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

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city and so they kept their main home there in the late 1930s. Money was

not a particular problem as shares in the family iron and steel business

were doing well and his annual income at this time was £15–20,000 (the

equivalent of over £500,000 today), including a £2,000 prime-ministerial

pension.

Until 1940 he remained one of the most respected ﬁgures in public life

and played an active elder statesman’s role. He was busy on a range of public,

non-party-political and philanthropic bodies: he was chancellor of the uni-

versities of Cambridge and St Andrews; a governor at Harrow (his old school);

a trustee of the Pilgrim Trust; president of the Association for Education in

Citizenship and the British Association for International Understanding;

chairman of the Imperial Relatives Trust; a trustee of the British Museum; and

president of the MCC. In December 1938 a public appeal was launched

for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Jewish Refugees, which raised more than half

a million pounds in eight months. In 1939 he made trips to Canada and

the USA to lecture and broadcast on the English character and values, demo-

cracy and citizenship. Behind the scenes, and reﬂecting his long-time concern

ﬁrmly to embed the Labour Party into the constitutional system, he held

private dinners for the King to meet leading Labour ﬁgures.

Although there were occasional rumours he might come back into gov-

ernment, Baldwin ‘knew that he could not return: he was neither phys-

ically nor mentally able’.

He kept in touch with opinion in Westminster,

Whitehall and party circles. He was not happy, however, with the way things

were going under Chamberlain. After Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary in

February 1938, Baldwin saw a lot of him and gave him advice on tactics,

though Chamberlain was careful to try to keep his predecessor in Number

10 on side. Presciently Baldwin predicted that if war came, the country

would want Churchill as leader; Eden’s best chance, he said, was as a peace-

time leader. It was not that Baldwin fundamentally questioned Chamber-

lain’s policies, more that he was critical of his (unBaldwinesque) style and

methods, fearing particularly that his highly partisan and confrontational

approach towards Labour would jeopardise the broad-based national unity

needed to meet the threat from Germany. He hoped Hitler might be turned

East and – like Napoleon – break himself against the Russians. He made his

one and only House of Lords speech on 4 October 1938, to reassure doubters

and give general support to the Munich settlement, saying he could not

have gone to Munich himself but praising Chamberlain’s courage in doing

so, and arguing that the time bought must be put to good use with cross-

party cooperation, industrial mobilisation and more rapid rearmament.

In private he was critical of Chamberlain’s ‘peace with honour’ ‘emotional

outburst’ in Downing Street – ‘I would have done it very differently’, he

sniffed. While Duff Cooper, who resigned from the government over Munich,

begged Baldwin (in 1939) to come back into ofﬁce and lead a coalition gov-

ernment, the ﬁrst stirrings of the later public and political hostility could

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be seen in the way one peer in the Lords debate on the agreement lashed

out about the ex-prime minister’s ‘responsibility for failure to rearm’.

During the ‘phoney war’ period of 1939–40 he became steadily more

disenchanted with Chamberlain and critical of his decisions and inert con-

duct of the war. In May 1940 he was clear the country and the crisis needed

Churchill’s leadership.

If, during the last years of peace, Baldwin’s retirement had involved a

mixture of ‘disappointment and anti-climax rather than satisfactory after-

glow’, as Roy Jenkins put it, that was nothing compared with what was to

come during the worst period of the war. He came in for considerable

abuse, criticism and scapegoating in and after 1940, being left particularly

exposed as a target after Neville Chamberlain’s death. There was hate mail

(and he lacked even a secretary to protect him from the abusive letters) and

newspapers attacks. Even some of the Baldwins’ local shopkeepers and

tradesmen were hostile. ‘It was convenient for many people who had not

themselves been conspicuous supporters of rearmament or a strong for-

eign policy to turn upon the unhappy Baldwin … and put all the blame

upon him’, was Harold Macmillan’s verdict. Media and political enemies

persecuted him in a damaging row in 1942 over the requisitioning for scrap

metal of the wrought iron gates at Astley Hall, his house in Worcester-

shire – one pair of gates was left, ‘to protect Lord Baldwin from the just

indignation of the mob’ jeered one MP. Churchill had to squash talk of

Astley itself being requisitioned and the Baldwins turned out of their

home (the London house had been given up at the start of the war).

G.M. Young wrote that Baldwin was advised or warned to stay away from

London because of public hostility (though there is no corroboration for

this claim).

