NORMALITY IN POWER

Roy Jenkins commemorates Stanley Baldwin,

the 50th anniversary of whose death passed almost unnoticed just before Christmas

OF ALL the 51 prime ministers — 50 men and one woman — who, beginning with Sir Robert Walpole, have occupied No. 10 Downing Street, the two with whom I find it most natural to compare with Stanley Baldwin are Asquith, his predecessor but two, and Attlee, his successor also but two. Of course neither of them was of his party, but this was not inappropriate, for an essential part of Baldwin's leadership skill was that it transcended party and reached out to a wider national audience. All his most notable House of Commons speeches were in this category.

Neither Baldwin nor Asquith was obsessed by politics. Baldwin's mind was nonetheless always playing around the crucial political issues of the day, sniffing the atmosphere, nudging his way to what would and what would not work, and for- mulating in his mind one of those rumi- native, persuasive speeches which were such important political instruments for him. One could almost say that he gov- erned more by mood-creating speeches than by hard decisions. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about speeches, and not only about political ones. He could seldom resist an invitation to address a learned society, a university, a county or regional association, a professional body, indeed any gathering of public-spirited people brought together for non-commer- cial purposes. And those speeches had to be rich in literary allusion and evocative phrases.

He was more imaginative than Asquith who, under his polished Balliol classicism and sophisticated conversation, had a good deal of Yorkshire phlegm. Baldwin, para- doxically in view of the image he acquired, and did not discourage, of the quintessen- tial solid Englishman rooted in the soil of the rural West Midlands, was more Celtic (his mother was half Highland Scots and half Welsh) and more highly strung. He was full of minor nervous habits, an eye- twitch, a frequent snapping of the thumbs and fingers when reading or in conversa- tion, a flicking of the tongue before starting a speech, and a curious habit of putting objects, particularly books, to his nostrils and audibly sniffing at them. More impor- tantly, he had a metabolism which reacted well to crisis. His power of decision-making improved, and his gift of calming, persua- sive oratory rose to its heights. But after such a period he was left exhausted, some- times near to nervous prostration. As examples, he dealt skilfully with the eight days of the General Strike in 1926, but was then supine in dealing with the coal strike, which dragged on for another six months. `Leave it alone; we are all so tired,' he said to Churchill at the end of the summer. But Churchill wasn't at all tired. Again, after his Abdication speech triumph, his main desire was to coast downhill to the already fixed date of this retirement.

His intellectual equipment was less formidable than that of Asquith. He had quite wide but somewhat imprecise knowl- edge and interests. There is a story, possi- bly apocryphal but of the sort that Baldwin engagingly liked to encourage about him- self, of his being asked in conversation which English thinker had most influenced him. 'Sir Henry Maine,' he firmly replied. When asked what particular aspect of Maine's thought had most seized his mind, he said Maine's view that all human histo- ry should be seen in terms of the advance from status to contrast. He then paused, looked apprehensively at his interlocutor and said, 'Or was it the other way round?' That was totally un-Asquithian. Asquith may not have had many original thoughts, fewer probably than Baldwin, but he could summarise the broad doctrines of every well-known philosopher or historian, as well as giving you their dates, at the drop of a hat.

Baldwin considerably admired Asquith. What he thought of Attlee, the other prime minister with whom I venture to compare him, I do not know. What we do know is that, in general, Baldwin believed in treating the Labour party with high con- sideration. This is well illustrated by a rebuke, massive in substance although gen- tly delivered in form, which he gave to Neville Chamberlain in 1927, when the lat- ter was perhaps the most successful of his departmental ministers. Chamberlain, sur- prisingly, recorded it faithfully and neutral- ly (but then did nothing about it) in one of his frequent letters to his two sisters. 'Stan- ley begged me to remember', he wrote, `that in the House of Commons I was addressing a meeting of gentlemen. I always gave him the impression, he said, when I spoke [there] that I looked on the Labour party as dirt.' Where Baldwin and Attlee were similar was that they liked a certain anonymity and ran a government without a surround- ing circus. They tried to lead as normal a life as possible in office. They were, for instance, the last two prime ministers habitually to travel by train unattended by private secretaries or detectives. But what of Baldwin as a statesman, as opposed to his quality as an individual, in which latter respect I have no doubt that he was one of the handful (or perhaps two handfuls) of really attractive human beings ever to inhabit No. 10 Downing Street?

