The extremely uneven career of a moderate

William Deedes

BALDWIN by Roy Jenkins Collins, £12.95 tanley Baldwin has attracted many biographers. The earliest one on my shelves is Arthur Bryant, whose tribute was published exactly half a century ago in the year Baldwin retired from politics. None of the earlier biographers possessed Roy Jenkins's political grasp and percep- tion -- nor his peculiar link with Baldwin.

Arthur Jenkins, Roy's father, entered the CoMmons as Labour MP for Pontypool in time for Baldwin's last years.. He was exactly the sort of Labour figure, an ex-miner, for whom Baldwin had warm feelings. I suspect it was mutual, which may partly explain why this short study offers a much kindlier portrait of Baldwin than we got from G.M. Young, unaccount- ably chosen by Baldwin as his official biographer.

Nonetheless, I approached the book cautiously, having long cherished one or two notions of my own about S.B. As a lobby correspondent I was distantly ac- quainted with him, and some of his final speeches made a lasting impression on me.

Baldwin has always stood accused of failing through inertia or timidity or deceit

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to arm this country properly in the 1930s. What is seldom remarked is the contribu- tion he made towards the national mood when we entered the inevitable conflict with Hitler. Though class differences and the gap between rich and poor were much wider in those years than they are now, we were in 1939 more one people than, say, the French. Stresses of the inter-war years could have torn us apart. Thanks partly to Baldwin, they did not.

I wondered what Roy Jenkins would make of this. He does no damage to my thesis. He puts first among the three great issues which dominated the age of Baldwin the thrust to power of the organised working class; and concedes that Baldwin was strongest there. The other two issues, less well handled, were our continuing decline as an industrial power, and the rise of the dictators.

As so many of his speeches show, Baldwin ruminated a lot on the great social changes precipitated by the first war. He was among the earliest to perceive that a new social order had arisen, that Labour must soon come to power; and in a style which would seem quite extraordinary today, took steps to ease their way.

He believed in the brotherhood of man, saw men like Arthur Jenkins as his equals — and moreover treated them as equals. He had privately less regard for the coal owners than the coal miners. In what, after the General Strike of 1926, might have been a bitter decade of industrial strife, Baldvvin's philosophy drew at least some thorns.

All this was embodied in the very last speech he made to the Commons in 1931. A great coal dispute threatened. Baldwin, unexpectedly, intervened in the debate. He begged both sides to ponder on the young King and Queen about to be crowned, and to offer what lay within their gift — 'peace in our time'. It was the only time I have seen a major debate abruptly halted by a single speech.

Roy Jenkins does justice to all this. I am content to go along with his criticisms on other scores. It is extremely hard to deter- mine how far some of Baldwin's worst lapses arose from what his critics call lethargy or laziness, how far from the nervous exhaustion to which he was prone. Jenkins dwells critically on Baldwin's in- sistence on taking long summer breaks at his beloved Aix-les-Bains. It took a nation- al crisis to stop him going or pull him back. Even that failed to move him — until too late — after the Labour Government's crash of 1931.

My impression, based on a certain amount of evidence, is that Baldwin's notorious sloth has been given rather too much weight, his vulnerability to acute nervous exhaustion too little. I have never seen any attempt made to analyse this frailty clinically; yet it counted heavily against him in critical times.

Tommy Dugdale, his PPS in the closing years, once told me a strange tale. He had accompanied Baldwin to Westminster Hall this was not long before he retired — for a speech to Canadian ex-servicemen. Bald- win's vision of the ghosts at Vimy Ridge was in poetic vein. When it was over, he stumbled back to the Commons smoke room with Dugdale. There he demanded four glasses of sherry — of all things — in a tumbler and downed it in a couple of gulps. 'He was not a tippler', explained Dugdale. 'He had simp- ly drained himself in making the speech.' Yet, not long before this, after a crisis over Edward VIII that would have crippled most Prime Ministers, Baldwin enjoyed his strongest hour. As Jenkins recalls, he delivered faultlessly a 45-minute speech of historic importance, barely glancing at his scrappy notes.

One of Baldwin's gifts was what Jenkins calls the 'measured and skilful deployment of moderate words'. It was a singular style, at its best far more persuasive than Chur- chill or Macmillan's. It was essentially discoursive. It drew sceptics in the audi- ence along. Sadly, it would be totally unacceptable to the present House of Commons. Indeed it would be shouted down.

It has to be seen, as Jenkins sees it, as an extremely uneven career. There were his- toric high points, like his speech at the Carlton Club against Lloyd George, which destroyed the coalition and made his name; the castigation of the press lords; the Abdication. There were also dismal lows, like the Safety First election defeat in 1929 and the Hoare-Laval pact in 1935. Unarguably, his interest in foreign affairs was fitful and inadequate. He spoke a great deal about the Empire; but it is hard to find any point in his career at No. 10 when he could have been said to have a foreign policy.

Unhappily, his longest low came after retirement in 1937. He had so relished those holidays. Now, when granted total leisure, his peace of mind was destroyed by public feeling against him. 'They hate me so' he he muttered in one sorry passage.

His personal fortune, which fluctuated like his career, was in low water towards the end of his life. 'A rather decrepit old man, living in a rather decrepit old house', Roy Jenkins observes. Sad — and true.