Baldwin was hurt but did his best to be phlegmatic. He did not complain

or answer back. He had wanted to be able to do some national work during

the war but instead had to accept a sort of internal exile. He declined invi-

tations to broadcast on the BBC, to avoid arousing further controversy. He

had a clear conscience about his decisions on rearmament in the 1930s and

felt future historians would understand them and their context better than

the contemporary mud-slingers (he was, in the end, right). Churchill was

polite and gracious, occasionally having him to lunch in Number 10 (though

later in the index to his war memoirs there was the notorious entry about

Baldwin ‘putting party before country’).

The war years were lonely, isolated and bitter for the Baldwins. There

were money worries and he had to sell capital to balance his bank account

(though at death Baldwin left £280,000 – over £5 million at today’s prices).

Astley became rather run down and neglected. There were now few dom-

estic staff and travel was difﬁcult. The shortages, problems and restrictions

of their twilight existence hit Lucy Baldwin’s spirits badly. She was his main

prop and he was devastated by her sudden death in June 1945.

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Baldwin lingered on for two and a half years after the war, looked after

by one of his daughters. He was weary, lame, depressed, less able to con-

centrate, sunk in on himself. He had become politically irrelevant. He had

taken no part in the 1945 general election, and the Conservative Party

nationally had pointedly not mentioned him in its campaign. Despite his

pre-war electoral appeal and success he had become an electoral liability.

Baldwin had always been adamant he would write ‘no memoirs or non-

sense of that kind’, believing ‘no man can write the truth about himself’.

He distrusted biographers and what he called ‘the Higher Cannibalism’,

only reluctantly agreeing that G.M. Young should write an ofﬁcial life to be

published after his death – and he was badly served by Young’s inadequate

and unsympathetic biography which appeared in 1952.

Baldwin died in

his sleep, aged 80, in December 1947. Unveiling a memorial to him in

1950, Churchill called Baldwin ‘the most formidable politician I have ever

known’. But it had all ended badly. Looking forward to life after Number

10, Baldwin, because of the way events turned out and the ‘somersaults of

popularity’,

found it a chastening and dismal experience.

Neville Chamberlain (resigned 10 May 1940)

Neville Chamberlain’s physical demise followed soon after his political

demise. ‘He fell in May [1940]’, noted his ofﬁcial biographer, ‘in July he

was stricken by illness, he died in November.’

Yet politically and gov-

ernmentally he played a crucial role in those few months of his post-

premiership.

Chamberlain waited a long time for the premiership, being 68 when he

ﬁnally became PM in May 1937. He was a tireless, hard-working, resilient,

determined and dominating ﬁgure in Number 10. His reputation was high

when he took over from Baldwin but, rather than being able to concentrate

on domestic reforms, as he had wanted, his premiership was dominated by

the looming threat of war. He had always felt himself indispensable, but

the failure of his appeasement policy and the outbreak of the second world

war called that assumption into question. Nevertheless he did not yield his

grip on power easily. Churchill and Eden were brought into his govern-

ment at the start of the war but the Labour Party refused to join. During

the ‘phoney war’ period (September 1939–April 1940) criticism built up

of the government’s weaknesses in commitment, competence and drive.

Chamberlain recognised he was not cut out to be a war leader, describing

his life as wartime PM as ‘one long nightmare’.

As his limitations in that

role were increasingly exposed, support for him was eroded. Tory rebels

delivered their own vote of no conﬁdence in the 7–8th May debate on the

disastrous Norway campaign, when the government’s majority fell drama-

tically. To the bitter end Chamberlain had clung on, even trying to use the

breaking news of the start of the German offensive in the west on 10 May

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to delay the inevitable.

Labour delivered the coup-de-grace by making it

clear they would enter government only under another prime minister.

Churchill was not Chamberlain’s ﬁrst choice as his successor (nor did

ruling ‘Establishment’ circles, the Palace, or the bulk of Tory MPs want

him). He thought – wrongly – that Labour would not serve under Churchill.

But when Lord Halifax, his Foreign Secretary, fellow-appeaser and preferred

candidate, refused the fence, Chamberlain had no option but to recommend

Churchill to the King.

