Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

too would enter the government when fully recovered. But he was against

any lasting alliance between the Liberals and the Conservatives (‘If I am to

die, I would rather die ﬁghting on the Left’, he declared) and detected a Tory

plot to take party advantage of the national emergency in the decision to hold

an early election in October 1931, breaking with Samuel and Reading when

they went along with it.

But he was completely and humiliatingly ship-

wrecked by the ‘National’ government’s landslide election victory. Estranged

from the Liberals, he was reduced to heading a small ‘family’ rump of just

four MPs, whose other members were his son Gwilym (who resigned from

the government), his daughter Megan, and his brother-in-law Goronwy

Owen, all representing Welsh constituencies. Nine years after leaving Number

10 he was now almost completely isolated – a ‘statesman without a party’

– and politically irrelevant.

Lloyd George rapidly recovered his health and vigour. Aged 68 at the

time of the 1931 crisis, he had generally up till then enjoyed robust good

health, though was always a hypochondriac. A doctor who examined him

in January 1932 said he was a ‘bloody marvel’, with the heart and blood

pressure of a man of 35 and the chest and expansion of a prize ﬁghter. He

recognised that there was little point in trying to heckle the ‘National’ gov-

ernment’s steamroller (it had nearly 90 per cent of seats in the Commons

and there was unlikely to be another election until 1935). For the next

few years he made few appearances and speeches at Westminster, and he

largely devoted his energies to his farm and to writing his memoirs. Harold

Nicolson suggested he was ‘well out of it for the moment’. ‘No’, replied

Lloyd George, ‘one is never well out of it. One is just out of it.’ Nicolson

could feel his frustration at being in the wilderness and sensing lost oppor-

tunities. Lloyd George, he concluded, was ‘on the surface as hearty and

brilliant as ever. But one feels it is an effort’. Frances Stevenson and his

family found in the 1930s that as Lloyd George got older, he became more

cantankerous, volatile and demanding – more difﬁcult to live with.

The six fat volumes (totalling one million words) of Lloyd George’s War

Memoirs were published between 1933 and 1936 and were followed by two

further volumes, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, in 1938. He worked furi-

ously hard at them, while a team of assistants and researchers helped put

together an array of material, including private documents, ofﬁcial papers

and Cabinet records. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, gave

crucial assistance, including access to government ﬁles, and made detailed

comments and suggestions on drafts. Basil Liddell Hart helped on military

aspects. Lloyd George sought to vindicate his record, settle personal scores

and reﬁght his battles with the top brass. He was adamant he was not going

to spare the ‘skunks’ and the ‘charlatans’. There was a vicious attack on the

character and diplomacy of Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary 1906–16

and a thorn in his side during Liberal Party inﬁghting in the 1920s. Haig,

Robertson, Jellicoe and other wartime commanders were roundly denounced.

132 After Number 10

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 132

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

(Lloyd George liked to point out Haig’s highly-polished boots in a portrait

of the Field-Marshall, quipping, ‘He was brilliant – up to there!’). It was a

Lloyd-George-centric account of the war, much like Churchill’s later

Second World War memoirs. Margot Asquith reported with delight her

mother’s reaction: ‘I always knew that [Lloyd George] had won the war but

until I read his Memoirs I did not know that he had won it single-handed.’

Nevertheless they sold well, and while pugnacious, controversial and parti-

san the volumes were a major contribution to the history of the First World

War. There was a contemporary political purpose too, with Lloyd George,

as Morgan suggests, ‘implicitly arguing the case for a totally different

approach towards Germany and international affairs in the 1930s’. Later on

Lloyd George mused about possibly writing a character study of Gladstone

or a book on Welsh preachers (he was a connoisseur of sermons) or even a

novel; an autobiography which revealed details of his private life was never

on the cards.

