The Loyal Lord
The Abdication of King Edward VIII. By Lord Beaverbrook. Edited, with an introduction, by A. I. P. Taylor. (Hamish Hamilton, 16s.) `CHURCHILL,' wrote Mr A. J. P Taylor, in his English History 1914-1945, 'made every possible blunder during the crisis.' If Mr Taylor had substituted Beaverbrook's name for Churchill's, the sentence would have been just as accurate. Beaverbrook, like Churchill, misconceived the nature of the abdication crisis; and the chief interest of his book (to me at any rate) lies in the light it sheds, not on the crisis, but on Beaverbrook. For surely there can be few left who are enthralled by the abdication as an event in-itself. It belongs to that lost world—did it ever, one wonders, really exist?—of yachts and manne- quins. of society divorces and Lagonda cars, that world of which pale reflections could until re- cently still occasionally be detected on pages two, three and five of the Sunday Express.
But Beaverbrook himself is rather more in- teresting. His account of the crisis illustrates in conveniently summary form his talents and his deficiencies. Beaverbrook was a man to whom personal loyalty was one of the very highest of the virtues. He was not greatly interested in political ideas and reacted unfavourably to those who were. He gave his loyalty to the King partly because the King had flattered him ( Beaverbrook was highly susceptible to flattery. as one current Liberal MP can testify) and partly because he hated Baldwin. He had little patience with or understanding of the constitutional argument, accepted by most of the then Labour party, that a conflict between the King and his ministers admitted of only one outcome 'We have all become King's .men or Cabinet men.' he wrote. `It is as if the whole country had :slipped back into the seventeenth •centtrry again:' There was no one who by temperament and inclination was less fitted to play the part of cavalier.
Intense. personal loyalty in politics is a dan- gerous, even destructive, force. It means that principle must be subordinated and perhaps ex- tinguished. It can lead to the elevation of medi- ocrities such as Bonar Law. Moreover, it involves curious double standards. 'Dawson,' writes Beaverbrook, 'made himself busy in the cause in ways that were not normal for a journa- list: Yet what was Beaverbrook himself but a journalist, and a better one than Dawson? The only difference was that Beaverbrook was for the King, Dawson against. Dawson was successful, Beaverbrook not. Again, on The Times's threat to run the 'life' of Mrs Simpson, Beaverbrook writes: 'A promise to refrain from publication for the "next issue" was regarded as a cat-and- mouse game, and the King was the mouse. Tor- ture: Rarely can Satan have rebuked sin quite so resoundingly.
Nor is it only Beaverbrook's elevation of per- sonal loyalty which is illustrated. We see, too, his uncanny knack for misjudging the mood of the public. Partly this was due to his over- estimating the part the press. particularly the national press, could play. The Express, the Mail and (to Beaverbrook's surprise) the News Chronicle came out on the King's side. This, Beaverbrook believed, enormously strengthened the King's hand—a strange judgment. But then. the book contains other strange judgments, notably that a new government of King's men, neither Labour nor Conservative, could have arisen under the unlikely leadership of Sir Archibald Sinclair. In the -crisis, as on other occasions, Beaverbrook showed no real com- prehension of the solid, sometimes unkind. realities of British politics. He believed in fixing and in friendship. He could never understand it when his own self-appointed heroes deserted him. `It is difficult,' he writes, `to describe the loneli- ness that descended on me at Cherkley. . . . Now there was silence, total and unbroken. The tornado was still raging but it had passed me by.' It had been so twenty years previously when, hour after hour, he had waited by the telephone in the Hyde Park hotel for the call that never came. 'We shall astonish them with our ingrati- tude,' said Metternich. It was a maxim of politics which Beaverbrook never entirely absorbed.
ALAN WATKINS
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