than he was. Asquith had become the senior Secretary of State at the age of thirty-nine, Baldwin was fifty before he became even a junior minister. Baldwin was a Conservative, Asquith was a Liberal. Baldwin was rich, Asquith was not. Asquith was fashionable, partly but not wholly through
his wife. Baldwin was not. In spite of these differences, Baldwin wished to model himself more on Asquith than on any other of his twentieth-century predecessors.

Did he succeed? His main government, that of 1924-9, was less talented, although with Churchill, Balfour, Birkenhead and the two Chamberlains, Neville and Austen, it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as negligible in this respect. He was as economical with the attention he was prepared to devote to politics as was Asquith. But his intellectual equipment was much less formidable. When asked what English thinker had most influenced him, he firmly replied, ‘Sir Henry Maine'. When asked which particular aspect of Maine's thought had seized his mind, he said Maine's view that all human history should be seen in terms of the advance from status to contract. He then paused, looked apprehensively at his interlocutor, and said, ‘Or was it the other way around?' This is totally un-Asquithian. Asquith might not have had many original thoughts but he could summarize the broad doctrines of any well-known philosopher or historian as well as giving you their dates at the drop of a hat.

Baldwin's authority within his main government in the 1920s was substantially less than Asquith's had been. Baldwin, by then, had escaped from the anonymity of 1923; he had won a great election victory and he had made his own Cabinet, unlike his first short spell in Downing Street in 1923 when he had merely inherited one from Bonar Law. But he had made it mostly of men who were used to being his political seniors. He inspired no awe. On the other hand, partly by the devotion of vast areas of time to sitting on the front bench in the House of Commons, talking in its corridors, and hanging about its smoking room, desultorily reading the
Strand Magazine,
as was reported on one occasion, he acquired a considerable popularity in, and indeed mastery over, the House of Commons. His skill at the new medium of broadcasting was also a considerable and exceptional strength.

The
Strand Magazine
incident I use to epitomize certain differences between Baldwin and his predecessors and successors.
Asquith would never have chosen the
Strand Magazine,
or the House of Commons as a place in which to read. He would have read more reconditely, but equally haphazardly, in some more private precinct. Churchill in office would never have wasted time in the smoking room without an audience. Lloyd George would never have wasted time there at all, but he might well have chosen the
Strand Magazine
had he been left waiting upon a railway platform. Neville Chamberlain would never have read haphazardly. Ramsay MacDonald would never have exposed himself so apparently free from the burdens of state. It could not exactly be said that Stanley Baldwin was wasting time. More likely he was not even reading the magazine, but sniffing it, and with it the atmosphere around him, ruminating, feeling his way, nudging towards a variety of decisions he had to make. He was not indecisive. Indeed, Birkenhead once unfavourably described his method of government as ‘taking one leap in the dark, looking around, and taking another'. But he reached decisions much more by sniffing and then making a sudden plunge than by any orderly process of ratiocination.

Baldwin rarely applied himself to the methodical transaction of written business. Tom Jones, Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet who later became one of his closest confidants, at first thought him remarkably slow, with barely a fifth of the speed of his predecessor, Bonar Law, in dealing with papers. It took Jones some time to realize that Baldwin did not work at all in Law's rather unimaginative accountant's sense. But his mind was none the less always playing around the political issues. In this way he was the opposite, not only of Law but of Asquith, who certainly did not have an accountant's mind. Churchill wrote of Asquith, ‘He was like a great judge who gave his whole mind to a case as long as his court was open and then shut it absolutely and turned his mind to the diversions of the day.' With Baldwin the court was never either wholly open or wholly shut.

It followed from this method of work that Baldwin was even less inclined to interfere in the work of departmental ministers than was Asquith. He did not bombard his ministers with declaratory minutes like Churchill, or petulant ones like Eden, or nostalgic
ones like Macmillan. Nor did he exercise much control over his ministers by headmasterly promotions, demotions or sackings. He made hardly any changes during his four-and-a-half-year period of office, except when Halifax (then Wood, about to become Irwin) went to India as Viceroy, when Curzon died, or when Birkenhead decided he could not live on his salary. He never seriously thought of getting rid of Steel-Maitland who was a useless Minister of Labour, stationed in the most crucial and exposed segment of the government's political front. This decision at least had the effect of involving and identifying the Prime Minister very closely with his government's handling of industrial relations. This was true both before and during the General Strike. His ‘Give Peace in our Time, oh Lord' speech in February 1925 was then his most successful House of Commons foray, and the decision four months later to set up the Samuel Commission and to pay a temporary subsidy to the coal industry was very much his own work. During the eight days of the General Strike itself he was also deeply involved, but once it (as opposed to the coal strike, which dragged on for another six months) was defeated, he rather lost interest.

There were five major developments in the life of his second and central government (1924-9), and this was the only one with which he was crucially concerned. The return to the gold standard in 1925 was very much Churchill's decision at the Treasury, even though he had at first been opposed to it. The Treaty of Locarno, and the European security system created by it, was overwhelmingly Austen Chamberlain's work at the Foreign Office. The housing and poor law reforms were even more decisively the work of his half-brother Neville at the Ministry of Health. Finally, the Statute of Westminster, which enabled the reality of Dominion independence to be combined with the dignity of the Crown, came from Balfour.