If Lloyd George hoped to emulate Gladstone – who had charged back

into active politics aged 70 in his Midlothian campaign in 1879, returning to

Number 10 and dominating the scene for another 15 years – with his own

‘New Deal’ and ‘Call to Action’ in 1935 (when he was 72), he was to be sorely

disappointed. He stumped the country and dominated the media with his

ideas for economic reconstruction and public works to cure unemployment

(harking back to his 1929 programme), linked to support for the League

of Nations, international disarmament and peace. He insisted to his aide

A.J. Sylvester that he did not want to go into government but his proposals

accepted. He added that if ‘they’ would not do that, ‘I will smash them’.

MacDonald and Baldwin toyed with the idea of co-operating with him and

even bringing him into the Cabinet, but backed off when they realised the

strength of opposition to making a deal with Lloyd George: Neville Chamber-

lain and other ministers would have resigned, and soundings revealed two-

thirds of Tory MPs were opposed to bringing their old enemy into the tent. As

a diversion the government invited him to meetings of a Cabinet committee

set up to examine his plans. When Baldwin succeeded MacDonald as prime

minister in June 1935, no place was found for Lloyd George in the reshufﬂe

and his proposals were ﬁnally turned down. He responded by creating a non-

party ‘Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction’, working with the Free

Churches to tap non-conformist radicalism, and pouring money into sponsor-

ing candidates in the hope of holding the balance of power after the next

election. There was wishful thinking here; even Frances Stevenson thought

the Council of Action was ‘the most complete muddle & scarcely anyone

believing in it’. When the Conservative-dominated ‘National’ government

won another huge majority in the November 1935 general election, the game

was up. The Liberals won 21 seats, including Lloyd George and his family

group who now rejoined the party. Lloyd George’s last bid for power had

ended with a whimper not a bang.

Lloyd George to Chamberlain 133

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 133

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

In September 1936 he made a controversial visit to Germany, meeting

Hitler at Berchtesgaden and touring German public-works projects. Unfor-

tunately for the ex-prime minister’s reputation Lloyd George appeared to

admire and get on well with the Führer, the two men fascinating and

ﬂattering each other. An article he wrote about his visit in the Daily Express

was so enthusiastic and uncritical it had to be toned down. Hitler, he gushed,

was a great man, doing tremendous things for his country. His qualifying

remarks, condemning the suppression of liberty in Germany and the per-

secution of the Jews, received much less attention. Lloyd George was slow to

wake up to the threat posed by Hitler and a resurgent Germany in the 1930s.

Although he was hostile towards Mussolini and Franco, and denounced

fascist aggression (and the limp reaction of the British government) against

Abyssinia and in Spain, he sympathised with German grievances and resent-

ment towards the Versailles settlement and backed frontier concessions and

adjustments, arguing problems could be sorted out and that good relations

and a peace agreement with Nazi Germany were possible. However, if he

had been taken in by Hitler and was an appeaser in 1936 he was certainly

not two years later, condemning the Munich settlement and criticising

Neville Chamberlain’s government for its failures to rearm and to stand up

against the aggression of the dictators. He was a strong supporter of an

alliance with Soviet Russia, criticising the March 1939 guarantee to Poland

as otherwise a worthless gesture.

In the late-1930s Lloyd George was effectively only a part-time politician

and elder statesman. His speeches in parliament were infrequent. His close

aides detected signs of decline, and he himself was starting to feel he was

no longer really up to it. As early as 1934 Frances Stevenson was noting he

‘has got so accustomed to ease and leisure, not to say self-indulgence …

that he would ﬁnd daily application to a job very onerous’. In 1936 he told

one assistant he had left behind any idea of engaging in ‘administrative

statesmanship’ or of being an ‘executive minister’ again. Such ministers

should not be much over 60, and he was now in his seventies, ﬁt only for

an advisory role. ‘Fancy having to be in town every day, running a depart-

ment or in the House’, he said in 1938 – ‘it would kill me’. A.J. Sylvester

noted how he put on an act, walking quickly when in parliament to create

an impression of energy and vigour. ‘But put him at a difﬁculty, face him

with an important situation and a speech: he funks it.’ It would be wrong

to see him as a ‘spent force’, however, as Paul Addison warns. An American

emissary found him, in March 1940, to be still ‘alert, mentally very keen,

and minutely familiar with every detail of both British domestic affairs and

British Foreign Relations’. At the beginning of the Second World War he

was virtually the same age Churchill was when he began his second pre-

miership in 1951, and in roughly similar health. He remained inventive

and imaginative, and with his great political experience potentially had

something to offer.

