The Strand Magazine incident I use to epitomize certain differences between Baldwin and his predecessors and successors. Asquith would never have chosen the Strand Magazine, or the House of Commons as a place in which to read. He would have read more reconditely, but equally haphazardly, in some more private precinct. Churchill in office would never have wasted time in the smoking room without an audience. Lloyd George would never have wasted time there at all, but he might well have chosen the Strand Magazine had he been left waiting upon a railway platform. Neville Chamberlain would never have read haphazardly. Ramsay MacDonald would never have exposed himself so apparently free from the burdens of state. It could not exactly be said that Stanley Baldwin was wasting time. More likely he was not even reading the magazine, but sniffing it, and with it the atmosphere around him, ruminating, feeling his way, nudging towards a variety of decisions he had to make. He was not indecisive. Indeed, Birkenhead once unfavourably described his method of government as ‘taking one leap in the dark, looking around, and taking another’. But he reached decisions much more by sniffing and then making a sudden plunge than by any orderly process of ratiocination.
Baldwin rarely applied himself to the methodical transaction of written business. Tom Jones, Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet who later became one of his closest confidants, at first thought him remarkably slow, with barely a fifth of the speed of his predecessor, Bonar Law, in dealing with papers. It took Jones some time to realize that Baldwin did not work at all in Law’s rather unimaginative accountant’s sense. But his mind was none the less always playing around the political issues. In this way he was the opposite, not only of Law but of Asquith, who certainly did not have an accountant’s mind. Churchill wrote of Asquith, ‘He was like a great judge who gave his whole mind to a case as long as his court was open and then shut it absolutely and turned his mind to the diversions of the day.’ With Baldwin the court was never either wholly open or wholly shut.
It followed from this method of work that Baldwin was even less inclined to interfere in the work of departmental ministers than was Asquith. He did not bombard his ministers with declaratory minutes like Churchill, or petulant ones like Eden, or nostalgic ones like Macmillan. Nor did he exercise much control over his ministers by headmasterly promotions, demotions or sackings. He made hardly any changes during his four-and-a-half-year period of office, except when Halifax (then Wood, about to become Irwin) went to India as Viceroy, when Curzon died, or when Birkenhead decided he could not live on his salary. He never seriously thought of getting rid of Steel-Maitland who was a useless Minister of Labour, stationed in the most crucial and exposed segment of the government’s political front. This decision at least had the effect of involving and identifying the Prime Minister very closely with his government’s handling of industrial relations. This was true both before and during the General Strike. His ‘Give Peace in our Time, oh Lord’ speech in February 1925 was then his most successful House of Commons foray, and the decision four months later to set up the Samuel Commission and to pay a temporary subsidy to the coal industry was very much his own work. During the eight days of the General Strike itself he was also deeply involved, but once it (as opposed to the coal strike, which dragged on for another six months) was defeated, he rather lost interest.
There were five major developments in the life of his second and central government (1924-9), and this was the only one with which he was crucially concerned. The return to the gold standard in 1925 was very much Churchill’s decision at the Treasury, even though he had at first been opposed to it. The Treaty of Locarno, and the European security system created by it, was overwhelmingly Austen Chamberlain’s work at the Foreign Office. The housing and poor law reforms were even more decisively the work of his half-brother Neville at the Ministry of Health. Finally, the Statute of Westminster, which enabled the reality of Dominion independence to be combined with the dignity of the Crown, came from Balfour.
Baldwin was therefore more detached from the main policies of his government than was Asquith, and he was, in my view, a less considerable man, although not a negligible one either. He would not have had the intellectual grasp to write Asquith’s constitutional memorandum. But he had the feel to deal successfully with the General Strike, although not the sustained energy to follow this up by dealing equally well with the miners’ strike, which was both its cause and its aftermath. He dealt still more skilfully with the Abdication crisis ten years later. Like Asquith, he preferred to engage with constitutional issues more than with any other, though his lack of overseas interest (except for India and that he never visited) meant that that Statute of Westminster slipped by him almost unnoticed. He continued Asquith’s practice, interrupted by Lloyd George, of performing as Prime Minister without a surrounding circus. He would walk about London or travel by mainline train on his own.