Chamberlain and Churchill had long been political rivals and, in the

1930s, bitter enemies, though they had worked well together and come to

respect each other after September 1939. Now, as Graham Stewart puts it,

they ‘found circumstances conspiring in the moment of deadly national

peril to make them dependent upon one another; Chamberlain could not

form a government with cross-party support, and Churchill could not

survive as head of that new combination without Chamberlain’s support

and the parliamentary majority that rested upon it’. Labour pushed strongly

against Chamberlain’s inclusion in the new government but Churchill

knew that was politically impossible and all he would do was to abandon

his initial plans to make Chamberlain Chancellor of the Exchequer or

Leader of the House of Commons and instead appoint him Lord President

of the Council with a seat in the ﬁve-member War Cabinet. Chamberlain

was relieved to be able to avoid ‘much tedious sitting in the House’ and the

burden of day-to-day management of parliamentary business.

Chamberlain has rightly been seen as ‘the key ﬁgure’ and as occupying a

position of ‘pivotal signiﬁcance’ in the government.

Out of a mixture of

tact, prudence, magnanimity, respect for his abilities, and hard political cal-

culation, Churchill treated him with great care. ‘Insiders’ noted his ‘cour-

tesy and deference’ towards Chamberlain at Cabinet meetings. He did not

evict Chamberlain from Number 10, letting him and his wife continue to

live there for another month, until they moved next door to Number 11

Downing Street. Nor did he try to evict Chamberlain from the leadership of

the Conservative Party or to seize control of the party machinery. Churchill

and Chamberlain both knew the latter’s political position remained strong

and that only if he remained party leader could the support of the Conserv-

ative Party in parliament be swung behind the new PM – a ﬁgure regarded

with resentment and suspicion by the bulk of Tory MPs. Conservative back-

benchers cheered wildly when Chamberlain entered the chamber of the House

of Commons on 13 May 1940 but greeted Churchill with sullen silence. Two-

thirds of Chamberlain’s old ministers stayed on in the new government

and relatively few die-hard anti-Chamberlainites beneﬁtted from Churchill’s

patronage or received senior posts. ‘To a very large extent I am in your hands’,

Churchill told Chamberlain.

The displaced former prime minister responded with loyalty, swallowing

his distaste for some of Churchill’s methods and his cronies, and he did not

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plot or intrigue against the usurper. Other Tories did: junior Foreign Ofﬁce

minister R.A. Butler and other Chamberlain loyalists met to drink a cham-

pagne toast to ‘the king over the water’ and looked forward to the return of

their old master; within days of Churchill’s accession, the chairman of the

1922 Committee was saying that three-quarters of Tory MPs were ‘ready to

put Chamberlain back’. Chamberlain assured the party’s National Union

Executive that relations with Churchill were ‘cordial’ and there were no dif-

ferences of policy between them. Concerned that the all-too conspicuous

absence of vocal and whole-hearted Tory support for Churchill might

be giving out the wrong signals about the government’s strength and

resolve, particularly to the USA, he operated behind the scenes through the

whips, still largely a Chamberlainite stronghold, to ensure the PM started

(in early July 1940) to receive a chorus of Tory cheers in parliament. But

Tory doubts about Churchill remained and, according to Andrew Roberts,

a sort of ‘undeclared guerrilla war’ between Churchill and the Chamber-

lainites in the party continued for some time, even after Chamberlain

himself left the scene, Churchill’s political position in the party only being

ﬁnally safe from the summer of 1941.

Chamberlain’s relationship to Churchill was in marked and positive con-

trast to that of Asquith to Lloyd George in 1916, which Churchill acknow-

ledged with gratitude. It contrasted to the damaging divisions, mistrust and

inﬁghting in the French government in 1940 between Paul Reynaud and the

former-prime minister Edouard Daladier. By working to shore up Churchill’s

position and by playing a constructive role in the new government Cham-

berlain performed a great national service, helping to promote and sustain

political unity at a time of military disaster and when a Nazi invasion of

Britain seemed imminent.

‘All my world has tumbled to bits in a moment’, Chamberlain admitted

after his overthrow, and although he was relieved to be free of the ‘agony

of mind’ associated with supreme war leadership, he described himself as

‘numbed’ at the sudden change. ‘There is no pleasure in life’, he said, ‘and

no prospect of any’, only ‘chronic misery’ and ‘harrowing anxieties’. He

had done what he thought right and never wavered in his belief that his

combination of appeasement and rearmament was the correct policy. But

he was bitter, humiliated and resentful. He was 71 and, though he did not

yet know it, probably already fatally ill. He grimly set to and threw himself

into his new duties, but close observers noted his ‘ghastly’ appearance,

calling him ‘a heartbroken and physically broken man’, someone whose

days were numbered.

The Lord President’s job in wartime was no sinecure: Chamberlain

carried a heavy load. He chaired the War Cabinet when Churchill was away

or out of the country (‘Neville, please mind the shop!’ Churchill would

cry). He was in effect Churchill’s deputy (the Labour leader Attlee being

formall y appointed Deputy Prime Minister only in 1942). Churchill looked

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to him to run the ‘home front’ while he concentrated on running the war.

Through the Lord President’s Committee his role was to coordinate, pull

together the threads and provide executive direction over the broad econ-

omic and domestic policy front, though the complex web of sub-committees

(covering trade, transport, shipping, food and agriculture) was liable to get

overloaded, bogged down and deadlocked. Chamberlain took the lead in

preparing sweeping emergency-powers legislation and he handled a wide

range of other issues: ‘ﬁnancial policy and exports, the supply of labour to

agriculture, the position of aliens, the organisation of underground warfare

in the event of invasion and the disruptive effects of German air raids

on munitions production’. Churchill praised him as ‘the best man he had

– head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’; the

prime minister said he did not know what he would do without him.

Whitehall ofﬁcials saw him as ‘the one Minister in this ﬁeld from whom

you could get clear and immediate directives’. Labour Party politicians had

long hated and feared Chamberlain (Baldwin had once complained that

Chamberlain treated Labour as dirt – ‘intellectually, they are dirt’, he had

replied). But they were impressed when, now on the ‘inside’ themselves,

they saw him in action and soon ‘considerably revised their ideas of [his]

value to the government’. ‘Very able and crafty’, was Attlee’s verdict, ‘very

businesslike’, a good chairman and committeeman: ‘you could work with

him’.

Chamberlain played a part in all the big strategic decisions in this period,

weighing in for instance in War Cabinet discussions about bombing

Germany and about the idea of an Anglo-French Union to try to forestall

French capitulation, examining the consequences of the fall of France

and the evacuation of the BEF, and involved in an attempt to persuade

de Valera to abandon Eire’s neutrality, even at the price of a united Ireland.

Most crucial of all was the role he played during the critical few days at the

end of May 1940 when the War Cabinet was secretly debating whether to

negotiate with Hitler (through Mussolini) or to continue the war. At this

backs-to-the-wall moment, had Chamberlain supported Halifax, who was

pressing strongly for an approach to Italy to explore a negotiated peace,

then the War Cabinet would have been split down the middle and Churchill’s

position may have become impossible. But after initially sitting on the

fence, he came down decisively against the idea of throwing in the towel:

Hitler could not be trusted, Chamberlain now knew, a peace deal on his

terms would be worthless, there was no alternative but to ﬁght on. It was a

‘hinge’ moment for the government, the country and the free world.

Their partnership, and Chamberlain’s support and loyalty, were impor-

tant and valuable and of direct practical assistance to Churchill. In return

he defended Chamberlain against attacks and plots to remove him from

the government. Pressure mounted particularly in the aftermath of Dun-

kirk, with mounting press criticism of the ‘Guilty Men’, demands for his

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dismissal from Labour MPs and some trade unions, and the so-called ‘under-

secretaries plot’ involving anti-Chamberlain Conservatives. An opinion poll

reported 77 per cent of the public wanted Chamberlain ﬁred. Chamberlain

offered to resign (on 5 June) but Churchill refused and was adamant there

should be no witch hunt. After the prime minister’s intervention the press

campaign was halted virtually overnight; Labour leaders promised to muzzle

the agitation in their party; uppity junior ministers were brutally told to stop

the conspiracies or leave the government themselves. The underlying parlia-

mentary arithmetic had not changed, as Churchill knew – Chamberlain was

still Conservative leader and strongly backed by the majority of Tory MPs

– even if Chamberlain’s public reputation had received blows from which it

was never to recover. Churchill exacted a price for his support in the shape of

getting Chamberlain to drop his veto over the offer of a government post to

Lloyd George. He had twice threatened to resign if the old Welshman were

brought in – they loathed and mistrusted each other, and Chamberlain was

sure Lloyd George aimed to destroy him – but when Churchill brought the

matter up again, Chamberlain had reluctantly to acquiesce; to his relief, Lloyd

George decided to stay out.