134 After Number 10

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 134

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

In 1916 Lloyd George had offered the energy and the will to win the war.

But in 1939–40, in his ﬁnal signiﬁcant appearance on the political stage, it

was different. He seemed pessimistic and defeatist, convinced that Britain

could not win the war and defeat Germany by itself, and that it might lose

the war. He believed a negotiated compromise peace was possible and

would be better than another long and costly war. ‘I want to stop this war,

otherwise it will mean the break-up of the Empire’, he told Sylvester in

October 1939. Some inside the government, such as Halifax and Butler,

shared this stance, which was based on a realistic assessment of Britain’s

strength. But Hitler had by then proved his word was worthless and that he

would keep a pact only until he was ready to break it. Some saw Lloyd

George as a potential British Pétain, though there was an important dif-

ference in that Lloyd George envisaged not surrender but negotiations to

break a deadlock, from a position of strength after an invasion had been

beaten (or called) off.

He helped to bring Neville Chamberlain down with his last great parlia-

mentary speech in May 1940 – ‘the Prime Minister should give an example

of sacriﬁce … [and] sacriﬁce the seals of ofﬁce’. For the ﬁnal time, it

seemed, he was on the brink of a return to ofﬁce. He might be good for

only six hours work a day, it was said, ‘but they would be six hours of pure

radium’. One idea was that if he was not capable of running a department,

he should become a sort of food or agriculture supremo, chairing a food

production council. Churchill appeared to be anxious to have Lloyd George

with him and, in discussions in late-May/early June 1940, offered a post in

the War Cabinet, but he turned it down: ‘I’m not going in with this gang!’

He was unwilling to serve with Chamberlain, who was still a powerful

ﬁgure in the government, and was angry the offer had been made con-

ditional on his old enemy’s agreement. He may have felt the call had come

too late and doubted his physical capacity and resilience. Perhaps too he

doubted whether Churchill would succeed and thought he should hold

himself back ‘in reserve’: ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust’. Later, in

December 1940, he turned down the offer to become British ambassador to

the United States on health grounds; Churchill met him and felt he had

aged signiﬁcantly even in the last few months.

Lloyd George went into sharp physical and political decline. He was jumpy,

terriﬁed of German air-raids, and had a deep and luxurious underground

shelter built at Churt in which he would sleep. He insisted on listening to

the German radio propaganda broadcasts by ‘Lord Haw Haw’. He rarely went

to parliament. In May 1941 he made his last full-blown speech, critical and

gloomy, provoking Churchill to resort to a contemptuous put-down, com-

paring him to Pétain. Lloyd George became bitter about Churchill and his

conduct of the war, seeming to take a perverse delight when there were set-

backs. He had picked Churchill out of the political gutter and rescued his

career in 1917, he told Emanuel Shinwell, a Labour critic of the government,

Lloyd George to Chamberlain 135

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 135

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

and now wished he had left him there. In February 1943 he cast his last

vote in parliament, voting against the government and with Labour rebels

in support of the Beveridge report. He last set foot in parliament to listen to

Churchill’s statement on the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944.

In January 1941 Dame Margaret Lloyd George died; deep snowdrifts had

stopped him reaching her bedside in North Wales. It was a massive blow to

him and after it he seemed to age more rapidly and his health began obvi-

ously to break down. Two years later, in October 1943 – and in the face of

bitter hostility from his daughter Megan in particular – he married Frances

Stevenson. In September 1944 they left Churt and moved to a house with

some land he had bought just before the war at Llanystumdwy, the small

Welsh village where he had been brought up. Shrunken and increasingly

frail, he was diagnosed as suffering from cancer, and, perhaps sensing that

the end was not far off, was returning to his roots.