Baldwin was therefore more detached from the main policies of his government than was Asquith, and he was, in my view, a less considerable man, although not a negligible one either. He would not have had the intellectual grasp to write Asquith's constitutional memorandum. But he had the feel to deal successfully
with the General Strike, although not the sustained energy to follow this up by dealing equally well with the miners' strike, which was both its cause and its aftermath. He dealt still more skilfully with the Abdication crisis ten years later. Like Asquith, he preferred to engage with constitutional issues more than with any other, though his lack of overseas interest (except for India and that he never visited) meant that that Statute of Westminster slipped by him almost unnoticed. He continued Asquith's practice, interrupted by Lloyd George, of performing as Prime Minister without a surrounding circus. He would walk about London or travel by mainline train on his own.

Attlee arrived in Number 10 Downing Street eight years after Baldwin had left for the last time. Unlike either Asquith or Baldwin, he inherited a vast government machine which the war had created, and which was used to dealing with a great part of the nation's affairs and spending a high proportion of its income. He was also the heir to a post-Baldwin Prime Ministerial habit of trying to run a large part of British foreign policy from 10 Downing Street, and believing that Britain counted for a great deal in the world. (The latter belief was pre- as well as post-Baldwin.) Attlee's first duty in his new office was to meet the Russians and the Americans at Potsdam. Neither Asquith nor Baldwin had ever attended an international conference as Prime Minister. Attlee, a very firmly established member of the English upper-middle-class, was not rich like Baldwin, or fashionable like Asquith, but he was similar to both of them in having a natural respect for conventional values and institutions. He liked almost all institutions with which he had been connected: cricket, Haileybury, where he had been at school, Oxford (and University College in particular), the Inner Temple, Toynbee Hall, and even the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. It did not make him pompous, for his taciturnity gave him a natural talent for balloon-pricking, and it did not prevent his being the head of an effective radical government just as it had not prevented Asquith or, for that matter, Gladstone before him being in the same category.

Compared with Asquith and Baldwin, Attlee was the worst speaker, the least engaging personality, and by far the best Cabinet chairman. He developed this last quality even before he had the authority of Prime Ministership behind him. Many recorded tributes testify to the way in which he presided over the War Cabinet during Churchill's frequent absences: rhetoric disappeared, and decisions were taken with speed and precision. Yet Attlee was not the dominating figure of his government, either publicly or privately. Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison, Bevan, and latterly Gaitskell, constituted a formidable array of ministers. I do not think that they can quite be classed with Asquith's, partly because of the subsequent fame of Lloyd George and Churchill, but also because there was nobody in the Attlee Government to match the non-political distinction of Morley, Birrell and Haldane. That Liberal Government apart, however, they are unmatched this century and for most of the last, too. Attlee balanced them, steered them, kept them and himself afloat, but he did not exactly lead them. He was a cox and not a stroke. For his first three or four years he distributed their weight brilliantly, although latterly he failed to place Aneurin Bevan properly, which led to considerable trouble.

One of his strongest attributes was said to have been his capacity for laconic ministerial butchery. This may be slightly exaggerated. He despatched parliamentary under-secretaries with ease, but this was rather like shooting chickens. Of big game he was more cautious. He was probably relieved when an exhausted Dalton shot himself but he pulled no trigger on him. Arthur Greenwood he did dispose of but only when that figure had become unwilling to conduct even his morning's business from anywhere except the ‘snuggery' (I think it was called) of the Charing Cross Hotel. Then towards the end he dismissed Ernest Bevin from the Foreign Office. That was an extraordinary feat. Bevin was the most important Foreign Secretary of this century, by which I mean that he was the one who left the biggest imprint on British foreign policy for a generation ahead. He was a massive but by no means a wholly amiable personality. He had been the sheet-anchor of Attlee's support throughout the life of the government. He had given his support to ‘little Clem' against
Morrison, Cripps, and Dalton. Yet when his health made him no longer capable of doing the job, out he went, miserable and complaining, and died six weeks later. This was an act of cold courage more difficult even than President Truman's sacking of General MacArthur.

With what aspects of government policy did Attlee most concern himself? Like both Asquith and Baldwin, even though both of them had been Chancellors of the Exchequer, I do not think that he understood or was much interested in economics. But the ‘dismal science' had become far more central to government by his day. He gave his Chancellors, and especially Cripps, a very dominant position. His Foreign Secretary had such a position by virtue of his own personality. Between Potsdam and Attlee's visit to Washington in December 1950, when Truman had falsely suggested that he might be about to drop an atomic bomb on the Chinese in North Korea and when Bevin was too fragile to cross the Atlantic in less than five days, Attlee intervened in foreign policy no more than Asquith had done.

However, the beginning of the end of the Empire meant that there was a great range of external affairs with which a Prime Minister could concern himself without impinging on the prerogatives of even the most truculent Foreign Secretary. On relations with America, Russia and the continent of Europe, Attlee supported Bevin. On India, with a rather weak Secretary of State, he made his own policy. And determining the future of 450 million people, now 800 million, was by any standards in the major league. Perhaps the two biggest impacts on history made by Britain during the past two hundred years have been first to govern and then to leave both America and India. So Attlee ranks as a major agent of Britain's world impact.

Internally, constitutional affairs engrossed Attlee less than they did either Asquith or Baldwin. On the other hand, he took more part in the social legislation of his government than did Asquith in the previous wave of advance in this field. The Attlee Government was also memorable for six or seven major measures of nationalization. Attlee did not much involve himself in the detail, but supported them all with commitment, even enthusiasm.

He presided over a highly interventionist government but he did not find it necessary to overwork. He once told me that being Prime Minister left him more spare time than any other job that he had done. It was partly, he said, because of living on the spot and avoiding the immensely long tube or Metropolitan Railway journeys, to which his modest suburban lifestyle condemned him, both before and after Downing Street. But his modesty should not be exaggerated. No other Prime Minister in British history was ever so richly honoured, as he noted in the little piece of doggerel which he wrote about himself: