BOOKS
Aristocrats and Mechanics
By HENRY FAMLIE W. HEN I reviewed Mr. Frank Owen's life of Lloyd George I said that it was clear that Lord Beaver- brook had planned his biography in three volumes : the first disguised as a life of Lloyd George, the second dis- guised as a life of Bonar Law and the third disguised as a life of himself. The second volume has come.*. It is, of course, very different in style from the first. Mr. Frank Owen's varied from chapter to chapter, almost from page to page. There were passages which seemed to meet no more than a demand for a weekly stint; and there were Passages which recalled Mr. Owen's Liberal past and (to judge by his candidature at the last election) present. Mr. Blake has produced a very different sort of book. All the impressive evidence of Christ Church scholarship is in its pages. (One kept on looking back and mak- ing sure that it had. not been written by Professor Felling.) But the total effect is the same. Mr. Blake has done an effective job of whitewashing.
Mr. Blake goes to considerable trouble to quote the docu- ments which arc relevant to Bonar Law's election to the leadership of the Conservative Party before the 1914-18 war. At every point he accepts Bonar Law's account of the events. He even•quotes a disclaimer by Bonar Law that he was inter- ested in leading the party as proof that he was not. (You see what I mean by Christ Church scholarship.lf you do not, then read Professor Feiling's life of Neville Chamberlain as well.) The plain fact is that Bonar LaW angled for the position, and that the engine behind him all the time was Lord Beaverbrook. Only a few days ago a colleague of Lord Beaverbrook's used to me in conversation the phrase, 'When Lord Beaverbrook put Bonar Law into the leadership. . . .' It is as unquestion- able as that. So it goes on throughout Mr. Blake's pages. Bonar Law is represented as a far bigger, far more intelligent, far more original figure than he was. And everywhere there is-- Max. To a' later generation, of course, Max is a hamster, a cartoonist's creation, who always ends up upside-down. There is not much difference between the two. The only difference is that Max, Lord Beaverbrook, is a Canadian hamster.
Bonar Law as the leader of his party was important to Lloyd George both during and after the war. But he was no more important than that. You can search, as I did, Mr. Blake's book for one major decision of policy for which Bonar Law was responsible. You will not find it. This really was the small man in a big position. This really was the little Scottish busi- nessman looking at politics through the wrong end of a factor's chanter. Bonar Law was willing to be a tool—and a wonder- fully subservient tool he was to life-size men like Lord Beaverbrook and Lloyd George. Even the occasion which eventually gave him a few months' tenure in Downing Street— the Carlton' Club meeting which rejected the Lloyd George coalition—owed nothing to his inspiration or his initiative. One dreads to think what would have happened if he had lived. Baldwin was able, during the Twenties, to override the 'Forty * TOE UNKNOWN PRIME MINISTER. By Robert Blake. (Eyre and Spouts- woode, 42s.) Thieves'—the 'hard-faced' business element in the Conserva- tive Party. It is extremely doubtful whether Bonar Law would have either wished or been able to do. so.
Bonar Law always sought the winning side in politics. To call him a leader is misleading. He had no conception of what a Conservative policy should be—see, for example, his manoeuvres over tariff reform—and no deep political instincts.
I doubt even whether he had any instinct about Britain's position in world affairs. Certainly there is no evidence of it in Mr. Blake's biography. How refreshing, then, to turn to Lord Winterton's unpretentious volume of reminiscences.t. This is not an autobiography, and Lord Winterton has already skimmed off some of his reminiscences in an earlier volume, Orders of the Day. Yet Fifty Tumultuous Years is a grati- fyingly revealing book. Lord Winterton wanders through his fifty years in public life and jots down what he remembers in an informal and candid way. On every third page there is a memory of past occasions or an aneedote, about a famous person which is worth remembering. Lord Winterton, in fact, has put his conversation on paper. If, after a very good dinner with the Sussex Conservatives, one could sip a glass of port with him, this is what he would have to say.
But the book is more important than that—because Lord Winterton is more important than that. Dr. Schumpeter, in the later editions of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, has said that the business world must always govern by . proxy-- and, in the case of Britain, this means that business must govern through the aristocracy and squirearchy. The nearest that Britain came to a purely businessmen's government was just before the war. The men who were excluded from Neville Chamberlain's Government were Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper. All of them represented a tradition which owed nothing to the business world; indeed, all of them had a deep distrust of the business world, a dis- trust which is most evident in Duff Cooper's remarkable autobiography..Lord Winterton was part of the same tradition. To the unsophisticated he might seem to represent the real old Tory. So he might. But that is not all the story. What he 'did not represent in Parliament was the new Conservatism. His book is full of the most humane and civilised comments on social and political developments in Britain since the war. If you would wish to find the reverse you would turn to Mr. Gerald Nabarro in the present House of Commons.
The Story of Conservatism between the wars was the story of an aggressive business element in the Conservative Party competing with the older aristocratic clement. Lord Winter- ton's book will demonstrate to many who have not understood it before exactly how important the aristocratic element is. (In the vote on MPs' salaries the Conservatives, including Sir Winston Churchill, who supported a straightforward increase were the aristocratic element. Those who opposed it were the business and managerial element.) Today the business clement is on the attack, but, as in the days of the 'Forty Thieves,' it is not a majority of the party. But today there is a, vital third element : the professional politicians (they are on both sides of the House) who will always take the winning side. They are the managers of politics. They are without opinion, instinct or judgement of their own. They are the descendants of Bonar Law. Scotland has served Britain and the Commonwealth well by peopling it with engineers and mechanics. It is always a disaster when one of these mechanics, like Bonar Law, sets his sights too high and invades the House of Commons. The ominous fact today is that the mechanics are coming not only from Scotland.
t FIFTY TUMULTUOUS YEARS. By Lord Winterton. (Hutchinson, 21s.)
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