He was in no ﬁt state to ﬁght another general election, and his Caernarvon

seat was no longer looking so safe. Ending his career by going down to elec-

tion defeat would be humiliating. He wanted to be able to have his voice

heard when it came to ending the war and making the peace. He had long

held the Lords in contempt and had praised Gladstone, Joe Chamberlain,

Bright and Cobden for never making the ‘mistake’ of taking an honour. But

on a couple of occasions during the war (in 1942 and 1943) he had talked

privately of perhaps taking a peerage. Hints were discreetly dropped with

Churchill towards the end of 1944 and, after some last-minute agonising

over the decision, Lloyd George accepted a hereditary Earldom, the honour

being announced to widespread amazement (and, in some quarters, dismay)

on 1 January 1945.

The new Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor never took his seat in the House

of Lords. He was sinking fast and died just over two months after his

82nd birthday on 26 March 1945. The radical outsider did not want the

Establishment resting place of Westminster Abbey and had instructed

he was to be buried at Llanystumdwy, by the side of the River Dwyfor,

his grave marked simply by a great stone.

Andrew Bonar Law (resigned 20 May 1923)

Bonar Law’s premiership was the shortest of the 20th century: becoming

prime minister on 23 October 1922, he served only 209 days in the ofﬁce,

resigning because of serious ill-health on 20 May 1923. He died only ﬁve

months later.

A modest, unassuming and rather gloomy personality, Law was frequently

underestimated – to their cost – by his political opponents and was a tough

and highly effective party leader, parliamentary debater and government

administrator. If there were no great legislative or policy achievements

during his brief time in Number 10, he had had a major impact on British

136 After Number 10

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 136

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

politics over the previous decade, serving as a senior minister 1915–21 and

being a key ﬁgure in the toppling of Asquith and in making (and later

unmaking) Lloyd George prime minister.

With his health shattered after six exhausting years in high ofﬁce, Law

had resigned from government and from the Tory leadership in March

1921. Before long he seemed to have recovered but resisted pressure to

return to front-line politics and indicated he did not wish to hold ofﬁce

again. Probably expecting to play some sort of elder-statesmen role in the

years ahead, the break-up of the Lloyd George coalition and the Carlton

Club revolt instead made Law prime minister. Aged 64, he was not sure his

health and stamina were up to it, but his doctors told him that he could

resume full political activity for perhaps two years. He was privately think-

ing of holding ofﬁce for only a year or so.

Law was probably already a dying man when he became prime minister.

He had trouble with his throat and a weak voice during the November

1922 election campaign – the ﬁrst symptoms of the disease that killed him

a year later. Within a few months his health sharply deteriorated: he

seemed tired and worn-out and was unable to speak in parliament or take

a real part in Cabinet discussions. At the beginning of May 1923 he was

packed off on a Mediterranean cruise to see if his condition would improve,

but had to abandon that trip and was diagnosed with inoperable throat

cancer (linked, no doubt, to his life-long heavy smoking). Depressed and

needing heavy doses of pain-killers, Law gave up ofﬁce with evident relief.

Too ill to attend in person for an audience with the King, Law resigned by

letter.

Law seems to have expected that Lord Curzon, the more senior and experi-

enced ﬁgure, would be preferred ahead of Baldwin as his successor. He

thought it was too soon for Baldwin but at the same time he did not want

to help the overbearing marquess into Number 10. His illness got him off

the hook and he ducked the responsibility of giving advice to the Palace

– though others, including some of his aides, who asserted they spoke for

him, weighed in. He was surprised and pleased when the prize went to

Baldwin. Law left behind him a comfortable majority but he had won the

premiership as ‘not Lloyd George’ and bequeathed little in the way of a

positive strategy beyond the promise of ‘tranquillity’ and stability.

Although he kept his seat in parliament, Law did not attend the Commons

and played no further part in politics after he quit ofﬁce. He had never been

able to understand the desire for honours and did not want one himself. No

one told Law he was suffering from terminal cancer but he probably soon

realised he had not long to live. Supported by his family and close friends

(notably Lord Beaverbrook), he spent the few months he had left stoically

undergoing unpleasant X-ray treatment in Brighton, playing chess and bridge,

managing a few holes of golf on a short visit to France, and – political obses-

sive to the end – keeping up with the latest political news and gossip. He died

Lloyd George to Chamberlain 137

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 137

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

at home in London on 30 October 1922. His wish to be buried in Scotland

alongside his wife (who had died in 1909) was set aside and he was instead

given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey (the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’

buried near the ‘Unknown Soldier’ was Asquith’s cruel comment).

James Ramsay Macdonald (resigned 7 June 1935)

Ramsay MacDonald headed three governments as prime minister, serving for

a total of six years in that ofﬁce, leading Labour administrations in 1924 and

1929–31 and then breaking with his Labour colleagues to form the ‘National’

government in which he was PM from 1931 to 1935. His historical impor-

tance lies at least as much in his role in the creation and development of

the Labour Party in which he was a key strategist, orator and ideologue than

in what he achieved as a prime minister, when he displayed a lack of clear

policy ideas and drive and was hampered by the absence of parliamentary

majorities in his two terms as Labour PM and by being, in effect, a prisoner of

the overwhelming Conservative majority after 1931.

MacDonald stayed on as prime minister in the 1930s well beyond the

point at which he had become ineffective in the role. He still kept a touch

for, and had more inﬂuence on, foreign policy than on home affairs. But by

1933–34 he had become ‘a standing embarrassment to the government’

and, in different circumstances, would probably have been pushed into

resignation – but he was too useful as a political ‘ﬁg leaf’ and helped to

maintain the ﬁction it was still a ‘National’ rather than a Conservative gov-

ernment.

Baldwin, the Conservative leader and the government’s number

two, felt committed to MacDonald and held back from playing the ‘mer-

ciful executioner’.

For his own part, vanity, a belief in his own indispens-

ability, a sense of duty, and a desolate loneliness made MacDonald unwilling

or unable to retire (his wife had died in 1911 – it is possible that had she

lived he might have left while he could still enjoy retirement).

Moving into his late-sixties, his health, powers and grip were failing.

He suffered increasingly from eye problems (undergoing operations for

glaucoma), headaches, insomnia, exhaustion and depression; in 1934 he

had to take a three-month complete break from work on medical advice. His

speeches were now too often embarrassingly windy ﬂops. His memory started

to go. As time went on, he became increasingly rambling and incoherent at

Cabinet meetings and international conferences. Roy Jenkins brackets him

with Gladstone and Churchill as prime ministers ‘upon whom senility began

to descend while they were still in ofﬁce’, though MacDonald was ten or more

years younger than them. ‘There can hardly have been a weaker prime min-

ister’, argues Kevin Morgan, ‘nor one held in such little regard by supporters

and opponents alike’. Reviled as a ‘traitor’ by his former Labour supporters, he

was despised by the Conservatives. When he ﬁnally left Number 10, says

David Marquand, ‘his reputation was in ruins’.

138 After Number 10

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 138

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

By early 1935 even MacDonald could see the writing on the wall as pres-

sure for a change built up within the Conservative Party. His ﬁrst assump-

tion was he and Baldwin would retire together but Baldwin soon put him

right on that and they agreed a timetable for the handover, and that

MacDonald would remain in the Cabinet but without portfolio (King

George V – always friendly towards MacDonald – wanted him to stay on

as Lord President of the Council so he could continue to see him often),

and that MacDonald’s son, Malcolm, one of the small band of ‘National

Labour’ MPs and a junior minister, should be promoted into the Cabinet.

