Up with Jones
ROBERT SKIDELSKY
Whitehall Diary Vol II 1926-1930 Thomas Jones edited by Keith Middlemas (out, 75s) The tragedy of English politics, remarked Sir Oswald Mosley in his recent memoirs, is that the good have so often been divorced from the dynamic. As a judgment on the years covered by the second volume of Thomas Jones's absorbing Diary, and on the interwar years in general, it is particularly apt. On the one side were ranged Baldwin, MacDonald, and a host of lesser luminar- ies, all undoubtedly men of goodwill; on the other, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Mosley himself, men of action. Between the two was an unbridgeable gulf of tem- perament and sympathy.
Thomas Jones gives a vignette of Bald- win listening to Churchill speaking in the House. 'During this brilliant performance, the PM's face was turned towards the Official Gallery and covered with one of his hands. He looked utterly wretched, much as Ramsay does when Lo is on his legs.' The successful efforts of Baldwin and Mac- Donald to keep Lloyd George and Churchill from laying their hands, separ- ately or jointly, on the levers of power is the major theme of interwar politics. Both men thereby thought they were striking a blow for public decency; yet in an age menaced by mass unemployment and Ger- man revanchism, who was really on the side of the angels?
When we talk of Baldwin and MacDon- ald being 'good' men, we mean something more than 'nice'. Indeed MacDonald was not particularly nice: he was vain, petu- lant, insincere. Baldwin was nice. He in- spired great affection and trust in those who worked with him, which is surely the key to his prolonged hold on power. Jones him- self came almost to love him, as he had Bonar Law. What both Baldwin and Mac- Donald shared was a common puritanism, a strict standard of rectitude which they believed Lloyd George challenged with his every act, with his sexual misdemeanours as much as with his selling of peerages.
Lord Grey expressed what they both felt when he wrote that 'Ll. G's Government after the war let down and corrupted public life at home and destroyed our credit abroad.' The fact that it was Grey's own policy in 1914 that really destroyed the world they loved, or that the despised Lloyd George coalition had pulled off a brilliant Irish settlement where all others had failed (comparison with de Gaulle over Algeria suggests itself), did not in the least modify this stern judgment. It was Lloyd George's badness, not their own mistakes, that was to blame for Britain's troubles—a judgment on the world which echoes those of the
early Church fathers contemplating the barbarian invasions of the fifth century.
And, as in that case, the remedy was to be sought, not in new ideas or policies, but in a return to the old virtues. It was thus that Victorianism, undermined by the war and Lloyd George's methods as well as by Lytton Strachey's prose, came to be restored in the 1920s. It was not just a matter of decorum. Sound finance, free trade, gold, were back as well. The Goat was out.
The results were devastating. Balc% in's 'decency' minimised the consequences of the General Strike, but as the Diary makes clear, even a modicum of leadership mould have prevented it happening altogether. There were several possible schemes of settlement, any one of which would have been accepted by both sides had the Gov. ernment taken a positive stand. The 'impot- ence of government', to which Baldwin loved to refer, was the impotence of Bald- win himself; a classic case of elevating one's own weakness into a principle of life. His desire not to get involved meant. in effect, giving the owners a carte blanche to starve the miners into submission: so much for his famous plea for 'peace in our time'.
The world depression undoubtedly con- fronted the Labotl- government of 1929 with a much sterner challenge—intellectual as well as temperamental. Yet before %e exonerate them from blame, it is well to remember that Britain was the only indus- trial country to inflict almost twenty years of mass unemployment on its working population without even an attempt at a 'New Deal'. The nearest it came was when Mosley's Memorandum was presented to the Cabinet in 1930.
Mosley was not a 'good' man either. Yet he had ideas and energy—both in short enough supply in Ramsay MacDonald's Cabinet. He implored the Government to initiate a vast programme of public works to help the unemployed. 'Where are your schemes?' they asked. 'A Napoleon could spend £200 million in three years', Mosley retorted. To Baldwin he was a 'cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out'. A shrewder judgment was surely that of Thomas Johnson, one of Mosley's minis- terial colleagues: 'Mosley has nothing to do; he has been trampled on; his talents ignored . . . I feel he should be used.' But this was asking too much of the 'good' men.
Churchill described Thomas Jones in 1926 as 'the thyroid gland of the Cabinet. supplying the secretions not otherwise pro- vided . . ' 1926 is the last time when these secretions had any important influence on policy. Skilled advocate as he is, Keith Middlemas makes out the best case he can for Jones's continuing importance in the last years covered by this Diary, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that he had become little more than a glorified speech-writer. Perhaps it was a realisation of this that prompted him to resign in 1930 and become first secretary of the Pilgrim's Trust.
He was not a great thinker or a great administrator, but he has greatly enlarged our knowledge of events, and insight into the hidden processes of British governmen In the best Civil Service tradition, his oso personality remains obscure till the ve end when, in an appendix, Middlemas prints a moving memoir to his son El phi killed by a motor car at the age of o■el One realises then that Thomas Jones W a truly good man too,
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