During his decade and a half of leader- ship he had three 'swell of the ocean' national issues with which to deal. They were not all the most obvious or those which most occupied his time, but they were the most fundamental. The first was the rise to power of the organised working class, stronger than hitherto in any other bourgeois democracy, and expressing itself, alternately rather than complemen- tarily, in industrial conflict and the coming to government of the Labour party. This I would say he handled almost brilliantly, far better than any other Conservative would have done. There was one major flaw, and that was when he allowed him- self to be pushed by Neville Chamberlain into over-reaction to a relatively minor financial crisis and the formation of the National Government in 1931. This suited neither his own interests — for four years he had the central responsibilities without the compensations of office, neither Che- quers nor No. 10 Downing Street — nor, in my view, the interests of the nation. This hasty and unnecessary action worked against much of what he had been trying to achieve in the 1920s, and unbalanced British politics for half a generation. It was against his instincts, but he allowed him- self to be overborne.

The second issue began with Mussoli- ni's Abyssinian threat to the flimsy world order of the League of Nations and was then quickly subsumed in Hitler's much more massive threat to the very existence of democracy and decency in Europe. It cannot be held that he reacted to these threats with dynamic leadership. In his defence, no previous major peacetime prime ministers — Asquith again or Gladstone — would have been any more likely to do so. Nor would any likely alter- native prime minister of the 1930s Churchill was not remotely a realistic proposition until the country had been brought right up against the precipice of national destruction. At least Baldwin, had he still been there, would never have climbed three times into a small aeroplane in September 1938 and gone to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg and Munich. There can be some advantages in indo- lence. So at least we would have been spared the nonsense of the 'high case' for the Munich agreement, the view that it was peace with honour and the opening of a new era of Anglo-German friendship, as opposed to the much more sustainable `low case' that it was a necessary but inglo- rious playing for time.

The third issue was the 1920s impact, for the first time, of Britain's relative industrial decline, which had begun as long previous- ly as the 1890s, but which had been sup- pressed until our over-expanded and obsolescent basic industries — coal, cotton, shipbuilding and, to some extent, iron and steel (Baldwin's own business) — ran into the post-1921 export slump. Some difficult adjustment would in any case have been necessary, but Baldwin made it worse by allowing Churchill to restore sterling to the gold standard, and at the old pre-1914 pari- ty, in 1925. Contrary to the general impres- sion, Churchill resisted this for some time inside the Treasury, but was eventually carried along by the weight of establish- ment opinion. Baldwin, who thought very highly of Montagu Norman, the intellectu- ally certain governor of the Bank of Eng- land, would undoubtedly have been against Churchill had he attempted to resist fur- ther. This was despite the fact that the decision to go back to gold ran heavily counter to Baldwin's own generally emol- lient industrial policy.

After that, and as the 1930s wore on, Britain performed relatively well economi- tally in a depressed world. Rearmament, when it began in Baldwin's third premier- ship, helped — and so did the house- building boom, which was substantially a response to low interest rates. Bank Rate, as it was then called, was unchanging at only 2 per cent from 1932 to 1939.

The other indicators of the period pre- sented a mixed picture. The real value of wages (obviously only for those in work) rose steadily and significantly. The first glint of middle-class standards began to touch the helmets of manual workers in the more prosperous industries and the more favoured parts of the country. There was a widening of the gaps between the unemployed and the employed, and between the old industrial areas and the new Britain of arterial roads, semi-detached, gabled suburban houses and factories which looked like exhibition pavilions. Britain's external accounts were more or less in balance, although heavily dependent on the rev- enue 'from the foreign investments of previous generations. Agriculture remained depressed, and we imported two thirds of our food. Inflation was not a problem.

Paradoxically once again, these econom- ic developments, some of them beneficial, led to the semi-destruction of several aspects of the England to which Baldwin in his self-conscious countryman aspect was particularly attached. The unchanging nature of English rural life was one of his most effective and frequently recurring oratorical themes. His 1934 speech to the Royal Society of St George contained what was probably the most remembered passage he ever wrote:

The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow to the hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function: for centuries, the one eternal sight of England.

This was prose of high evocative quali- ty, but its prophecy was inaccurate in both the letter and the spirit. Now, less than three quarters of a century later, with the Empire admittedly gone and only too many 'works' closed down, but with little of eternity used up, the brow of every hill in England may be searched in vain for the sight of a plough team. And the destruction of traditional rural life proba- bly proceeded more rapidly during the period covered by his premierships than in any previous span of 15 years. When he began, the countryside of Hardy's novels was little touched. When he ended it had been deeply invaded by suburbia and the motor-car. The change was not his fault, although he may have been guilty of the romantic self-deception that it was not taking place.

Like most of us, he sometimes preferred to avert his gaze from things he did not like. But the things that he did like were good and attractive things, and I think he was a good and attractive man.

Extracted from an address given by Lord Jenkins in Worcester Cathedral.

`Well, I found a precedent. You committed the same crime in 1979.'