On 7 June 1935 MacDonald resigned as prime minister and swopped ofﬁces

with Baldwin (‘I die today’ was his ﬁrst thought on waking that morning,

as he recorded in his diary, his feelings after the event a mixture of regret

and relief – ‘I kept wondering who I was’ now, he admitted).

Opting to stay on as Lord President in Baldwin’s Cabinet, 1935–37, was a

tragic mistake. Physically and intellectually decrepit (his health continuing

to decline), politically isolated and ignored by his Tory colleagues, MacDonald

should have retired completely. When he ﬁnally went in May 1937, almost

no one noticed or cared.

MacDonald was unhappy about the Conservatives’ decision for an early

election, called for November 1935, and got nowhere when trying to per-

suade them to give up some more seats for their non-Tory allies. Although

offered a safer seat elsewhere, he decided to stand again in his Seaham con-

stituency, losing to Labour’s Emanuel Shinwell, a former protégé, with an

above-average swing and by a margin of over 20,000 votes in a bitterly-

fought contest. Humiliatingly he had to wait a couple of months before he

returned to parliament in a by-election for the Scottish Universities after

the Unionist Graduates Association was leaned on to nominate him.

He now cut a pathetic ﬁgure, lingering on in political and ofﬁcial limbo.

Marquand describes him as ‘a forlorn and, as time went on, an almost for-

gotten ﬁgure, cruelly aware of his diminishing effectiveness, full of griev-

ances against his colleagues and the world, and with no real inﬂuence on

events … [He] was more isolated politically than he had ever been. Though

he still served on the Committee of Imperial Defence and the Defence

Requirements Committee, as well as on a number of less important Cabinet

committees, Baldwin rarely consulted him informally, and when he tried

to ensure his views were heard in discussion outside the Cabinet he was

often snubbed. He scarcely ever appeared at the dispatch box, and the news-

papers ceased to pay attention to him. He had no patronage, no future, and

hardly any following; when he appeared in the lobbies, he seemed lost and

helpless, like a ghost from a vanished era.’ In 1935 he had just enough

clout to insist that Jimmy Thomas, one of his oldest friends in politics and

one of the few Labour ﬁgures who had stuck with him, be kept on as a

minister, but watched helplessly as Thomas was thrown to the wolves after

a budget leak scandal in 1936. Although ‘bitterly contemptuous’ of the

Lloyd George to Chamberlain 139

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 139

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

Labour Party leadership, he still thought of himself as a socialist and felt

more and more alienated from his Conservative colleagues over issues like

the Spanish civil war (where he was sympathetic to the Republicans).

Finally leaving ofﬁce when Baldwin quit as prime minister on 28 May 1937,

MacDonald refused all honours. He had turned down the Order of the

Thistle in 1935 and now rejected a peerage. ‘Me an Earl? How ridiculous’,

he is supposed to have said. In the 1920s he had turned down an offer

of £50,000 for his memoirs (there was ‘nothing I shrink from more than

making public personal impressions of people’, he said), but in 1936 did

contemplate starting to write an autobiography, though he got little further

than beginning what he hoped would be the opening chapter.

Although

his wife had a private income and left a trust fund, MacDonald had strug-

gled ﬁnancially when out of ofﬁce in the 1920s, making some money (only

modest amounts) from journalism and lecturing. Some business admirers

gave ﬁnancial support and left him legacies at that time, and he had been

able to buy a substantial house in Hampstead and to indulge his passion for

foreign travel. He was comfortably off, but not wealthy; at his death, he left

£21,500 (around £800,000 at today’s values).

Less than six months after ceasing to be a minister, MacDonald was dead.

