Not all gas and gaiters
John Vincent
STANLEY BALDWIN: CONSERVATIVE LEADERSHIP AND NATIONAL VALUES by Philip Williamson CUP, £25, pp. 378 Books about prime ministers may now concentrate as much on what they say as on what they do. It is considered legitimate to treat them primarily as preachers, public orators, creators of mood and atmosphere. Never has the role of the soundbite, its antiquity and perhaps even its primacy, been more fully recognised. The preten- tious sometimes call this the 'linguistic turn'. There is now a great tradition of those whose smallest actions and lightest word somehow mysteriously embody national feeling: Palmerston, Gladstone, Baldwin, Reagan, Clinton, Blair. Of these, Baldwin is perhaps the least explored, least fraudulent, but far from the least success- ful.
It is in these terms that Philip Williamson's Baldwin is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, insight and persuasion. It is primarily a reconstruction of Baldwin's way of thinking and speaking. It is not a biogra- phy in the simple sense of a narrative of a life. Though strong on what Baldwin was like before he became a politician, it assumes a grounding in interwar political history and is aimed at encouraging debate about interpretation. A reviewer must say circumspectly both that it is the best book on Baldwin, and that the Lower Sixth would not find it an easy guide to the course of events.
Politically, it is a rehabilitation. William- son thinks Baldwin a very good thing indeed. It would not be too much to say that Baldwin has touched his heart. This I think is helpful, for unless one understands the trust he enjoyed one is not likely to understand much about the interwar period. Baldwin, for instance, was the last leader to win a clear majority of the popu- lar vote at a general election (and that at a time of privation), and some think he always got a majority of the working-class vote, perhaps the last Tory leader to do so. There must be a great deal to learn from him. Much of his success was due to ploys which lay somewhere between fishiness and shrewdness. He cultivated friendly relations with Labour in a way which can hardly have been innocent. He dealt with the unions on the basis that they were doing much that was admirable. He created a false public identity for himself as a Worcestershire ironmaster, morally accept- able to democracy because he made neces- sities. What the public never knew, and here Williamson has dug deep, was the extent of his interests as a multi- millionaire with railway and banking directorships and a City office. Financially, he was a big fish pretending to be a small provincial fish.
This leads us to what the public did know — the speeches. It was these which per- suaded the country, almost as rapidly as with Blair, that Baldwin was the man it wanted. Williamson goes out of his way, I think unnecessarily, to stress that no other interwar politician could have produced anything like the same effect. The number of speeches, many not on politics or to non-political audiences, seems huge, and perhaps sufficiently disposes of the myth that Baldwin did not work. The speeches were his work. However, since they were not written by him but by speech-writers whose politics differed from his, they are hard to use as evidence. (We have left far behind the days of Mr Gladstone's three- hour impromptu speeches without notes). One point to emerge is that Baldwin was only to a very minor degree given to speak- ing on rural themes, which comes as a sur- prise.
On the contrary, he invented a new polit- ical religion. What today might be called social cohesion or inclusiveness, he called democracy, a word to which he gave reli- gious overtones, although most Conserva- tives and many Liberals had traditionally feared and loathed it. He perfected a wool- ly rhetoric in which it was hard to tell where democracy, responsibility, decency, brotherhood, service and common humani- ty ended and a very inclusive, not very Anglican Christianity began. In this he was undoubtedly genuine. He had considered ordination at Cambridge; his day's work at No. 10 and Chequers began with family prayers. He .spoke of his Disraelian inheritance, no doubt with some historical inaccuracy, but genuinely in that he was heir to a paternalist tradition which was real enough. Some lips, including Tory ones, may curl at his monumental outpouring of homily. Others may see it as truly expressing Chris- tian love in politics. Yet others will note its sheer political skill. There was no real rea- son why the Tories should not have with- ered and died between the wars. The 1929 general election, with its endorsement of woolly progressivism, might perfectly Well have been the normal general election result. It was Baldwin who persuaded the new democracy otherwise, just as it was Baldwin who persuaded Labour to accept exclusion without alienation or embitter- ment. This was a great achievement. Great achievements were indeed to be expected when one thinks who Baldwin defeated. He thoroughly thrashed Lloyd George and Churchill, the two great wartime premiers. He saw off Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, owners of most of the Tory press, and virulent oppo- nents. He thrust aside his two senior rivals for the Tory leadership, Lord Curzon and Austen Chamberlain. He almost effortless- ly eased a king off his throne. He broke the General Strike without seeming to; he destroyed Labour in 1931; he eliminated the Liberals as a force in politics. It is quite a record.
This brings us to the appalling Churchillian cult of blaming Baldwin for every wartime disaster. Williamson makes light of Baldwin's apparent lack of the executive virtues, strange in a successful multimillionaire, but puts forward an idea which will give many pause. In a nutshell, this is that Baldwin in the early Thirties invented the Churchillianism of the early Forties: that is, the sense of England's unique role in fighting total evil. Baldwin, Williamson argues, created the public per- ception of a world engaged in a final encounter between good and very bad, a perception that arose not from events abroad but from the inner momentum of Baldwin's rhetoric. Since, in the end, Eng- land attacked Germany on moral grounds rather than for reasons of realpolitik, Bald- win can be said to have created the moral setting for the outbreak of war. The nature of the Baldwin problem has certainly changed. Ever since the war he has been pilloried as the scapegoat for Dunkirk. That implies that Dunkirk could have been foreseen; as it could not, he stands largely exonerated. Nobody, not Churchill, not the appeasers, not the Ger- man general staff, not any English politi- cian, not even Hitler himself, foresaw the fall of France. It is idle to pillory Baldwin for something that in his day was quite sim- ply unthinkable.
That said, a new and blacker cloud has arisen. Where Baldwin is (probably) being Painfully genuine, he looks remarkably like Blair being (probably) painfully synthetic and slick. How one distinguishes between Baldwin's reputation for being 'non-politi- cal' and Blair's for being 'a straightforward 'arida guy' I cannot imagine. The purist may look with anxiety at Williamson's wish to give Baldwin the benefit of many a doubt in cases where the evidence is ambiguous. He may also be uneasy about the author's way of conjoining evidence from different decades. He would not wish to deny that Williamson speaks with unrivalled authority, that he will gravely annoy all those stuck in the historical mud, and that he seems to be saying something of general importance about politics in modem societies.
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