In the end Chamberlain left the government only because he was mor-

tally ill, not because he was forced out, and Churchill was unhappy to lose

him. From mid-June he was reporting serious abdominal pain and an oper-

ation in late July revealed he was suffering from terminal bowel cancer,

though his doctors did not at that stage tell him. Chamberlain wanted to

go on working ‘in my present capacity’ till the end of the war, but accepted

that ideas of political activity or a possible comeback as prime minister after

the war were now impossible. After six weeks convalescence he managed

about ten days back at work in London in mid-September before, in a state

of physical collapse, he had to leave the capital for good. He offered his

resignation on 22 September but Churchill would not at ﬁrst accept it;

soon, however, he decided to let him go as part of a reshufﬂe (3 October)

designed to distract attention from the military setback at Dakar. Shortly

afterwards Churchill succeeded him as Conservative Party leader. A month

later, on 9 November 1940, Chamberlain died. He had refused a peerage

and the Order of the Garter, preferring, like his famous father, to die plain

‘Mr Chamberlain’.

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Attlee to Douglas-Home

Clement Attlee (left ofﬁce 26 October 1951)

When Attlee left ofﬁce he had been prime minister for six years and three

months and before that Churchill’s deputy in the War Cabinet for ﬁve

years, and he had been leader of the Labour Party for 16 years (since 1935).

He was 68 years old, exhausted after 11 gruelling years in government, and

had been hospitalised twice while prime minister, in 1948 and 1951, suffer-

ing from duodenal ulcers. It might have been thought a good moment

to step down. Attlee’s wife would have liked him to retire. A year or two

earlier a retirement cottage had been bought in the Chilterns, a few miles

from Chequers, a place the Attlees had grown to love. Attlee himself later

admitted he wanted to go after the 1951 election.

However, there was no

call from within the party for him to quit and when parliament reassembled

Labour MPs re-elected him as leader unopposed and by acclamation.

Labour had lost the 1951 general election only narrowly, polling more votes

than the Conservatives who had only a small 17-seat majority. Attlee had

high approval ratings and was an undoubted electoral asset. The Conserv-

atives might not last long, it was thought, and the pendulum might swing

in Labour’s direction sooner rather than later.

The four years, until December 1955, in which he led the Labour Party and

was Leader of the Opposition were not a happy or successful period for him or

his party. Although Labour was ahead in the opinion polls for most of the

period, it rarely had a big lead after 1952, and in the May 1955 election the

Conservatives won comfortably, polling 3.3 per cent more votes than Labour

(who lost 1.5 million voters compared with 1951) and increasing their major-

ity to 59 seats. The handover from Churchill to the 57 years old Eden in April

1955 underlined the 72 years old Attlee’s status as a member of a political gen-

eration whose time had passed. His health was not good: he needed an appen-

dix operation in 1953; in February 1955 he fainted into Churchill’s arms

(‘some of the others are not lasting as well as I am’, remarked the 81 years old

Churchill, with grim satisfaction

); and in August 1955 he had a slight stroke.

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Attlee stayed on as Labour leader in the 1950s ‘long beyond the time

when he could make any positive contribution in that role’. He showed

little interest in the necessary task of rethinking social democratic policy

and doctrine. Aloof and distant, he lacked ‘the inspirational and innovative

power to rally his forces’. Outstanding in government, he underwhelmed

(as in the 1930s) in opposition: ‘he was too reasonable, and too little the

partisan … he was as poor as ever at courting publicity’.

Personality clashes

and factional inﬁghting had been starting to pull Labour apart while still

in government, and the splits, divisions and policy differences (often over

foreign policy and defence) intensiﬁed in opposition. Attlee had survived

so long as leader by having an acute sense of the balance of party opinion,

and often by following rather than leading his party. After 1951 it became

more difﬁcult to paper over the cracks, hold the party together and broker

compromises. Internal Labour politics became exceptionally bitter, with

much bloodletting at the 1952 party conference and an attempt (headed

off by Attlee at the last minute) by the hardliners on the right to expel from

the party the leader of the left, Aneurin Bevan, just before the 1955 elec-

tion. Attlee often seemed weak and vacillating – hoping that somehow the

party would pull itself together – and his critics wanted him to come down

off the fence and give a stronger lead. He ‘doodled where he ought to have

led’, complained Herbert Morrison.

At one point it looked as if Attlee’s 70th birthday in January 1953 would

provide an appropriate retirement opportunity, and he assured some col-

leagues he would bow out at that time but changed his mind, claiming

friends had pressed him to stay and that the party was in such turmoil

that he felt he had a duty to stay on to save it from splitting asunder.

His justiﬁcation for clinging on was that victory for one or other of the

two rivals for the succession – Bevan on the left or Morrison on the right

– would spark an all-out party civil war. Beneath his concern for party

unity was the fact that after so long at the top Attlee had become used to

being party leader and had come to regard himself as indispensable. He was

determined to block his long-time rival Morrison, hanging on until his can-

didacy was weakened by the emergence of a younger and more attractive

successor, Hugh Gaitskell.

Attlee campaigned in an old-fashioned way in his last general election

as leader in 1955, his wife, Vi, driving him in their own car 1,200 miles

around the country, where he spoke at forty meetings. After the defeat

he announced that he was ready to go at once but was cynically pressed

to stay on by Morrison’s enemies on the left and the right, though realistic-

ally the leadership issue could not be long delayed. Attlee was now 72 and

Morrison 67 – both were fading forces. Six months later, on 7 December

1955, he ﬁnally stepped down as party leader. Its seems that earlier Attlee

had wanted Bevan to be leader but came to feel he had thrown his chance

away by being too undisciplined and too much of a rebel. Gaitskell (but

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not other contenders) had been privately tipped off a week or so before

Attlee’s departure was conﬁrmed, and while Attlee was not particularly close

to or keen on him, he felt he would win, which he did decisively.

‘One either has to stay on in the House of Commons when one is per-

haps a nuisance, or not of much use, or to give up constant connection

with public affairs and with old friends’, Attlee once explained about the

advantages of going to the House of Lords, a place where it was possible to

‘still keep in contact with affairs’ and ‘sometimes, possibly … contribute

something’. He had conventional, small-‘c’ conservative views about

the honours system and himself accumulated an impressive collection of

honours: a CH (1945), an OM (1951), an Earldom (1955) and a KG (1956).

He went to see Anthony Eden, then the prime minister, when he had decided

to retire, to ask for his Earldom, saying ‘That’s the rate for the job.’ He

accepted the House of Lords was an anomaly, illogical, democratically inde-

fensible and sometimes rather dull, supporting life peerages and criticising

the party imbalance there, but – always a constitutional conservative – felt

it worked in practice satisfactorily enough and that reform was not a burning

question or a high priority.

He had no intention of remaining an active politician but he had a fairly

busy retirement. He seemed to relish the part of ‘Former Prime Minister’

more than he did some of his earlier roles (particularly that of opposition

leader), it has been said. ‘Now that he no longer had to “shape up” to his

party’s expectations he could revert somewhat to the inﬂuences of his

youth when ideology meant nothing and ethos was all’, commented

D.J. Heasman. ‘Identifying himself with what he took to be the ethos of the

nation as a whole he could now afford to be less inhibited in his pro-

nouncements on men who in themselves or their policies had failed to

“measure up”.’ ‘I have arrived at the years of irresponsibility’, as Attlee

quipped in 1959. ‘It doesn’t matter a hoot what I say.’

In 1964 he opposed

the winding-up of the Admiralty, declaring ‘I like the old titles’ and com-

plaining abut the Conservative government’s iconoclasm and change for

change’s sake. In a Lords debate on industrial relations he likened the well-

run ﬁrm to a well-run regiment, saying it called for the same kind of leader-

ship and concern for morale. When the only Communist peer made his

maiden speech, it fell to Attlee as the next speaker to congratulate him.

‘There are many anomalies in this country’, he said. ‘One curious one

is that the voice of the Communist Party can be heard only in this House.’

‘That’, he continued as peers laughed, ‘is the advantage of hereditary

representation.’

He was serious and diligent about attending the Lords, where he made

some effective and well-regarded interventions and speeches. When the

Lords were sitting, he would travel in like an ordinary commuter: Vi would

drive him to Great Missenden station and he would sit in a third-class

compartment on the train to Baker Street, then go by tube to Westminster.

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