He spent the summer of 1937 just ‘pottering about’ at his home in Lossie-

mouth in the north of Scotland. Then, accompanied by one of his daugh-

ters, on an ocean liner en route for what was planned as a long holiday in

South America, he suddenly died of heart failure, aged 71, on 9 November

1937. After a public funeral in Westminster Abbey, his ashes were buried

alongside his wife at Spynie churchyard, near Lossiemouth. MacDonald

was ‘always talking of returning to public life in some way when he came

back from the cruise’, Stanley Baldwin recalled in February 1938. MacDonald

had still not fully realised his ‘powers of control had entirely gone’, he

suggested, but he would do so when he ‘came to exert himself’ and would

then ‘suffer very much’. ‘It was a mercy that he died when he did’ was

Baldwin’s sad conclusion.

Stanley Baldwin (resigned 28 May 1937)

Baldwin was one of the dominant ﬁgures in interwar British politics, serving

three times as prime minister (1923–24, 1924–29 and 1935–37) for just over

seven years in total. In the 14 years he was Conservative Party leader the

party won its largest majorities of the 20th century and was out of ofﬁce for

less than three years. When he ﬁnally retired, in May 1937, it was said ‘no

man has ever left in such a blaze of affection’.

Yet within three years his

reputation plummeted and he faced a tremendous wave of contempt and

hatred, viliﬁed as one of the ‘Guilty Men’ whose inadequacies and failures

had left the country unprepared for war with Hitler. By the time he died in

1947 he had become a largely forgotten and reclusive ﬁgure. Historians

140 After Number 10

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 140

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston

started properly to reassess his career and give a more positive view of his

achievements only 30–40 years after he left the political scene.

As Lord President of the Council 1931–35 (and also Lord Privy Seal

1932–33), Baldwin had been in effect deputy prime minister in the ‘National’

government, his status symbolised and underlined by his occupancy of

11 Downing Street. Head of the largest party in the coalition, he con-

centrated in those years largely on party and House of Commons manage-

ment and on India. It is not clear that he wanted or expected to become

PM again. The heir apparent, the powerful and impatient Neville Chamber-

lain, was ready to take over, and many in the party wanted a change in the

leadership. Baldwin thought of retiring but then decided he would take the

reins again when MacDonald stepped down. He thought that, health per-

mitting, he would do two or three years at most. He admitted there was

a worry about ‘overstaying your utility’, as had MacDonald or Gladstone,

but he wanted to hand over to his successor only when the ‘political wea-

ther’ was fair, when his own prestige was still high and the party ‘in good

heart’.

Baldwin always lived on his nerves and as prime minister needed country

weekends and annual month-long summer holidays in Aix-les-Bains to

recharge his batteries. He had turned 68 in 1935, shortly after moving back

into Number 10, and by mid-1936 was more than usually tired, battered

and depressed. He seems to have had some sort of nervous break-down and

needed ten weeks break before returning to his desk in October 1936. He

now decided to retire as soon as possible and only the Abdication crisis

stopped him going at the end of that year. Baldwin is the only prime min-

ister between Salisbury (in 1902) and Wilson (in 1976) to make an unforced

departure from the ofﬁce at a time of his own choice. But he could see he

needed to get out soon and he took the ﬁrst available opportunity to leave

on a high note after his successful handling of the ‘King Edward problem’

and the coronation of the new King George VI, resigning on 28 May 1937,

a few months before his 70th birthday.

Wanting to avoid causing problems for his successor and former col-

leagues, Baldwin is said to have resolved to ‘make no political speeches,

neither to speak to the man at the wheel nor to spit on the deck’. He was

made a Knight of the Garter and an Earl but there are suggestions he

needed persuading by the King and by his wife, Lucy Baldwin, before agree-

ing to go to the Lords (at one point he said he did not want to go there

unless life peerages were created).

Baldwin was worn out and suffered a nervous collapse in the ﬁrst months

of his retirement. The inﬁrmities of old age started to trouble him: deafness

and arthritis, which stopped the long country walks he had always loved

and eventually left him hobbling around with a stick. Left to himself he

might have preferred to live mainly in the country with only occasional

visits to London, but his wife liked the more active social life of the capital

Lloyd George to Chamberlain 141

9780230_202184_07_cha06.pdf 3/5/10 2:27 PM Page 141

10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston