A confoundedly modern Tory
Allan Massie
BALFOUR: INTELLECTUAL STATESMAN by Ruddock F. Mackay
OUP, £19.50 alfour,' Beaverbrook told A. J. P. Taylor, 'was a hermaphrodite. No one ever saw him naked.' Mr Taylor responded to this assertion by asking Beaverbrook "whether it was usual to see Cabinet Ministers naked". Setting aside all other occasions when Balfour may have been seen naked, it was precisely because he was a Cabinet minister of high rank that he was, at least once, interviewed while wear- ing no clothes . . .' Sir Sidney Lee, his private secretary, once brought 'a very Pressing despatch' to him in his bathroom, and found him 'in native majesty like Milton's Adam'; 'so, all in all,' as Ruddock F. Mackay, formerly Reader in Modern History at St Andrews University, remarks 'it seems fair to conclude that Balfour was not a hermaphrodite. As he was sometimes heard to observe to pessimists, "This is a singularly ill-contrived world, but not so ill-contrived as that".'
Mr Mackay tells this story in his first chapter. It is extremely uncharacteristic of the rest of the book. Indeed, it serves to get the question of sex out of the way by Page 9, as perhaps Balfour got it out of the Way early in life too. This is quite proper. Mr Mackay has not attempted a full biography — there are already, he points out, four in existence. He has concentrated on Balfour as statesman, and for much of the book it would be possible to forget that he had any private life at all. Considering the number of good stories about Balfour In circulation, Mr Mackay's self-denial is admirable. He concentrates on his subject, even to the extent of foregoing anecdotes about Margot Asquith. (On their first meeting Balfour told her he 'detested work, adored leisure, and always left ev- erything to chance, adding that he found nothing so absorbing as his own health'; he denied rumours that he was to marry Margot saying that he was 'thinking of having a career of his own'; both stories make him sound like Nancy Mitford's Davey Warbeck.) Mr Mackay carries his restraint even into his chosen field of statecraft. His treatment of Balfour's time as Irish Secretary, when to everyone's surprise, except perhaps his uncle Salis- bury's, the elegant flaneur revealed a tenacious will, and so made his reputation, is perfunctory — on the grounds that 'an excellent book has already been written out of the available materials', namely Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland by L. P. Curtis Jr.
All this may make the book sound arid. It isn't, however, so. I introduced that uncharacteristic anecdote first, because though it is not typical of the content of Mr Mackay's book, it is yet typical of its tone. Mr Mackay is cool, detached, sceptical and inquiring, in command of his material; just like Balfour, in fact; biographer and sub- ject are well-matched. The result is a work which is continuously absorbing, which encourages reflection, and which offers intellectual pleasure. It is, within its chosen limits, a very good book.
Balfour was essentially a man of Gov- ernment. Fortunately, since, despite his debating skill, he took little pleasure in opposition, he had plenty of opportunity; he held Cabinet rank for 27 years, longer than Churchill, Liverpool, Gladstone, Pal- merstone or Pitt, as Mr Mackay points out. His only lengthy period out of office was during the Liberal supremacy that began in 1906; even then he served on the Commit- tee of Imperial Defence (his own creation), or its sub-committees. When the War Council was formed in November 1914, Balfour became a member even though he had no Government position and was a former leader of the Opposition. Indeed, he was temperamentally averse to Party politics, even though his attachment to the Conservative Party could not be doubted.
His involvement in Government led to a curious intellectual development. He was instinctively a sceptic who believed that legislation could do little to ameliorate social conditions, and always less than it claimed to do. In the best Conservative tradition, he distrusted the efficacy of reasoning: 'a force most apt to divide and disintegrate; and though division and disin- tegration may often be the necessary pre- liminaries of social development, still more necessary are the forces that bind and stiffen, without which there would be no society to develop.' Yet his interest in science and economics (in 1885 he had read enough Marx to convince him that a comparison between Marx and Henry George was 'absurd') and his experience of Government, particularly during the War, led him to revise his views in the 1920s; he was then instrumental in creating a body which was intended as the civil counterpart of the Committee for Imperial Defence. This 'implied a non-party basis for long- term planning' and, in Mr Mackay's view, would have been something like the Com- missariat du Plan established in France in 1946.
The conviction grows, as one reads about Balfour and reads his own Memor- anda, that he was a very modern politician. The particular occasions — the Evacuation Act of 1902, the Tariff Reform con- troversy, the Defence questions before 1914 — are obviously not going to present themselves again, in the same light any- way; but much of what Balfour has to say is extremely pertinent to our concerns today. In 1904, for instance, there was a Labour- sponsored Trade Union Bill. Balfour ex- plained his objections to the King:
It has to be observed that 'peaceful picket- ing' is, or may be, a most serious form of intimidation; and, as such, can scarcely be permitted unless surrounded by precautions which the bill does not contain. As regards Trade Union Funds, it may be perfectly right that the portion of these funds which is devoted to charitable purposes (pensions and so forth) should not be liable to seizure; but it can hardly be right that the funds em- ployed in promoting strikes should possess privileges which no other corporate funds in the Kingdom are allowed to enjoy.
Eighty years later, is there anything to add to this lucid exposition?
Lucidity and logic were the features of Balfour's mind, and they were combined there with a distrust of abstraction. He would have agreed with Burke that 'cir- cumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circum- stances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.' So; in the Tariff Reform de- bates, he displayed 'intellectual contempt for outright Cobdenites and straight pro- tectionists alike' regretting the manner in which political economy is treated in this House and on public plat- forms. It is not treated as a science, or as a subject which people ought to approach impartially with a view to discovering what the truth is, either from theory or experi- ence. Not at all. They find some formula in a book of authority and throw it at their opponents' heads. They bandy the old watchwords backwards and forwards; they rouse old bitternesses, wholly alien, as far as I can see, to any modern question; and our controversies are apt to alternate between outworn formulae imperfectly remembered, and modern doctrines imperfectly under- stood.
You will have to look far to find a more exact and pleasing summary of the econo- mic arguments that have distressed the country for the last 15 years. Indeed Balfour, the languid aristocrat, is con- foundedly modern. This book should be required reading for all Conservative Members of Parliament.
Previous page
