Baldwin by Roy Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

What worried him most, apart from the meretricious glitter of the whole charade, was the erosion of the proper rôle of Cabinet Ministers, both in relation to their own departments and in their right to be fully consulted on matters of collective responsibility; the Prime Minister’s indifference to the processes and opinions of the House of Commons, provided a majority would sustain him in office; and the disarray and poor morale which coalition under a dynamic chief of another party was creating in the headquarters and local organizations of the Conservative Party.
    Lloyd George never appreciated the potential menace of Baldwin. He had put him in the Cabinet because, with Bonar Law gone, he needed a man from the Law stable to preserve the balance. But having put him in, he rarely consulted him on general policy issues and gave him little rôle even in industrial disputes, which were still the traditional concern of the Board of Trade. He commented patronisingly that almost the only sounds he heard from Baldwin during Cabinets were the rhythmic sucking of his pipe. He did not realize that each suck marked an extra notch of disapproval, a further step towards the precipice of his own irrevocable downfall.
    Nineteen twenty-two was from the beginning an uneasy year for the Coalition. There was a continuing Conservative fear through the winter and spring months that Chamberlain and Birkenhead would be seduced by Lloyd George into agreeing to a snap election, and that the rest of the party would be confronted with a
fait accompli,
highly damaging whichever way they decided to play it. Then in June the honours scandal passed from the baroque to the rococo stage. With an ill-fated exuberance which only a government in its last stages could achieve, Lloyd George succeeded in assembling five nominations for peerages, four of which were alleged to bediscreditable. One, Sir Joseph Robinson, who had been convicted for fraudulent share-dealing in South Africa, was sufficiently so that the Chief Whip, F. E. Guest, was charged with calling on him in his suite at the Savoy Hotel and telling him that he had no alternative but to withdraw from the list even though his name had already been published. 4 Robinson lost his peerage and Lloyd George was forced to concede a Royal Commission on future honours procedure, but the damage to the Coalition could not be retrieved. The session ended with an extraordinary meeting demanded by the Conservative junior ministers in order that they might express their discontent to the Cabinet members of their own party. Austen Chamberlain stiffly told them that the meeting was unprecedented and irregular, but it was left to Birkenhead to denounce them all for impertinence, stupidity and disloyalty.
    Baldwin watched in silence as the remarkable gathering ground towards its angry conclusion. He spent most of August in Worcestershire and September at Aix, which he had discovered the previous summer. During his first two weeks in France he read no English newspaper and barely glanced at a French one. But although his mind was detached from day-today events it brooded a good deal on longer-term considerations. He decided he had had enough of the Coalition. He would break with Lloyd George, and it would remain to be seen whether the victim would be himself or the Prime Minister.
    The Chanak crisis, 5 which erupted in late September, droveBaldwin to the newsstands of Aix for the first time. Mrs Baldwin recorded what then happened (and also provided some insight into their life at Aix):
I tried to persuade him that things couldn’t be so bad as the French paper made out or he would have been wired for. The next day he went for a long walk, about 20 miles, during which he did a good deal of clear thinking in the mountains. The next day he and I went for a shorter walk and returned about 6. I was a little tired and went to my room to rest before dressing for dinner and he sat down to a game of Patience. Suddenly S.